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I finished reading Peter Turchin's new book, End Times this past week, which visits many elements of the culture war, including Trump, immigration, 99%ers, even Ukraine. I hadn't read his previous books, but apparently they included more of the data and graphs that he works with for his research. This one is branded more populist, from the name, bright red cover, and relegation of models and graphs to the final third of the book, which is all appendix. He comes across as a moderate Marxist, who's trying not to alienate American conservatives.
The basic argument is that a core part of nation ending turmoil is a cycle of what he calls the wealth pump and overproduction of elites. A society will start out an epoch with a more or less equitable share of power and money between the workers and the elites, but at some point, this is disrupted by the elites ovedrawing resources from the economy, often because they have too many children, or allow more upward mobility than downward. Then popular immiseration sets in, where the workers have decreased access to the kind of resources they need to thrive -- land, capital, opportunities -- and the elites have a "wealth pump," which seems to be his way of talking returns on capital outpacing returns on labor. Also, increased immigration to keep labor costs low, and benefit employers. The wealthy grow, the poor grow, and the middle class shrinks. Elite competition becomes more and more intense, both because there are more people competing for roughly the same number of positions, often simply because population growth outstrips the growth of important positions, and because the alternative of downward mobility looks worse and worse in comparison. So everyone with any money or influence tries extra hard to get their kids a good position at whatever their era's version of the ivy leagues are, so they can benefit from the growth of the top 10%, while desperately fearing falling into the precariat. There are a bunch of young intelligentsia without money or positions, but a lot of education and family investment, ready to become counter elites or revolutionaries. Often they wage wars until enough of them die to relieve the social pressure, and the cycle starts over.
Turchin's main prescription follows the outlines of the New Deal -- high tax rates for the rich, a growing minimum wage, labor unions, low immigration, perhaps public works projects, that kind of thing.
I found the prescription, especially, underwhelming. Turchin doesn't really go into the kinds of jobs workers do, or how that might influence things, and there's no real commentary about going from an agricultural labor base, to industrial manufacturing, to service, and the growth of a suspicion that it isn't just the aspiring elite jobs that are basically useless, but many of the "workers" are as well. A large component of the current malaise seems to be the impression not only that there are too many leaders, not enough followers, but that, increasingly, the followers are all simulated, automated, or passive consumers, not workers at all. It seems like any plan that could hope to stabilize society over the next hundred years would need to incorporate the possibility that most middle class jobs, especially, as well as a decent number of working class ones, will be automated, while higher level positions and things like garbage collection and construction continue to be necessary much longer. Sure, we could probably move to an economy where each person's job is to care for some other person's parent, child, or pet, but that doesn't seem like a great outcome. He does not mention this at all.
I don’t see a new deal working. The elephant in the room is AI which can easily replace the bulk of the workforce in most industries. We simply don’t need the people anymore and unless we can grow ourselves into needing the tens of thousands of new college graduates on top of the displaced workers also looking for the same jobs. I would expect the demand for white collar workers to decline by half within a generation. We’re going to be shedding those jobs at the same time we’re training people to be essentially useless because we’re training them for a job that won’t exist.
What we really need is a worker sink. One of the things that worked fairly well in the past — across civilizations actually— was priesthood or monks or nuns being a prestige position. If you had too many kids, you could highly encourage one or two to become monks or nuns or something else. Another thing that would work is space colonization, which would provide a sink for the surplus population, jobs, and people to work out the logistics of managing a space colony. There would be need for construction as well, as you’d be building the New New World. This would be something like what happened in Europe. The extra people went to America, Australia, or some colonial conquest elsewhere thus giving the elites fairly secure positions.
What we have now suffices. More prolonged and more useless "education" and "training", more sinecures and bullshit jobs, more generous disability, more early retirement, in extremis even universal basic income. No need for upturning whole society.
When this was the case, priests and monastics were tiny part of population, recruited from elite classes, not from losers and rejects.
Classic article
religious (10,600) and seculars (24,900) should have been about 35,500 or 1.6 per
cent of the total population. Omitting the nuns, the total is about 33,500 men
or about three per cent of the male population.
...
This will provide jobs for few highly skilled and well paid professionals, equivalents of today deep sea divers and offshore oil platform workers.
You do not want on space station someone who was fired from minimum wage McDonald job because robot can flip burgers cheaper and better.
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