“The four generations can be defined as the builder, the one who has personal contact with the builder, the one who relies on tradition, and the destroyer.”

• ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah

“Hard times make strong men;

Strong men make good times;

Good times make weak men;

Weak men make hard times.”

• Internet meme

I. The End Times Are Near

Peter Turchin’s big idea is that history forms cycles spanning centuries and the structure of these cycles is similar across geography and era. The template cycle, identifiable through the historical record in various cases in classical, medieval, and early modern Europe, is characterized by a unified society which goes through a Golden Age for decades to over a century before two factors- worsening standard of living for the general public, and overproduction of elites- combine to drive society into decline. Eventually these trends self-correct, society becomes unified once more, and the cycle can recur.

Turchin’s ideas gained a new application and audience early in the 21^st century: due to some combination of factors such as the 2008 financial crisis and the proliferation of independent media (including social media) in the 2010s, his cyclical theory of history now became a forecasting tool pointing, in a seemingly deterministic way, to doom for the modern day United States. He himself writes, in 2023’s End Times (page x):

It became clear…that complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a certain degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces, operating across the thousands of years of human history…In 2010, the scientific journal Nature asked specialists from different fields to look ten years into the future, and I made this case in clear terms, positing that judging from the pattern of US history, we were due for another sharp instability spike by the early 2020s.

Was this prediction wrong, or is such an instability spike still awaiting- or even imminent? This essay reviews Turchin’s theory across two of his earlier works (2007’s War and Peace and War and 2009’s Secular Cycles (with Sergey A. Nefedov) ); his highest-profile work, 2016’s Ages of Discord; and his most recent presentation of the argument, End Times. [1]

II. The Lure of the Cycle

Turchin begins WPW by referencing Asimov’s Foundation series [2], even proclaiming “War and Peace and War addresses the question raised by Asimov (and many other people before him, including Marx and Tolstoy): Is a science of history possible?” (WPW, 2). By the end of the book, he states “history is shaped by great impersonal forces.” (WPW, 315)

Turchin is far from the first to view history as having patterns. In antiquity, it was common to see history as a secular decline from a long-ago golden age; even over a shorter time horizon, Plato wrote of a devolutionary process of individual societies from kingship to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny.

The model of a historical cycle shaped by fundamental forces seems to originate in ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah. ibn Khaldun had observed a pattern of rise and decline in the city-states of North Africa and went looking for a fundamental explanation of this pattern. He settled on a variable called “asabiya” in Arabic, frequently translated as something like “cohesion” or “unified purpose”. A society (or, interchangeably for ibn Khaldun’s purposes but useful to remember for later in this essay, a dynasty) builds this asabiya over the course of generations of hard living in the desert until its superior capabilities, unlocked by said asabiya, enable it to conquer a more economically developed area and serve as its leadership. Then, as summarized in the quote at the top of this review, fundamental social forces gradually weaken the asabiya of the conquerors (a process that might be familiar as decadence).

Turchin is aware of ibn Khaldun’s theory (WPW, 5) and even applies the term “asabiya” generously in the book, including linking it to Robert Putnam’s modern theory of social capital. Social trust is also included (WPW, 334) and “two or three centuries…seems to be the minimum time needed to nurture high asabiya.” (WPW, 331)

The model becomes more formalized in SC: “the integrative phase is characterized by a centralizing tendency, unified elites, and a strong state that maintains order and internal stability…the disintegrative phase, by contrast, is characterized by a decentralizing tendency, divided elites, a weak state, and internal instability and political disorder…discrete events signaling the arrival of crisis can be pandemics, extreme episodes of famine, or state collapse followed by intense civil war.” (SC, 1.2)

The model of a cycle helps satisfy the demand for pessimism. The establishment historical perspective could be said to be progressivism. It cannot be denied that per-capita GDP continues to increase, that technology continues to unlock new capabilities, that progress has been made since olden times on a variety of health-related metrics, and that individuals are unusually free to make personal life choices. So the pessimist must find a way to grant the progressives their trendlines but then identify factors which indicate a coming reckoning. In the late 20^th century this was frequently environmental collapse, but by the 2000s the leading candidate became a decadence similar to what ibn Khaldun had identified, and the Internet meme quoted at the top of this review made it pithy and explicit: it is the very prosperity the progressives celebrate that is softening something deep within society.

III. The Agrarian-Society Cycle

The bulk of Turchin’s earlier books consists of extended narratives of historical periods in various countries, with the narration supporting his interpretation of rises and falls. Reviewing these narratives, Turchin, a biologist by training, ends up looking at these historical societies like an ecologist: in stable times predators (the elite) become a growing share of the total population relative to the prey (the laboring class, which in the societies he reviews generally equates to agricultural workers specifically). For examples of how this is applied in ecology, including the frequent identification of cyclical patterns in the data, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equations

Because of this societal bifurcation, what Turchin at various points calls “popular immiseration” plays a role in the fracturing of the elite. But first comes a period where a geographic region approaches what might be called a surplus carrying capacity (SC, 1.2):

As population density approaches the carrying capacity, a number of related changes affect the society. There are shortages of land and food, and an oversupply of labor. As a result, food prices increase, real wages decline, and per capita consumption, especially among the poorer strata, drops.

