A Few Comments on the Cliodynamics of Peter Turchin as Employed in his 2023 "End Times"

Identification of a false alarm in a crowded theater, and also the provision of a sociopolitical/biological model consistent with Desmet’s psychological observations of mass formation events...

Dec 16, 2023

Peter Turchin: with his nose stuck in an university office and in a deep pile of data, he’s not Alexis de Tocqueville. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin#/media/File:Peter_Turchin_2020.webp

The word cliodynamics is composed of clio- and -dynamics. In Greek mythology, Clio is the muse of history. Dynamics, most broadly, is the study of how and why phenomena change with time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliodynamics

Introduction

Growing up in a small Missouri mining town during the 1960s, I had a friend who came from a locally-unique, academically- and artistically-cultured nuclear family. My friend’s father was a mustachioed mining engineer for the large company that mined most of the region’s lead-zinc deposits, his redheaded mother taught piano, and his two older sisters were out of the house, away at universities. At home with his younger brother and parents, my friend played the cornet and practiced classical music on a piano, worked (successfully) on becoming an Eagle Scout, and while at our small (~300 kids) high school, he and I competed academically head-to-head. The year-to-year final results of this two-way academic competition seemed very important to his family, judging by the unconcealed joy or disappointment his mother showed in her face during the high school’s annual awards assemblies (to my own mother’s watchful eyes).

Now, to the extent possible for someone attending a public school, my friend maintained an aloof attitude towards the rest of our male and female peer group. It was apparent to me that he didn’t feel very comfortable being around pretty much any of them.

From time to time, some of the student clubs would carry out fund-raising activities. One of these activities that I remember particularly well – for a reason that will soon become apparent – was to haul in an old automobile, park it in the school lot, and then charge students a few dollars for the right to use a sledge hammer to hit and damage the old car. On the day this particular money-making event was going on, my friend and I were walking back to the main school building from the long mid-day outside recess, and passed a fairly large group of male students banging away on the car about a 100 feet away from us. My friend, seeing this, stopped, formed a megaphone with his hands, and then shouted towards them, “Turn it over!” He watched with pleasure as they, not raising their heads from what they were already doing to the car, immediately caught his idea and unhesitatingly did as he suggested. They got into some trouble with the principal over the result, and he didn’t — because evidently no one besides myself and he ever knew where the original idea came from.

Keep that story in mind as you go through the rest of this post.

Turn It Over, Redux

So, I’ve been reading professor Peter Turchin’s well-written 2023 popularization of his mathematical/statistical modeling of human political and economic history, provocatively titled End Times. Despite my informed skepticism of the objectivity of the performance of some of his modeling interpretation work, I found that his narratives and comparisons of major events in history were by themselves sufficiently engaging to easily justify the time and attention it took to read the book.

A Russian emigrant to the US when he was 20,1 the now 66-year-old professor Turchin is a mathematical ecologist by training who has combined ecosystem science and econometric modeling methods (i.e., machine learning) to the analysis of the causes and the timing of the major periods of conflict that have occurred throughout human history. Having used historical events as a training set of samples to conduct his extensive statistical modeling work, Turchin is convinced that it is now feasible to use his methodology to determine approximately when any given society is likely to enter, as he terms it, a dangerous and potentially revolutionary “age of discord”. As an example, referring to prediction work he first publicly disclosed in 2010, Turchin comments with regard to the United States:

“We start the [machine learning] engine in 1960 and first run it for the sixty years for which the history is fixed. From the MPF [multipath forecasting model] point of view, the most important trend during this time is the decline in the relative wage. The decline in the relative wage turns on the wealth pump, and elite numbers begin to increase in an accelerating manner. By 2020, both immiseration [impoverishment] and elite overproduction, and thus the PSI [political stress index], reach very high levels. The radicalization curve, tracking the number of radicals, which had been staying flat near zero, starts to grow after 2010 and literally explodes during the 2020s. So does political violence.”

Caliber of the writing and its information and entertainment values aside, the timing of the 2023 publication Turchin’s latest book is plainly meant to influence and guide the thoughts and actions of other Americans as the nation approaches the 2024 presidential election year. (Turchin and his publisher, Penguin Press, yelling together, “Turn it over!”) The only problem with this -- no doubt well-intentioned -- mass-influencing effort is that Dr. Turchin has, by omission, made serious sample classification/identification errors in his data modeling work that, among other things, invalidate his otherwise very alarming near term prognostications for the American near term. See the Figure below explaining the meaning of “classification errors” and the impacts on prediction accuracy of committing those sample classification errors.

