Structural-Demographic Theory | Hacker News Reader

Structural-Demographic Theory

peterturchin.com

34 pointsrzk7 comments

I recommend reading the full paper linked by esafak. For those without the time, the brief summary is that political stress is a multiplication of (1) the likelihood of the general populace to mobilize, (2) the likelihood of elites to mobilize, and (3) financial distress at the national level. The primary drivers of each of these are:

(1) real income (its inverse, actually), % of the population that is urban, and % of people in their 20s. i.e. If real income declines, urban population % goes up, or % of the population that is young increases, the mobilization factor goes up.

(2) real income of elites (inverse, again), and elite competition for government offices. i.e., If incomes of elites go down or competition among elites for government offices goes up, the mobilization factor goes up.

(3) debt to GDP ratio, and distrust in the state. i.e., If debt to GDP goes up or people trust the state less, the financial distress factor goes up.

The author provides a worrying chart showing an increasingly steep spike in the overall political stress level of the US, but it stops at 2013 (when the paper was published). I would argue that the financial distress factor has gotten substantially worse in the intervening 12 years, but the the other two factors may have declined due to the resumption of real income increases starting in 2015.

What about food security and the price of food? I recall seeing that's generally the ultimate catalyst for revolutions, cf French cake and the price of tea for wannabe ex-Brits ;-p

I believe this also featured in the Arab spring. When asking Zimbabwean colleagues 15 years ago why people hadn't risen against Mugabe yet, they told me that while people still had food they would bear the yoke.

This theory is highly generalized. Depending on context any critical resource may become precious as a result of economic problems and social disparity. Sometimes it is food, other times housing, and so on. And these triggers are differentiated from the structural issues that generate critical instability in the first place. What spreads kindling around may be unrelated to what strikes the match.

Ok, makes sense. Thanks

The causal factors of revolution and civil war are straightforward to propose. The interesting part is the quantitative analysis; the validation of the causal model.

The author goes into more detail in Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qp8x28p)

On a fun note, I was reading the Wikipedia article on cliodynamics (the discipline whose name the author coined) and saw that the article drew an apt comparison between cliodynamics and Asimov's psychohistory.

Thanks for linking the full paper. The most worrying part is that the numerical study is from 2013 and two of the key factors (government debt to GDP and trust in government) have both gotten significantly worse since then.

Turchin has waffled back and forth on whether he likes the comparison to psychohistory. Broadly, he doesn't.

It's also worth reading Bret Devereaux's discussion of cliodynamics if you're interested in the subject:

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-202...

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