The End Times.
immiseration
noun
1. economic impoverishmentStep One is: Stop the Wealth PumpUnderstanding Societal Collapse and Donald Trump, with Complexity Scientist Peter Turchin A Poly Crisis aka Multiple Crises laying one upon another compounding their impact.
What leads to political turbulence and social breakdown? Is there any way to stop history repeating itself today? Peter Turchin has mined 10,000 years of data to find the answer.
Peter Turchin has pioneered a new science of making history predictable - by applying methods that had already succeeded in other complex fields. You'll want to know what he sees lying ahead, and what we can do about it.
In this live event, he will present a ground-breaking account of how human societies work, explaining how, when the shifting balance of power between the ruling class and the majority tips too far in favour of elites, elite overproduction leads to state breakdown. It happened in imperial China, in medieval France, in the American Civil War - and it is happening now.
@6:45 mins https://www.youtube.com/live/XGhBTKzrJEY?si=YjKUpR7n7IeGWUPG&t=406
in 2010 you called the beginning of a disintegrated phase so let's go
through the four warning signs of that Disintegration phase and the first one is
what you call popular immiseration so talk us through what that is ...
sure so the four warning signs just to give a preview is
1 ) declining living standards for the general population, the technical term is Immiseration, or economic impoverishment.
2) even more important is Elite Overproduction
3) the State Weakness is the third one and
4) depending on how large and powerful the country is External Influences can also play a role
With Immiseration here the concept that I use I call it the wealth pump. It's the perverse Wealth Pump that at some points it gets turned on and it starts pumping income and wealth from
the general population workers or even peasants for example in medieval societies and delivers this wealth to the Elites.
The generic thing that's that tends to happen is that when you are in the middle of an integrative phase the elites get relaxed they think that life is going to be good for everybody and then as they start reconfiguring the economy in such a ways that they direct more and more of the fruits of the economy to themselves they become selfish Elites
Why? Because they can right, it's known there is a term for it the Iron Law of Oligarchy
People are tempted to translate their power into good things for themselves.
So what that does then it leads to especially in societies where there is no economic growth like
in medieval times or the modern times this leads to Absolute Immiseration of the population
In more modern societies actually once this wealth pump gets working very
hard what happens like in the United States for example the pump was turned
on during 1970s .................. and then I was shocked when in 2017 suddenly
the life expectancy of Americans not only stopped growling it actually declined
and that kept declining even before Covid19 hit.
you may be familiar with the idea of Death of Despair all right so that hit
about 20 years ago it became noticeable and these are the Deaths of Despair are:
Suicide, deaths from alcohol abuse and drug abuse and also it is often by other
lethal fatalities because people just don't care about their lives anymore.
So this is what Immiseration is like at the individual level .
Then note the facilitator after this section who is naturally extremely biased in defense of oligarchs and social imbalances while totally ignoring the harms done to the majority of the population ... "which are slightly different from the slap on the wrist don't be a mean employer approach to things"
The entrenched distortions of today's cultural values run deep .... if your on the elites side of the discussion you'll double down to defend your advantages and elite privileges all the time. It's psychologically and morally sick. It's a default ideological and selfish self-serving position from the get go.
@18 mins
What is an Elite first of all? Who are the elites?
I use neutral sociological definition simply a small proportion of the population who
concentrate Social Power in their hands. So these are like military nobility, let's say
in medieval England (Baron's Bishops Knights) or the Mandarin class in Imperial China
or the the proverbial one percent in the United States today, (and the IT millionaires
from Silicon Valley, Hedge Fund managers, high paid News media personalities, to
Elon Musk.)
All right so this Elite concentrate four sources of Social Power which is: coercive
economic, political, or administrative, and ideological power. Don't forget
ideological very important soft but very powerful kind of power.
Anyway the next question becomes is how are Elites recruited and related so to
speak? Essentially this requires a pool of people who want [are ambitious egotistical
and desire] to occupy [powerful / leadership] Elite positions in business and politics.
Now, there is always more Elite aspirants than positions and while some degree of
competition is good because it weeds out the bad ones and more less energetic, but
excessive competition is destructive because it's like a game of musical chairs.
If there's only 10 chairs, when you have 12 players you know things are fairly
manageable when you get 20 things start to break down, but when you get 30 or 40
aspirants competing for 10 chairs you can imagine the chaos right
and so that's precisely What's Happening Now. how is that connected to the wealth
pump? Well we can think about most Elites in Western Democratic societies are a
combination of Economic and Political Elites
there are two pipelines leading to Elite positions one of them is wealth you're either
inherit wealth or you acquire it; the second one is holding the right degree
credentials essentially -- so both of these pipelines are operating the wealth
pump now I think it's obvious how the wealth pump affects the wealth route,
the more millionaires you have the more people want to transform into Donald Trump!