And even the early stages of popular immiseration may not kick off decline, depending on the ability of the elite class to effectively predate on food producers (SC, 1.2):

During the late stages of population growth…lords can set the level of extraction almost arbitrarily high, because oppressed serfs have nowhere to flee- the whole surrounding landscape is at the saturation level.

Still, these periods or the time right before them are often what traditional historians interpret as a Golden Age, when civilization qua civilization is at its peak. Turchin’s thrust is that this is precisely because real wages are low and laborers can be squeezed to maximize their labor- the aggregate “elite surplus”, as a share of economic output, is at its maximum. For example, this is the period when the number of church building projects peaked in England. (SC, 2.1) In classical Rome, “The stagflation phase…was a period of high political stability, when the [Roman] empire was governed by the five “good” emperors (Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius[sic] Pius, and Marcus Aurelius).” (SC, 7.1)

This is also generally a period of urbanization, where people whose families’ farmlands could no longer support them move to the cities and are paid, effectively, with a portion of the food surplus extracted by the elites. It is interesting to consider the claim presented in James C. Scott’s Against the Grain, that ancient agriculture triumphed over a hunter-gatherer economy due to inherent characteristics of agricultural production and staple grains specifically that enabled state elites to extract resources from the producers; pop-sci narratives of Egypt’s ancient monuments sometimes claim that the pharaohs could create these massive public works projects because of the combination of a fertile Nile surrounded by desert terrain that punished exit. Legal institutions are also important: when real wages fall, some farmers borrow, and eventually many of those debts are defaulted on. “Toward the mid-sixteenth century the [Russian Orthodox] church owned an estimated one-third of all cultivated land in Russia.” (SC, 8.3)

Despite the appearance of national prosperity, the laboring/agricultural class is so impoverished that it eventually begins to actually decline in numbers (generally, this means that fertility is below the replacement rate). With low or zero productivity growth in the periods under study, it becomes impossible to sustain the flow of resources to elites to which the elites have become accustomed. In the most drastic cases, the population decline is sudden; the most extreme and evocative example appears to be that of the Black Death [3]. Turchin claims that, in comparison to the 30% plus mortality rate of the Black Death, “peers lost barely 8 percent of their number. The only reigning monarch who died from the pestilence was King Alfonso XI of Castile.” (WPW, 222) Even if there is not a dramatic event such as an epidemic, the key point is that the elite increase their share of the population to the point that their per-capita lifestyles become jointly unsustainable- a phenomenon called elite overproduction.

Now begins what a progressive narrative of history might mark as “good news”; the relative scarcity of food producers and other primary laborers causes real wages to increase (as is very clear in data on the Black Death period). But in Turchin’s model, this is what triggers the beginning of a period of civilizational decline. In some of the freshest-feeling work in his books, Turchin recounts the desperate measures that precariously placed elites turn to during this period, in setting after setting. Frequently, they turn to warfare against each other (or crime- WPW, 228) to try to seize a larger share of the shrinking pie; “the dominant role in internal warfare appears to be played by elite overproduction.” (AD, 38) In one of the more infamous incidents, King Philip the Fair seized the assets of the Knights Templar. (WPW, 231) When the fortunes of the English nobility declined, they feuded and, in the end, began the Wars of the Roses (SC, 2.5), and here Turchin notes how skewed towards the elite the casualty rolls were:

The intensity of intraelite conflict during the Wars of the Roses was extremely high. Three kings were deposed and killed, and numerous magnates were executed…many ending on the losing side of a battle were simply made to kneel in the mud and were beheaded on the spot. However, its direct effect on the population of England must have been insignificant. It is unlikely that more than 50,000…ever took part in the battles of the civil war.

At the same point in a cycle in France “dueling for personal honor and without royal sanction became so common that La Noue believed more noblemen died from it than in combat.” (SC, 5.3) In the cycle corresponding with Russia’s Romanov era, elite competition was initially with the pen rather than the sword:

This period saw the formation of a new social stratum, the intelligentsia, which grew together with the expansion of education. The elite overproduction was the most important process underlying the formation of the intelligentsia, half of which had personal roots in the noble estate.

And eventually “thirty-eight percent of the leadership of the radical “Popular Will” organization had noble origins.” (SC, 9.2)

The throughline could be said to be that, pressured with a shrinking flow of national surplus, what was previously a harmonious, high-asabiya elite fragments. Turchin makes an analogy to a game of musical chairs, and notes that the game-theoretical strategy is to “slow down by a chair or even stop and wait right next to it for the music to stop, while shoving away other contenders…others quickly catch on, and each chair soon acquires a jostling crowd.” (ET, 9) It is these intra-elite conflicts that represent, or directly bring about, “hard times.”

