Peter Turchin’s End Times is a brilliant, sprawling, and oft-times maddening look at the rise and fall of nations and empire. He’s worried, and rightly so, about the United States.
The book posits that the economies of prosperous states inevitably turn into “wealth pumps” that enrich well-placed elites and immiserate everyone else – so-called “counter-elites” – who respond with devastating backlashes that afflict their societies with discord and, at worst, civil war.
Turchin says that the U.S. is now well down this road, and for this reason alone the book is well worth reading.
As the old academic bon mot goes, the volume contains much that is interesting and new, but what is interesting isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t interesting. Turchin is a biologist and not a historian, economist, or political scientist. This by itself doesn’t disqualify him from writing such a sweeping volume, so long as he’s done the homework.
The problem is that he hasn’t.
One would expect anyone writing about the fate of nations to have widely read in the above disciplines. The bibliography contains just 148 items – skimpy for a wide-angle view of world economic and geopolitical history, with nary a mention of the names one expects to see when reading about the rise and fall of states and about today’s political polarization: Macaulay, Malthus, Mancur Olson, Douglass North, Joseph Henrich, Robin Dunbar, William Baumol, Luigi Zingales, Ronald Inglehart, and David Autor, to name just a few. This reviewer found Turchin’s labeling of the Economist as a neoliberal rag particularly annoying. He and I must be thinking of different publications; the one I read generally favors a European-level social safety net and frequently advocates for increased taxes on the wealthy and for more vigorous regulation of commerce and the financial markets.
There’s no mention at all of Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations, which four decades ago succinctly described the wealth pump, even if he didn’t call it that: stable, wealthy societies invariably accrue, like barnacles on a ship, layers of rent-seeking elites who tear apart societies by creaming off a nation’s riches. Turchin barely mentions Walter Scheidel and Thomas Piketty, both of whom lucidly described the same phenomenon. On the other hand, Turchin deserves kudos for pointing out that while libertarians have for the better part of a century worried about how democracy allows a grasping underclass to appropriate the wealth of the deserving rich, recent political science research demonstrates that the opposite is true: The legislative agendas of Western nations respond exquisitely to the concerns of the 1%, and hardly at all to those of the 99%.
Turchin’s most original proposition is that wealthy societies inevitably suffer from “overproduction” of elites, university graduates whose oversupply deprives them of the wealth and privileges they feel entitled to, and thus turns them into counter-elites.
This doesn’t scan. In the first place, were it true, U.S. college graduates would not receive the large wage premium they enjoy, which is seen even among liberal arts graduates, whose salaries, contrary to conventional wisdom, catch up to those of STEM graduates by age 40 because of their broader skill sets. (As put by a memorable New York Times headline, “In the salary race, engineers sprint but English majors endure.”)
More to the point, as recent electoral results have amply demonstrated, few parameters cleave today’s political divide as well as the presence or absence of a bachelor’s degree. Turchin conjures up an army of disaffected graduates who offer a target-rich environment for the populist message. Trouble is, there’s scant evidence for this; were his elite overproduction thesis valid, one would expect the precise opposite of Donald Trump’s high/low support among those without/with a college degree. (Turchin points out U.S. populist support is led by disaffected elites like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley, and J.D. Vance, but this is unconvincing, since the leaders of most mass movements, whether pro-social or anti-social, usually falls to the most eloquent and well educated.)
End Times also tries to make the case that the instability of Asian societies that practiced elite polygyny was the result of the resultant overproduction of rulers’ progeny, whose succession battles often resulted in civil war. An intriguing hypothesis, to be sure, except that there’s a much more credible reason for such regimes’ short lifespans: Anthropologists and sociologists have known for a long time about the societal advantages of monogamy, even the normative monogamy among Western elites, which avoids the destabilizing effects of the large number of mate-less males seen with polygyny. (Today, China and India suffer from the instability of excess mate-less males, not from polygyny, but rather from fetal ultrasounds.)