He is the best example to translate their wealth into political position and what we
see in United States when the wealth pump got turned on during the 1970s ....
over the 40 period year of time the numbers of these millionaires increased tenfold
10 fold right and so now not all of them are going to seek office but the more of them
you have the smaller proportion is going to grow and we say that very clearly, so that
leads to this game of musical chairs and as the numbers of elites trying to get in
increases the number of frustrated Elites who don't get the positions grows even
faster and they are being tempted to start breaking the rules of the game --
becoming more extreme more immoral more desperate to claim what they believe
is RIGHTFULLY THEIR LEGACY as a wealthy Elite member of society.
METAPHORICALLY there will be one individual who will do something sneaky like
stand by a chair and while everybody's moving and then people will figure it out
and so then now they will crowd and start you know pushing each other, then fist
fights and so on it will quickly escalate fast to chaos.
And that's essentially why you see the degradation of the social norms and
institutions governing elections in the United States ... and everything else too.
@ 24 mins approx.
What produces conflict because of inter-league conflict between Elites is one of the
leading causes of disintegration and an example of how conflict between Elites then
cause Elites to mobilize people lower in the economic pyramid to fight on their behalf
and is the classic example of being possessive of your chosen Billionaire or supposed
billionaire, it's now a Billionaire Counter-Elite fighting against another Billionaire
Counter-Elite who mobilizes the Grievances of the Masses who are left out the system
in order to fight Elite Games or preserve their established positions of power rather
than to reconfigure the nature of a society for the good of everyone involved!!
You have lots of very ambitious people all right and if the majority of them get
frustrated then they typically, it is natural to perceive the problem IS NOT THEM
(oh no, they're perfect as they are) it's not their problem right, it's the society!
The society has become unjust, and therefore the motivations may not be very
savory or noble but vile psychopathic nefarious paranoid and morally degenerate.
To the frustrated self-centered privileged Elites now it is the society (and the swamp)
that has become unjust.
It's about Class. It's still always about Class. What is so stunning is how little people
know what is going on. Then again, we humans are generally an ignorant distracted lot.
Lately the 'masses' rally to the side of Elites instead. Some to Trump, others to
Hillary, or Obama. To Elon or Alex Jones or to Tucker Carlson. Some to climate
scientist celebrities, others to 'freedom loving' Fossil fuel companies, or a Lyndsay
Graham, and to Zelensky or Boris Johnson and to outspoken science deniers -
elitist celebrity tribalism on steroids?
"Still, we need the elites, the well educated skillful and capable. We need managers,
we need intelligent and wise thought leaders. We need all those people who are good at organizing things and who can occupy the important positions of power and influence. But we need and want Pro-Social leaders who are working for the benefit of the whole of the population rather than for the narrow benefit of the ruling class only!
We need the elites, but somehow you have to constrain them to act for the benefit of all, and in the past that has been done successfully and societies have thrived.
We need to worry about the health of societies and how do we get better health or societies? By getting much better science. "
America Is Headed Toward Collapse
History suggests how to stave it off.
By Peter Turchin
We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.
These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society. [...]
By 2010, the relative wage (wage divided by GDP per capita) of an unskilled worker had nearly halved compared with mid-century. For the 64 percent of Americans who didn’t have a four-year college degree, real wages shrank in the 40 years before 2016.
As wages diminished, the costs of owning a home and going to college soared. To afford an average house, a worker earning the median wage in 2016 had to log 40 percent more hours than she would have in 1976. And parents without a college degree had to work four times longer to pay for their children’s college. [...]
Unlike the post–Civil War period, real wages steadily grew in the mid-20th century. And high taxes on the richest Americans helped reverse the wealth pump. The tax rate on top incomes, which peaked during World War II at 94 percent, stayed above 90 percent all the way until the mid-1960s. Height increased by a whopping 3 inches in roughly the first half of the 20th century. Life expectancy at age 10 increased by nearly a decade. By the 1960s, America had achieved a broad-based prosperity that was virtually unprecedented in human history.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societal-trends-institutional-trust-economy/674260/
"The Elites start reconfiguring the economy in such ways that they direct more and more of the fruits of the economy to themselves they become Selfish Elites!"It's a manifestation of human psychology in the Western world today. What happens when
the Rules of the Game are Biased towards the already Wealthy.
SEE
'Pernicious' Effects of Economic Inequality He also mentions, rightly, that Tucker Carlson, Matt Taibbi and the other Muckraking new kind of independent journalists who are taking on the Ruling Classes and the Elites is a very very good thing at this time.
"..... they have created their own platforms and they are more influential that is the great thing you know, they actually get more views and everything else you know CBS whatever MSNBC and so CNN and so on and so forth. So that is actually a good way in which technology is changing the landscape as ideological power is very important because it's much more subtle - it's soft but um you know one social media influencer can reach millions of people and change their minds and that could push the pressure from Grassroots on our politicians something that we really need. " Mmmm, that was quite long.