From https://dataheroes.ai/blog/improving-machine-learning-models-a-guide-to-error-classification-analysis/

Turchin’s ‘Social Contagion’ Multipath Forecasting Model

The general set of hypotheses that encompass and organize Turchin’s complex of thinking about the human historical record are embedded in what he refers to as his Multipath Forecasting model (MPF model). According to Turchin’s MPF epidemiological model,2 human societies in peaceful and productive equilibrium can be viewed as healthy macro-organisms not suffering from infection with trouble-making, disease-causing agents. Circumstances surrounding these social macro-organisms can change, however, causing episodes of nationally-destabilizing political infections by radical “elites” and/or radical “elite aspirants”.

Radical politics denotes the intent to transform or replace the fundamental principles of a society or political system, often through social change, structural change, revolution or radical reform. The process of adopting radical views [and thereby becoming a radical] is termed radicalisation. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_politics

Here are the givens (assumed conditions) in Turchin’s overall schema of the controlling mechanisms of national-scale human history:

Human societies are made up of “elites” and “commoners”;
Human economies are zero sum games. If one party in an economy gains, then another party somewhere in the system must lose to that same degree;
Over time, the “elites” will increasingly politically capture local economies to set up “wealth pumps” that extract wealth from “commoners” and channel it preferentially to the “elites”;
These “wealth pumps” will continue to operate under zero sum conditions until either the resources of the “commoners” are exhausted and/or the number of the “elites” (and “elite aspirants”) increases to the point that the per capita wealth of the “elites” begins to decrease. This decrease and lack of opportunity caused by “commoner” resource depletion, and/or natural increase in number of “elites”, disturbs and agitates the members of the “elite” class, especially its relatively energetic, younger members (and outside aspirants) seeking their own wealth, status, and power.
Agitation of the “elites”, and extreme impoverishment of both the “commoners” and the “elites”, cause political instability and social discord to develop throughout the bimodal body politic.

The economic and associated political dispossession of members of the “elites” that occurs periodically through time, mentioned in assumption number 4 above, is a process that Turchin calls “elite overproduction”. The onset of “elite overproduction” is, according to Turchin, the basic leading indicator that an “age of discord” has arrived. Once this age has arrived, ‘radicalisable’ scions of the elite class, and aspirants to that class, are found scrambling around unhappily and frantically, fruitlessly looking for cushy jobs and associated wealth just like Mom and Dad had. These upset “elite” youth then pursue strange and new ideas how to fix things, spread these ideas around, and then strive heroically and often violently to ‘set things aright’ using those ideas. (The “elite” youth yelling, “Turn it over!”)

According to Turchin’s thinking, the trackable and quantifiable political sub-mechanisms periodically generating dangerous periods of political instability are derived from the existence and characteristic behaviors of three basic, interacting categories of humanity. The following passages from Turchin’s End Times describe his three human types.

The first is the “naive” type, corresponding to the susceptibles in the epidemiological framework. This is the class into which individuals are placed when they become adults. (The model tracks only individuals who are active adults; children and the retired elderly are not modeled, as they are assumed to have no effect on the dynamics.) [emphasis added to highlight Turchin’s use of this highly unlikely assumption — unlikely given the importance of family in moderate “commoners”]. Naive individuals can become “radicalized” by being exposed to individuals of the radical type (corresponding to infectious individuals in a disease model). The more radicals there are in the population, the higher the chance that a naive individual will catch the “virus of radicalism.”
The third type of individual in the model, in addition to naïfs and radicals, is the “moderate” (corresponding to “recovered” in epidemiological models). This group comprises former radicals who have become disenchanted with radicalism and violence and have concluded that members of the society need to pull together and overcome their differences. The moderates differ from the naïfs in that they value peace and order above all, and they work actively to bring it about. In other words, naive individuals don’t have an active political program, radicals work actively to increase instability, and moderates work actively to dampen things down.”

