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"From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the ground-breaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a brilliant big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames. Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age by any measure, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for over a quarter century. The Wealth Pump is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States. Back in 2010, Nature magazine asked Turchin, along with other leading scientists, to provide a ten-year forecast. Based on his models, Turchin predicted that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order ca 2020. As the years passed, and his prediction proved accurate in more and more respects, attention around his work grew. The Wealth Pump distills his framework, its empirical justification, and its highly relevant findings, into an accessible, thought-provoking book that puts the American story into broad historical context. The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin argues: when the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. Before the industrial era, the imbalance between labor and capital, signaled by rising economic inequality, was usually caused by excessive population growth. For the past 250 or so years, it has been laissez-faire government, technological innovation, globalization, and immigration that have tended to disrupt the balance. Whatever the cause, when income inequality surges, the common people suffer, and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites. This vicious cycle is the "wealth pump"--the mechanism that causes both the relative impoverishment of most people and the increasingly desperate competition among elites. And since the number of positions of real social power remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. History shows that when the elite is riven by too many claimants, when counter-elites are powerful enough to lead effective populist uprisings, then the death knell of the established order is nigh. In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. Time will tell whether Peter Turchin's warning is heeded"--… (more)
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Instead, the book cherry-picks some historical incidences of systemic upheaval and fits those into his argument regarding immiseration and overproduction of elites. There's actually nothing very new here, it's territory that's been covered elsewhere and is presented with some new jargon. I'm not saying he's wrong, it's just that there's a lot more going on with historical processes that make prediction nearly impossible.
But let's say he's right in picking those two issues. There is no lack of recognition that inequality (a word which he seems to avoid using) is a major problem and one that history shows to have a major destabilizing effect on governments. I'm not exactly buying the elite argument, though. Many people with law degrees (which is the clearest path to political power) find work outside of government and thus present no threat to existing power structures. In fact, elite overproduction tends to be self-governing in that elites find work; they may be underemployed, but that has always been the result.
Along the way, he does discuss remedies such as higher taxation for the wealthy and bipartisan solutions for the immigration issue. But you don't need a new "science" to be the advocate for those solutions. What seems to be missing is an analysis of the psychology of the mob, which increasingly seems to be a serious threat to democracy. How do we deal with a bunch of delusional people who have succumbed to relentless propaganda? Even if times get better (as they have since the 2008 financial sector meltdown), polls show that many people think the economy is in worse shape now. And never in history has there been a society as in America, where the citizens have an astounding number of guns. In other words, we've reached a point in history where perceptions can be incredibly incorrect, and revolutions can occur based on nothing more than emotion.
Let's start with the "badly written" part. The author apparently makes his daily bread from building databases with numerical data from different periods in global history and
The author deliberate avoids mathematical formalism. At the end of part I he refers interested readers to the appendix if they want to know more about how he constructs and statistically analyzes historical databases. I followed his guidance, but I was very disappointed. The appendix contains no statistics and very little information about how his historical databases are compiled (for what it's worth, it seems like the author relies on the work of ordinary historians in this regard). But I couldn't make much sense of it as he delves into stories about aliens and other uninteresting asides for no clear reason.
So the scientific foundations of the author's arguments are shrouded in mystery. Consequently, it is difficult to see much value in the various case studies he presents throughout the book. He uses quasi-theoretical concepts (such as "elite overproduction" and "wealth pump") which are supposedly equally applicable to all periods in world history. Perhaps there is some degree of truth in everything he writes, but the frequent historical examples are too brief to be informative, and they don't support the credibility of his conclusions. Instead they just divert the reader from the main theme of the book, which is the political situation in the present-day United States.
Which brings me to why I also categorize this book as "insightful". In the main argument of the book the author traces the development of the US economy and politics, starting to some extent from the civil war but focusing especially on the past 80 years. I really liked this analysis since it helped me understand many aspects of recent US history from a new perspective. The author argues that the US is a plutocracy: the top of the power pyramid in America is the corporate community. Economic and administrative power networks are joined at the hip, but the economic one dominates (p.124). He explains how this came to be and how this system went off the rails in the 21st century. He also analyzes the forces that have recently transformed the Republican Party into a true revolutionary party (p.211). All of this is very interesting. The author indicates that the whole thing could spin dangerously out of control, but he also offers some vague suggestions for how the worst outcomes might be avoided. His forebodings about the 2020's (the book was written in 2022) should be read by anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the implications of the 2024 election (and 2028, should it be held).
In conclusion, this book is recommended reading. It falls very much under the category of "popular science", and I would have preferred a more logical and disciplined mode of presentation. But on the other hand, I certainly appreciate why intellectual rigor was in this case subordinated to popular appeal.