Turchin describes the database he has assembled on hundreds of historical and current states – the CrisisDB – that examines the factors associated with their rise and fall. It’s a shame he doesn’t do more with this data in the book, which contains not a single table or graph. He uses the term “relative wage,” for example, to describe the ratio of wages to per capita GDP. This is a good way to measure how a decreasing portion of a nation’s wealth production flows through to workers, but he is maddeningly vague and non-forthcoming about this data. Annoyingly, “relative wage” is a commonly used macroeconomic term that has nothing to do with GDP (but rather refers to the ratio of wages among different classes of workers). Second, what “wage” is he talking about? Mean or median? Household or individual? It makes a difference. (Moreover, his definition of “relative wage” seems nearly identical to another well-plumbed macroeconomic parameter, the percentages of national income that accrue to labor and capital.) It’s even more frustrating that he describes these numerical data over pages of text; the reader feels compelled to metaphorically grab him by the lapels and demand a graph.
The book’s weakest point is the author’s naïve faith that political forecasting can be accomplished with mathematical models based on the kind of data in the CrisisDB repository. I wish him the best of luck with this, but the empirical research on the forecasting accuracy of complex political and economic systems by putative experts, many of whom deploy the sort of mathematical models proposed by Turchin, is not encouraging. Nowhere in the book will the reader find the name Philip Tetlock, whose extensive body of work in this area demonstrated that beyond a horizon of one year, the forecasting accuracy of even the most authoritative experts in multiple fields with sophisticated modeling tools approximates that of a Ouija board; it’s doubtful that Turchin’s models will fare any better.
Despite these flaws, this reviewer found the book a compelling, fascinating read. For starters, Turchin has a gift for phrase – the term “wealth pump,” which seems to be original to him, describes better than any other name given to the phenomenon described by Olson, Piketty, and Scheidel. (He also coins another memorable term, the “Nero moment,” when the reign of a kleptocrat, such as Fulgencio Batista, Asraf Ghani, and of course Nero himself, collapses with stunning, unforeseen rapidity.)
Turchin also has a dead eye for narrative. He spends several pages on a sympathetic interview with “Steve,” a Trump supporter typical of those left behind in today’s global, post-industrial society. It’s not clear whether Steve is fictional or real, but I can clearly see him in my mind’s eye a week after reading the passage.
The author, who spent the first two decades of his life as a Soviet citizen before moving to the U.S. with his dissident father, is at his finest when describing the complexities of the disintegrating political systems that currently afflict Russia and Belarus. No matter how one feels about U.S. and European military support for Ukraine, its political system was also in an advanced state of decay when it was invaded in 2022.
Turchin succinctly describes the power struggles in the three nations as between billionaire oligarchs and the political apparatchiks in charge of the state-security apparatuses; in Russian and Belarus, the apparatchiks won. In the Ukraine, by contrast, the oligarchs came out on top, culminated by the rise of master plunderer Viktor Yanukovych, who was finally overthrown in the Maidan Revolution of 2013–2014, whose success triggered the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and Crimea; this chapter alone is worth the book’s purchase.
Turchin posits that pure oligarchies, run by and for billionaire bandits, juice the wealth pumps that immiserate the wider public, and are consequently the least stable of regimes, as was the case in Ukraine before the 2022 invasion. Both Aleksandr Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin are billionaires, but in contrast to Ukraine, they rule Belarus and Russia with well established security apparatuses whose job is made easier by reasonably prosperous citizenries. It is thus no accident that in 2014, Ukraine’s per capita GDP was well below that of Russia and Belarus, and that its autocratic regime fell first. (The book also points out that Joseph Stalin, who although a mass murderer was not a kleptocrat, slowly improved the USSR’s standard of living after taking power in 1928 and died in bed after a quarter century of iron-fisted rule, after which his empire survived another six decades.)
Closer to home, the book deftly outlines the ideological origins of populism’s real leaders, firebrands like Carlson, Bannon, Hawley, and Vance, whose exposure to the entitled aspiring members of the ruling elite at Harvard and Yale fueled intense resentment. In Bannon’s words, “There are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run.”
While End Times suffers from being written by an outsider without formal training in its subject matter, it is at the same time permeated with insights that are often missed by blinkered insiders; for these alone this well written and entertaining volume is worth the time of any serious observer of the modern world.
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and has written several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from the CFA Institute.
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