Note here that Turchin’s model very strangely -- given the basic knowledge-accumulating nature of his profession as a scientist, his acknowledged familiarity with the econometric concept of lag effects, and given his specific professional knowledge of biology -- does not mathematically or analytically allow for possible permanent structural changes in population attitudes and behavior that can occur over time, either epigenetically, through natural selection (e.g., de facto population culling taking place during large-scale conflicts), or by generation-to-generation transfer of evolving and accumulated “folk wisdom”.

In Turchin’s model, whether or not things get messy within a nation once an “age of discord” has been reached, basically depends upon the relative proportions of each of these three different human types. If the reactive behavior of the disturbed3 radicalized young “elites” spreads into and infects enough of the (also usually young) adults of the naïve type, the resulting political instability can be enough to overcome a whole nation, pushing it into such extreme events as revolution or civil war. If the moderate portion of a nation is large enough, however, its moderating influences will continually dampen down and quench the disturbed behavior of the country’s agitated radicals so that the general national equilibrium can be maintained and violence will be avoided. If there is enough of a paucity of energetic naïve youth that are susceptible to radicalization in the first place, social equilibrium will also tend to remain largely undisturbed.

Note here the similarity of the positive influence of the moderate “commoners” of Turchin, to Desmet’s observation that there is significant portion of the human population that does not get caught up in mass formation episodes but instead works actively to restore and maintain peace and stability while others are caught up in the mindless excesses of mass formation.

Alternatively, according to Turchin’s overall schema, the “elites” and/or “commoners” can preemptively work to institute government and economic policy changes that reduce political and economic stress otherwise leading to system wide break down and possible violence. Turchin cites the Roosevelt administration’s handling of the national difficulties of the Great Depression as an example of the first alternative approach to maintaining the peace, and points to the reduction in economic inequity more recently established within the Nordic countries as an example of the moderate “commoner”-instigated alternative route of maintaining national equilibrium.4

Having (along with everyone else on the planet) been a front row witness to the rapid infection of the human majority by the radical COVID19 hysteria (as well as a witness to the non-merit-based incompetencies of the “elite” during the same time), I believe there is much objective justification for Dr. Turchin’s use of an epidemiological model to explain the development of mass movements like revolution and civil war. The problem is that in the case of the application of his American MFP model to the United States, Turchin has unknowingly forced his model to yield an incorrect result by unreflectingly accepting mis-definitions of the most important, strongest controlling variable in his model; i.e., the real identity of the US “moderates”. I am fairly certain that this unknowing acceptance of the mis-definition is result of his own infection by the radical “Turn it over!” biases and preconceptions constantly permeating the atmosphere of the majority of modern American colleges and universities.

A model of the culturally-isolated modern American academic environment: “What I think and believe is what we all here believe and think”. From https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/04/dc-couples-surprise-proposal-infinity-mirrors-exhibit-beyond-magical/

Turchin’s Minor Sample Classification Error

I found a minor sample classification error in Dr. Turchin’s application of his machine learning approach to historical and modern America. This particular error is not uniquely his, but is shared by many, if not most, of the American academic, administrative, and business “elite”.

From my perspective as a member of the group that he and others call “commoners”, the minor Turchin classification error is his implicitly biased adoption of the “elite” and “commoner” terminology habitually employed and preferred by the “elites” themselves. As explained below, Turchin should know much better than to make this particular sample classification (definition) error, having been trained in the science of ecology, having recognized the distinctly predatory nature of the “wealth pump” used by the “elites”, and having directly based much of his data modeling work on the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey equations.

Turchin’s data and modeling are not demonstrating the out-of-phase growth and death cycles of a large population of “elite”-dependent “commoners” and a small population of meritorious, non-fungible “ruling elites”, but are instead demonstrating the ordinary out-of-phase growth and death cycles of a human prey population and its human predator population.5 See the two graphs below to compare the historically sourced 2016 human data of Turchin and the identical relationship that was first found to exist between animal predator and prey pairs in the early 1900s.

From Turchin’s 2016 *Ages of Discord*. The solid line is a proxy for the relative proportion of “elites” in the population, while the dashed line is a proxy for the relative degree of well-being (wages, health, body height, life expectancy, marriage rates, etc.) of the “commoners” that support those same “elites”.

From https://www.ck12.org/biology/Predation/lesson/Predation-BIO/. Turchin’s mathematics and historical data sets show that the “elites” are predators of their “commoner” prey, while his words and interpretations put the conventional ‘happy-happy’ spin to this by suggesting that meritorious “elites” uniquely provide irreplaceable and valuable leadership and other professional expertise to the relatively ignorant and uncultivated “commoner” masses.

