i’ll read the full report later but the abbreviated version on alternet is a cogent summary of the history of the neoliberal project. any discussion of class in the u.s. is complicated by the belief of so many even in the working class that they are “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” so they oppose anything which might tax the wealthy in order to improve the lot of the poor.
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I can see the logic of excess elites leading to development of anti-elite elites, just not sure I am convinced of the predictive value of that factor. Among other factors, I know. In a uncomplicated field like this, a semieducated amateur should probably listen attentively and try to learn something.
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Interesting, but the part I emphasized didn’t add up for me. The PMC are still workers. Management got hit in the same way those they managed got hit first, but the impact came from the same place - business owners. Within this they point out that those who used to be in business for themselves in a few professions soon found themselves under the same corporate thumb as everyone else in this group.
So, I don’t see the problem as coming from infighting, because it wasn’t that level of management driving the decisions to increase corporate profit ever year by increasingly short-sighted, borderline illegal, and definitely detrimental policies. They were just the blunt instrument used to club everyone below them over the head before the weapon was turned against them.
Those decisions were made by owners and directors of those corporations that employed the PMC. They made the PMC screw over the employees at the bottom, and when they were gone, they screwed the PMC next. They screwed government by evading taxes while advocating for cuts to government agencies or regulations, and now they’re screwing consumers by churning out crappy products and services - because that’s what you create when you invest the bare minimum in materials and staff. The only infighting I noticed in my career was when workers tried to get the PMC to protect them, but that was never really in their power. The power was always at the top.
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Yeah, the thing I didn’t want to get into was that I don’t like the theory of the PMC, I was just noting that the theory was similar to what this historian was saying.
In a proper analysis, they don’t exist as a separate class with their own economic interests, they’re just a relatively well off segment of the working class who have a particularly bad case of false consciousness leading them to identify with capital. You can argue that there are a small number of professional managers who do wield power within corporations on behalf of diffuse shareholders, but these are a tiny minority of upper management and board level executives who can use their proximity to power to reward themselves with enough in the way of wages and share options that they can pass quickly into the ownership class.
Anyway, back to the articles. I think it’s a fairly reasonable observation that as power and money are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the 0.1%, there’s an incentive to get even the relatively well-off to fight amongst themselves for access to the smaller pool of rewards, rather than looking to unite with each other and the poorer working people to take back all the wealth that has flowed ever upwards.
Therefore, I think there does exist a trend of factions looking to be part of the top 5% trying to use social capital to gain access to a small share of financial and institutional power, while pretending that elevating their personal status is somehow fighting the system on behalf of the rest of us. The whole Trumpian “drain the swamp” so that our grifters get a chance to be on top was one example. There are many others.
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Yeah, divide and conquer has served them well.
Now I’m thinking of all the wealthy entertainers who suddenly claimed to have a deep interest in politics last year. At this point, it seems like increased regulation and taxation are the only way to prevent companies from failing upward at everyone else’s expense. Workers have to gain greater influence over the legislators currently under corporate control. While most of the attention was focused on the top of the ticket, a significant number of pro-business pols managed to get re-elected in 2020. Hopefully, they won’t be able to repeat the same old tactics in 2021.
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This feels weird to me.
The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.
America is not pacifying unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies. It could definitely do that a lot more, giving out things like health care and food and housing to people that need it. And I’m sure that would actually do a lot to make it less insolvent rather than running anything out. I’m not going to say there isn’t a place things can break down here, but this description doesn’t seem like what it would actually be.
Edit: Dropping names like Pinker and Douthat of all things doesn’t exactly encourage me either.
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yeah it’s probably bullshit
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“Cocaine Hippo” is the name of the discotheque I’m opening as soon as the pandemic ends.
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How, exactly, are you “breeding voraciously” if you aren’t a female praying mantis or spider?
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“You keep using that word. I think it does not mean what you think it means…”
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They are hippos, so I doubt they stop eating for it.
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Okay - initial thoughts as I read through it…
He’s not a historian, but thinks he can do history better than historians… The guy seems pretty full of himself here, comparing himself to Hari Seldon for example. Really dude?
