Across the west, popular misery and ‘elite overproduction’ are fuelling crisis, argues data-driven historian Peter Turchin. So what can we do to turn things around?
In February 2010, Peter Turchin, a relatively obscure researcher at the University of Connecticut, wrote a letter to the distinguished journal Nature. He was responding to their “2020 visions” issue – an upbeat dawn-of-the-decade exercise that collected predictions of progress from across science and politics. Turchin assumed the role of Cassandra. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he wrote, “which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe.” He pointed to waves of disruption that tend to recur every 50 years. “All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.” There was still time to change course, though: with measures to improve wellbeing and reduce economic inequality, “records show that societies can avert disaster”.
Normally scientists enjoy being proved right, but for Turchin, the way the following decade panned out must have seemed a bit too on-the-nose. The response to the financial crisis wasn’t a New Deal-style rescue package as he’d recommended, but austerity and a widening of the gap between rich and poor. Frustration at the established order threw up Brexit in Britain and Trump in the US. Right on cue, 2020 delivered a pandemic, economic chaos and a president who refused to concede defeat at the polls. The following January saw the storming of the Capitol, and images of insurrection that seemed like a throwback to an earlier revolutionary era.
