Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series: Dr. Peter Turchin

Cliodynamics of End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration
Peter Turchin
Complexity Science Hub Vienna

Social and political turbulence in the United States and Western Europe has been rising over the past decade. My research, which combines analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, has identified the deep structural forces that work to undermine societal stability and resilience to internal and external shocks. Here I look beneath the surface of day- to-day contentious politics and social unrest, and focus on the negative social and economic trends that explain our current “Age of Discord.” One of the most important, but little appreciated, such hidden forces is a perverse “wealth pump” that, under certain conditions, begins to transfer wealth from the “99 percent” to “1 percent.” If allowed to run unchecked, the wealth pump results in both relative impoverishment of most people and increasingly desperate competition among elites. Since the number of positions of real social power remains more or less fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. In fact, in 2025 the USA finds itself in a situation that fits the definition of revolution, although, so far, fortunately a relatively non-violent one (by historical standards).

Background reading: Turchin, Peter. 2023. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of
Political Disintegration (Penguin Random House, New York and London).

About Dr. Turchin: 

Peter Turchin is Project Leader at the Complexity Science Hub–Vienna, Research Associate
at University of Oxford, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Connecticut. He is a
Founding Director of the Seshat: Global History Databank. Currently he investigates a set of

broad and interrelated questions: How do human societies evolve? In particular, what
processes explain the evolution of ultrasociality—our capacity to cooperate in huge
anonymous societies of millions? What processes are responsible for the resilience of
complex societies to external and internal shocks? What causes political communities to
cohere and what causes them to fall apart? His books include End Times (2023),
Ultrasociety (2015), and The Great Holocene Transformation (forthcoming).