The guy teaches at a major state uni and doesn’t believe he’s part of the elite he’s describing, he’s kidding himself.
And I also really object to him declaring that Bannon/Trump are part of some “counter” elite. Bullshit. Their actions are populist, anti-democratic, and authoritarian. They are working to ensure that social mobility is further degraded. The backbone of Trumpism has not really been working class people, but the propertied class opposed to social programs that actually help workers that they employ. It’s not a huge surprise, for example, that Trump employees undocumented immigrants, because he can pay them less and exploit them more.
White men are STILL largely in charge… it’s literally ahistorical to make that claim. Electing a Black president did not upend the white supremacist system that we’ve lived in for the past few hundred years. Nor did electing more women to congress and state legislatures. Part of the reaction we’re seeing in Trumpism is looking to counter, not the elites, but a truly democratic society whose top reflects our actual population.
Seer of Storrs
although he would continue to draw a salary as a tenured professor in their department
But he’s not an elite! Clearly a man of the people! /s He can literally stop doing the job he was hired for, and still get paid. Average for a tenured prof at UConn seems to be around $100,000, far more than the average salary of most Americans. So he’s utterly blowing smoke that he’s “not part of the elite.”
I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”
That’s not history. It’s number crunching to get some data that could be useful, until you project explanations on them that fit with your own world view.
If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.
Wut?
While historians dusted bell jars in the basement of the university, Turchin and his followers would be upstairs, answering the big questions.
Um. What? Is anyone surprised that these sorts of ideas emerge once it’s not white men who are the center of historical study, in terms of subjects of history?
Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before.
That doesn’t get us to answering the actual question, which is why that happens or if it happens every time, or if there are other factors at play, or what each individual instance was caused by and what he outcome was in each case.
One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war.
This is very much a traditional historical view. He seems to be making conclusions and then back-filling with data here.
But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex societies because they kill off simpler ones.
No. Societies are complex and made up of people making choices. That’s difficult to track, especially if you’re only focusing on the extraordinary people or events, which is most certainly the case here, as the further you go back historically, the less evidence you have of the lives of the rest of humanity.
the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country.
He’s not the only one to reach this conclusion. Pretty much anyone who studies white supremacists, militias, and other radicalized groups has been warning about this for years now - hell, a random punk who had regular run ins with nazis and white power skins at shows could have told you that, as well as how to deal with these assholes (organize against them, stand up to them, and put pressure on government institutions to take them seriously). It’s not some huge revelation that he’s reached the same conclusion, as if others have not by studying the words and actions of individuals. The difference is that those scholars, activists, etc, aren’t assuming it’s a foregone conclusion, but are looking to make changes to society that head it off at the pass. He’s just assuming it’s going to happen because SCIENCE…
Historians and journalists, by contrast, tend to focus on outliers—because they are interesting—and sometimes miss grander trends.
Except for all the historians and journalists who have focused on the deeper currents in society around race and violence. But it’s more fun to pretend that crunching numbers will always give you the right answer to complex social relationships.
Turchin’s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable.
No shit.
He opposes credential-oriented higher education
Well he’s got his, so fuck everyone else.
a mathematically preordained disaster
If only we could make choices and change shit, but alas, god math says we have no agency. /s
Instead, each historical event must be lovingly described, and its idiosyncrasies understood to be limited in relevance to other events. The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.
No, that’s not what most historians believe, even if they are focused on micro histories. They simply believe that history is driven by humans making choices with (some limited) agency. Few historians would argue that we can’t look to the past to help us to understand what could happen. Most of us just aren’t in the business of making definitive statements based on the past. A civil war right now is a real possibility, as is a decade of violence and terrorism. It is not, however, a foregone conclusion, just because numbers dude here believes it is. Why historical studies are valuable is because you can look at similar events in the past, compare them to events now, and see what sort of choices people made then to guide your own set of choices. It’s not a one to one comparison, nor is a some “cycle” that is predictable and unbreakable. But it can help guide policy-making to some degree.
Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity.
Not really no.
Turchin wants to invent a thermometer for human societies that will measure when they are likely to boil over into war.
Historians already do that by studying specific events, cause and effect, complexity and contingency.
Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs.
a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief.
Yes.
Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past.
Except for all the historians who study larger sweeps of history. There are many who do, in fact. He’s just not interested in reading them.
By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians.
Except for all the ones who don’t do micro-histories.
Few would dare to write a history of the United States
Jill Lepore called. She’d like to you to fuck yourself.
Turchin dropped ideology altogether
Yet he’s dressing up ideology as science…
Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-ending loop of boom and bust.
It bends how we move it.
This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.
So, either historians are all concerned with small scale change over time that focuses on individuals or groups of people making change, or they are blinkered by a Marxist view of an inevitable march towards progress (which is really not what marx argued, but whatever)? Which is it? It can’t be both. But again, maybe actual read some modern historical scholarship before making these contradictory claims. There are thousands upon thousands of people working in the historical field, who have competing visions of how to approach history, some of whom even likely agree with this guy. We’re not all thinking the same thing. Just spend some time reading our book reviews or spend time at conferences listening to some discussions among historians during panels. We’re not all in agreement on literally anything…
Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.
Gee. I wonder why it’s dominated by men. Couldn’t possibly be because it confirms their own biases and position in the world, could it? Must be because the rest of us are idiots. /s
Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpetbaggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods.
Or maybe you’re just wrong, Pinker?
but he believes in data-driven historical inquiry.
I don’t disagree that data can play a role in understanding the past. It can be invaluable depending on what you’re doing. It’s not a replacement for critical analysis of documents that help us to understand human motivations, though. It’s not an either/or.
it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,
Um… yes. Exactly. But Pinker couldn’t possibly be so biased, because… why? He’s an “objective” scientist? M-kay.
The only answer is to use large data sets.
No. The gathering of data itself can often be shot through with bias, making it just as problematic as any other source being employed. Bias in historical writing is not the reason to through out a source, but can further enrich a historical study by understanding the root of the bias in the document. It’s not just about studying WHAT happened, but understanding the reasons WHY something happened.
There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise
I don’t disagree, but people like Turchin and Pinker are coming at this as if they are the only ones who are offering methods that are valuable, rather than having a bit of humility that their colleagues in the humanities have insights into humanity to offer as well.
is one scholar who has embraced tools previously scorned by historians.
Plenty of historians use data. It’s disingenuous to say that they don’t.
She is a pioneer of data-driven history that considers timescales beyond a human lifetime.
Again, plenty of historians study larger sweeps of time longer than a human life span and have done so since the origins of historical writing way back in the ancient past.
Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians, who deny that the subject to which they have devoted their lives can be expressed in Excel format.
Right?
Ugh. Not a fan of this article or this guy, honestly. I’m not opposed to number crunching and data being employed, but again, it’s not just about the what, but the why, too. Nothing is pre-ordained to happen, and understanding why things happen is one way to shape our future. There are no exact parallels on events, but we can seek out similar events, and figure out what they did then, and then make better choices.
TL;DR - the guy is kind of full of shit, if you ask me.
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Unsurprisingly his data tells him just what his gut always did, that he and those like him were part of a lost elite forced to bargain with degenerates, their place in life taken from them by hoards of undeserving rising from every filthy and shadowy corner of the world, shirking their homely duties and humble place in life to pursue economic mobility when they ought to have stayed put. All this trouble started when those people didn’t stay in their place. Now even being a professor seems… quaint. And other departments don’t see the genius in this realization, not like they should.
That’s the impression I have of him. I am skeptical of the patterns people see in data when they can’t admit their own biases to themselves.
In the meantime you could just look at the actual body count in the US right now and say “yep, something bad is going on and it’s not showing signs of getting better” without the hamfisted augury.
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I think your impression is spot on.
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Thank you. I had a gut “umm, no, I don’t think that’s how this works” reaction, but could not have done what you did.
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thank you for the informed and informative reply to the article. I also read it, was troubled by it, but was waaaay out of my depth as a simple Keybilly.
thank you for fleshing out many of the most problematic (for me) statements and takeaways that I could not articulate with any background other than my passing acquaintance with history through my archeologist brother and his lectures and publications.
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We buy two bottles instead of one and end up getting over twice as plastered.
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The great call to level down expectations is already in full swing
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