Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
5people
2020–2023years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I certainly found Secular Cycles a compelling read.
- Given the content of the linked article, I heartily recommend taking a peek at Peter Turchin's work on Secular Cycles (1). He also keeps a blog, where he expands on some of the ideas. Not a light reading, though. The best introduction to his work was a book review at now deleted slatestarcodex - maybe it can be retrieved by internet archive.
Based on the dataset he and his colleagues compiled, civilizations big enough for internal dynamics tend to exhibit these characteristics during their stagnation phase:
* stagnating or declining real wages
* increasing rents
* decrease in social cohesion
* increasing inequality
* increasing urbanization (mostly due to no rural opportunities)
* more people pursuing education, arts and crafts in hopes of joining the elite. This sounds as a plus, until you realize it's caused by inability to keep a decent standard of living in traditional occupations
* sharpening intra-elite competition, leading to a gradual abandonment of previous norms. Dirty tricks become more and more commonplace
* crisis amplification - non-issues turn into crises, challenges turn into disasters
* 'overproduction of elites' leads to increasing corruption and rent seeking
* stagnating wages and increasing corruption leads to strain on public finances
Turchin's contribution lies mainly in providing historical statistics to back these claims, the novel mechanics of 'elite overproduction' and 'elite aspirants', and overlaying a secondary generational cycle, when a clique of elites keep power for too long (30-50 year cycle, think of Boomers in US or WW2 veterans in USSR).
(1) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles
- Haven’t read the full article, but I note with interest that this is by Peter Turchin, the same person who wrote Secular Cycles. I haven’t read it myself, but I’ve always liked Scott Alexander’s review of that book [0] and its sequel [1].
In particular, Turchin predicted in 2016, that 2020 would form the peak of social conflict in America. This strikes me as eerily close to what has actually happened…
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cy...
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-di...
- > Is there a study or report why all these social dramas are always coming from the FAANG companie?
Because these companies have the highest status and social justice outrage is a form of intra-elite status competition. You'll find that this stuff becomes more intense in academia as you move up the university prestige ladder.
Peter Turchin has written a lot about the general dynamics of intra-elite competition and elite overproduction: see https://www.amazon.com/Secular-Cycles-Peter-Turchin/dp/06911... for example
- A propos, there was a review on slatestarcodex for "Secular Cycles" effectively tracking the rise and fall of civilizations if I remember correctly. The argument is societies start to destabilize and stagnate once wealth concentrates to a certain point, after which war and strife levels the playing field once more. Except, we don't much expect that same sort of upheaval to happen today in Western society.
All of which to say, you could liken periods of high wealth concentration as lending to decadence, though I'm not sure how useful that would be as the same argument could be made of golden ages. Decadence itself doesn't seem suspect but I would expect it to be around before things go awry.
edit: here - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cy...
