I don’t know how to quote graphs. And the most recent account of structural-demographic theory, Peter Turchin’s Ages Of Discord, is full of graphs, the understanding of which is central to understanding the theory.

It’s thus amazingly convenient for me that the cover of that book has a graph that tells a lot of the story. Behold:

The front cover of Turchin’s book

Take a good look at it. The blue line represents popular well-being, as measured by a range of obvious and non-obvious bits of data (in addition to wages, for example, it includes height, because stature correlates neatly and understandably with poverty — in particular, poor and undernourished parents give birth to smaller children). The red line indicates political instability. And the extent of political instability is detemined functionally by the values of three variables: in addition to the popular well-being just mentioned, there is also what Turchin calls elite overproduction, and what he calls the fiscal crisis of the state. I’m going to ignore the fiscal crisis of the state subsequently, mainly because as Turchin himself notes it’s not always present (Ages of Discord, 16) and also to keep the length of this post down as much as possible.

Elite overproduction is where my interest lies. And explaining it I can explain the underlying logical kernel of the SD theory which Turchin attempts to show true by data. So here’s a neat bit of reasoning: sometimes population increases and thus the cost of labour decreases (because the supply of labour will shoot up while the demand for it won’t). This is good for the rich (hereafter, and slightly imprecisely, the elites; again, see Turchin) as the purchasers of labour but bad for the non-rich as sellers of it. The standard of living of the non-elites deteriorates, while the elites engage in Veblenian conspicious consumption and have it good. But only for a while. It’s essentially become cheaper to become rich, so more people are rich, and more people try to be. Suddenly your erstwhile wage-slave neighbour now has just enough money to set up his own business by availing himself of the cheap labour. And you want a piece of that action; you want to be an elite too. You try hard: you, for example, enroll in law or business school, because that at least was a sure fire way to get rich, for the generation before you. Lots of people have the same thought; lots of people try to become rich, try to become elites.

But a society can sustain only so many elites. As the number of rich increases, the proportion of the cheap labour each benefits from will decrease, and so their overall richness will decrease. People will eventually get booted out of the elite class. And such people won’t be happy about it, especially if they’ve spent thousands on fancy law and business degrees thinking it was sure to boost their status.

This influx of rich and wannabe rich has political consequences, too. Politics attracts the elites; historically, it’s the rich who get involved in politics. So there’s more competition for political offices, which are, after all, fixed (there’s only one president, only one hundred senators). In addition to failed lawyers and businessmen, there’s also failed politicians.

That’s not good. You have a generally unhappy populace, and many unhappy failed elites. The unhappy failed elites will resent the successful politicians and businessmen, and they can encourage the people to resent them too. It’s not implausible that this would lead to political instability: factionalism, competing ideologies, and so on.

That’s the neat logical theory: increased population leads to decreased wages and falling well-being for the many; this leads to the production of too many elites, which lowers the quality of life for the elites and produces failed elites, and together they kick up a stink, and we get political instability.

The main point, as I mentioned, is to try to find a way to express this theory mathematically, to see if the numbers bear it out. I won’t go into all the details, but Turchin uses figures like law school admissions (and cost) as well as data about income inequality to measure elite overproduction. When combined in a way with the quantitative representation of popular ill-being, we get, roughly, the scary red lines like those in the picture above.

(This is a slight oversimplification: the political stress index depicted on the cover doesn’t take into account features like law school admissions or, in the component which measures popular well-being, things like stature. The above diagram, then, kind of confusingly, doesn’t actually present the central findings of the book; but the central findings yield substantially similar graphs, and, as I’ve pointed out, I don’t know how to quote graphs, so we can stick with this one without worrying too much.)

Inspection of the graph reveals the US is not in a good place, structural-demographically speaking, and hasn’t been since around the 70s. And inspection of reality reveals the same: I take it as somewhat common ground among many observers that things have been going south politically and economically (at least as concerns equality) since the 70s with Watergate and stagflation, then neoliberalism and a large ideological divide between conservative and democrat, on to the tea party and Trump and so on. And inspection of the graph reveals the US wasn’t in a good place in and up to the 1860s, and inspection of reality reveals the same. While I’m sure there’s much for the skeptic to complain about, the simplicity and retrodictions of the theory are, in my view, prima facie impressive and deserving of our attention.

That completes my whistle stop tour of the story. I refer the interested reader to Turchin’s book and references therein, or to his website which you can easily google. The next question is: do these structural demographic spikes show up in cultural productions?