This guys not a historian, and you shouldn't take these wannabe Hari Seldons seriously.
Turchin's stuff is basically on the level of "The Chart", I mean
It's historically illiterate, Peterson level stuff, and I only know about this guy because he used to make ridiculous attacks on twitter against David Graeber (RIP)
Wow. The second one is pure drivel, but the "Well-being index" in the 1st one is :chefs-kiss: for ideological bias. Pretty sure the well being of enslaved and indigenous people was not included in the index during the "Era of Good Feelings." Damn.
Exactly
Also funny how it shows literally no changes on the "Political Stress Index" during: the Whiskey Rebellion, Alien and Seditions Acts, War of 1812, Presidency of Andrew Jackson/ Indian removal, or the Nat Turner rebellion. Among many other things.
Like yeah, I'm sure the Civil War just appeared out of thin air, everything was going great before that until "the age of discord" just started for no reason at all.
It didn't appear out of nowhere, the other line started declining slightly before that.
“The Chart”
Omg imagine thinking the entire Islamic golden age never happened, and that the renaissance came out of a rejection of Christianity and had nothing to do with it.
Damn if only there was some school of history that has existed for nearly 200 years based on some pretty straightforward economic models saying things are gonna get worse as a shrinking class claims an increasingly larger share of wealth.
Nah we just need some crank Russian-gusano to pull stuff out of his ass to explain stuff
One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex societies because they kill off simpler ones.
oh fuck off
DAE society is just our primal evolutionary urges taken to another level? I am an intellectual.
love too talk about elites and commoners because "class" is invisible, not even the Soviet-educated dude fucking brings it up?god damnI didn't express this properly. "ruling class" and "working-class" are mentioned, but reading it it's like they are incidental features of groups not a realtionship to the means of production, it's like the author has an anti-materialist brain tumor
it’s like the author has an anti-materialist brain tumor
Turchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, a city built by the Soviet state as a kind of nerd heaven, where scientists could collaborate and live together. His father, Valentin, was a physicist and political dissident, and his mother, Tatiana, had trained as a geologist. They moved to Moscow when he was 7 and in 1978 fled to New York as political refugees.
yes
I've heard about this guy before and I looked into him. He has "moderated" his stance on Marxism a bit, meaning that he is actually far more left-wing than the overwhelming number of people discussed in the pages of The Atlantic.
This sucks. Not that it won’t accidentally predict the future but this is literally a justification for enforcing inequality and gate keeping power.
I read a journal article somewhere IIRC about the tragedy of commons not actually occuring in practice as social norms for use develop.
Certainly many people have access to certain uses of land far beyond what you get post-enclosure Britain and things have generally been fine.
This isn't it but touches on some similar points https://mronline.org/2008/08/25/the-myth-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
The image at the top of the article has incredible meme potential
Too many people go to college and the fail sons will destroy western civilization.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of failsons rebelling against their parents.