I present as further evidence that the “commoner” and “elite” terminology in dominant use by the “elites” is only meaningless misleading and distracting ‘spin’ by again reminding the reader of the almost entirely incompetent professional performances evidenced by nearly all of these “elites” during the 2020-2022 period of greatest COVID19 hysteria.

Turchin’s Major Sample Classification Error

In working to apply his predictive schema to modern America, Turchin more importantly fails to account for the fact that America’s moderates constitute a permanent US majority which actively works to maintain/increase social and economic stability and “dampen things down”. This Turchin data handling failure is a sample classification error by omission. The more or less permanent American moderate majority needs no Turchin-theorized recovery from prior direct personal experience with radicalism to recover from that illness and then get down to the business of working “…actively to dampen things down”, as it always has done so. The moderate US independent-and-conservative faction, in fact, currently stands at almost 70% of the American populace

The moderates of America and other nations function like the control rods of nuclear fission reactors with regard to the destabilizing activity of (mentally?) disturbed elites. Where there are not enough moderates around, political melt-downs can take place, to the detriment of all.

Instead, Turchin arbitrarily (like many, if not most, other modern Democrats and some fewer Republicans) makes the ‘false negative-generating’ classification error of labeling moderate American majority actively working to increase political and economic stability as radicals. For a concrete example of this very grievous classification error and its results, see the “elite” Democrat Biden Administration’s ongoing unwarranted mis-handling of moderate participants in the civil demonstration that took place on January 6, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

This misclassification of American moderates as radicals makes Turchin (and others) blind to the fortunate fact that -- except in a very few urban locations of the West Coast, the Interior West, and the Upper Midwest containing large universities -- this very high percentage of geographically-dispersed US moderates does not leave the few true American “elite” radicals that exist very many “naïve types” to infect. The very limited number of locations, and the limited extent of true rioting and violence that occurred during the COVID19/BLM hysteria years, confirms the distorting effect of Turchin’s chief classification error on his model’s utility with regard to the US while still preserving the basic scientific validity of his epidemiological model with regard to the evolution of mass movements. It’s not the model’s fault that its own creator mishandled it.

In regard to the origin of the current American moderate majority, the details contained in following Figure taken from Turchin’s own Ages of Discord suggests the possibility that the American Civil War and Great Depression permanently(?) domesticated the American population and made it much more tolerant (at least for now) to, and more forgiving of, the characteristic misbehaviors of the nation’s predatory “elites”. The American Civil War especially may have almost entirely depleted the nation’s human and cultural/genetic stock of its more impulsive radical tendencies.

Taken from Turchin’s 2016 *Ages of Discord.* These data suggest that the nation’s people and culture underwent a lasting major structural change in their characteristic nature during and immediately after the American Civil War and Great Depression that was not accounted for in Dr. Turchin’s data modeling work.

Conclusion

The most specific, most dire warning issued by Dr. Turchin showed up on his blog of September 3, 2012. This warning stated:

I feel quite safe making the prediction that there will be a peak of political violence in 2020 (plus/minus a few years). If this prediction fails, it will be a result of the theory going wrong, or some massive unforeseen event affecting the social system, or something completely unforeseen (the “unknown unknowns,” in the brilliant characterization of Donald Rumsfeld). But I am fairly certain it will not be because the American policy makers suddenly take a note of what an obscure professor wrote and take action to avoid this undesirable outcome.
And if they do, I will be quite happy. Prediction is overrated. What we really should be striving for, with our social science, is ability to bring about desirable outcomes and to avoid unwanted outcomes. What’s the point of predicting [the] future, if it’s very bleak and we are not able to change it? We would be like the person condemned to hang before sunrise — perfect knowledge of the future, zero ability to do anything about it.

On the face of it, Dr. Turchin’s cliodynamics work successfully predicted the Antifa/BLM violence in the US occurring during the 2020 (plus or minus a few years) COVID19 hysteria event. Fortunately, these outbreaks of violence were not widespread, being – as would be expected from consideration of the three main elements of Turchin’s multipath forecasting model -- confined only to locations with especially high concentrations of naive youth in especially left-leaning cities with only relatively low concentrations of resident American moderates to keep things from getting too far out of hand. It remains to be seen, however, if the sociopolitical environment surrounding the 2024 American presidential election elicits any greater degree and prevalence of violence than that occurring during the height of the COVID19 hysteria, and whether America’s permanent majority of moderates will continue to serve as a sufficient shield of the nation’s general political environment.

Again, if the same good result eventuates in 2024 and beyond, it will largely be because of the steadying influence of the American moderate majority, most of which has been mysteriously, mistakenly, harmfully, and explicitly labeled by radical “elites” — including Dr. Turchin — as being “dangerous” right-wing radicals. In an elaborated comment on this mis-labeling of American moderates as radicals by the disturbed “elites”, Davidtollah wrote just a few days ago (12/13/23):6

I am familiar with the author's name [Richard Hanania, author of the post that is being commented upon], but this may be the first of his works that I've read. And a single statement put me off consideration of him as a serious political analyst:
"The trend on the majority of contentious issues is towards polarization, with Republican administrations and politicians moving right on most things and Democrats going in the opposite direction."
Considering Rs, with the possible exception of abortion (the Rs remaining in the position they have always occupied on the matter), the issues in which they have NOT moved leftward are few and far between. Rs have, arguably, surrendered ground on nearly every major issue. The only reason Rs and Ds have drifted further apart is because the Ds have moved leftward at a far higher rate than the Rs.
This conceit that Rs and Ds are mutually moving apart is a fabrication to maintain the idea that both are responsible for making our divisions worse.
Considering a bellwether issue as a single example, if one listens to Bill Clinton's second inaugural address where he talks of immigration and border security, he sounds like Trump. Even if insincere, Clinton understood where mainstream America was on the issue, and was giving lip service to that extensive constituency. Since then, Rs have done little to oppose the Ds' purposeful erosion of our borders and immigration enforcement (their inaction not being indicative of "moving to the right"). When someone (like Trump) suggests we actually enforce our laws, he's labeled an "extremist," because naturally a suggestion that laws be enforced looks extreme compared to a policy that refuses to do so. This is commonly cited as an example "how conservatives and liberals are tearing the country apart", but the country can be torn apart by one side pulling against the middle, and the other side just standing firm. Although this is not exactly what is happening (Rs are slowly sliding leftward) the speed at which Ds are moving leftward is doing the tearing. It might be argued that both sides are doing the tearing because, although moving in the same direction, they aren't moving at the same speed. But even this view would debunk the idea that "Republicans have become more conservative."
The author's sort of analysis may fly with Millennials (having limited perspective), but us Boomers have been around long enough to know that it's simply untrue. We know that Rs are LESS conservative than they were 40 or 50 years ago. And even the "extremism" of MAGA* generally insists on nothing more than enforcement of existing laws, lower taxes, and energy independence. There is probably nothing in the MAGA platform that represents anything more conservative than the policies of Ds in the 1960s.
Another possible example of "rightward movement" among conservatives (if that's what MAGA is), is non-interventionism, usually called "isolationism" in order to make it appear more extreme. But being anti-war had been for decades a D position, so non-interventionism is not strictly "more conservative," even if more aligned with early American political thought.
_________________________________________________
*I'm referencing MAGA because the movement's critics and the media often cite its "extreme right-wing views." Obviously, I believe this characterization is inaccurate, but still MAGA's agenda serves as an example of what is commonly blamed for "moving the country to the right", when "returning to the right" is more accurate, but still a "right" less conservative than it was a few decades ago.”

I wholly agree with Turchin, nevertheless, that the chronic misbehavior of our predatory “elites” has grown increasingly stronger and more harmful since the 1970s, and that this misbehavior needs to be immediately, civilly, and effectively addressed in the US by the moderate majority making up most of the “commoner” prey of those “elites”. However, it is my opinion that this curative work is very materially already in play, as witnessed by the (now more sub rosa, more circumspect) political activity of MAGA adherents, and by the actions of its more salient individual representatives and operatives in politics and business like Trump, Carlson, Thiel, Gaetz, Vance, Gabbard, Greenwald, Taibbi, Bannon, Flynn, Musk, and the Pauls. MAGA and people like those named here are not at all the “dangerous” that disturbed people like Turchin and others fear. To the contrary, the actual case is much more like Walt Kelly once sketched it:

Grundvilk

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