IV. Times Have Changed

We turn to the preface of Ages of Discord, where Turchin applies his theory to explaining the emerging populism of early 2010s America. In his telling, wages have declined (if looking at the inflation-adjusted wage of men), suicide is up, and mass shootings have become much more common. Chapter 1 begins with him raising the spectre of civil war; after recounting the outbreak of the American Civil War he writes (AD, 19):

Today, 150 years later…the degree to which cooperation among the American political elites has unraveled during the past decade is eerily similar to what happened in the 1850s, the decade preceding the Civil War…the vehemence and the disregard for the consequences of failing to compromise are the same.

This is clearly an out of sample application of Turchin’s vision. First, most visibly, immediately following his reference to Asimov in WPW, Turchin states on page 2: “This book focuses on empires” and further establishes that this is a study of historical societies, not a forecasting exercise. Further, Turchin stipulates “most research has been done on agrarian societies.” (WPW, 4) Early on, SC proclaims “our explicit focus is on agrarian societies.” (SC, 8) This book is structured as a methodical march through two cases of cycles, generally over 200 years apiece, from each of England, France, Rome, and Russia; only the latter’s Romanov cycle includes a period during the industrial era (and Russia itself was one of the later-industrializing nations of Europe). Similarly, ibn Khaldun was discussing pre-industrial societies and for that matter was really more describing a cycle of dynasties rather than nations. In addition to the historical cases focusing on agrarian societies, they also focus on pre-epidemiology societies, where cities were notoriously disease ridden and otherwise generated below replacement rate reproduction.

Second, for most of Turchin’s sweep of history, he is talking about fairly weak central states (one event in the French cycle is Louis XIV’s successful centralization of France) such that a coalition of counter-elites could pose meaningful economic, criminal, and even military resistance to the state. This would be a tall order today; it was only through luck and circumstance that the Confederacy’s rebellion was able to last as long as it did, and that was before capital-intensive machines like tanks and planes began to play a central role in warfare. Other states can certainly provide challenges to the modern state, but interstate war plays little role in Turchin’s theory of collapse (one way in which it does, elites swarming to join the military and often dying by the thousands in single battles, is implausible for the modern United States; the main role of interstate war is instead to increase asabiya, and indeed Turchin at times credits the Indian Wars for filling this role in American history).

Third, despite no longer being an agrarian society per se, the United States happens to produce a massive food surplus. Diets include staggering amounts of meat compared to any prior period in history [4], which in turn require large amounts of agricultural land to produce animal feed instead of more calorie-efficient dietary crops, and trade and capitalism make it possible to purchase fresh produce multiple times a week regardless of the seasonal climate. In 1984, news articles reported politician Phil Gramm quipping that “we are the only nation in the world where all the poor people are fat.”

Turchin seems to grasp this last problem, and later books start putting increasing weight on falling living standards among the majority of the population rather than actual below-subsistence living standards. By ET, for example, Turchin becomes interested in “relative wages”, or wages divided by GDP per capita; by this metric, even slowly growing wages become problematic if that growth is slower than the economy as a whole. The situation becomes definable as “falling living standards” and equatable to periods when “peasants revolted when their misery could not be borne anymore.” (ET, 81) This is quite a leap, and in tension with SC 1.2: “Eventually, deepening economic misery leads to peasant and urban uprisings. However, as long as the elites are united and the state maintains control of the military, such popular uprisings have small chance of success.” Turchin then quotes Jack Goldstone’s 2002 article “Population and security: How demographic change can lead to violent conflict”:

In order for popular discontent or distress to create large-scale conflicts, there must be some elite leadership to mobilize popular groups and to create linkages between them.

Recall, for example, the references to nobility in the Russian intelligentsia. So even if the public is in this zone of comfortably fed but disappointed by economic conditions, there still needs to be a fragmenting of the elite, and there is no obvious mechanism for falling relative wages to do this (while below-subsistence living standards eventually choke the extractable surplus).

We should also note that historically by “elites” Turchin has meant the nobility, but in AD he refers to the wealth share of the “top one percent”, one common shorthand in American discourse for the wealthy. He also notes an increase in the percentage of the US population meeting the wealth thresholds of $1 million and $10 million (AD, 129). By ET, even just “$1-$2 million” of net worth places one in “the top 10 percent, which puts you in the lower ranks of American elites” (ET, 3), but Turchin also implies that “the bosses at various levels of organizations” (ET, 5) and “columnists at major newspapers” (ET, 5) should be included. He even restricts his claims about stagnant or falling real wages to Americans without a college degree (ET, 64), and concludes “By 2016, then, the American population had sorted itself out into two social classes: the educated and the “immiserated”.” (ET, 78). The implication seems to be that everyone with a college degree at least sort-of belongs to the elite, satisfying political relevance at the cost of consistency.

V. What If It’s Actually All The Elites?

The attempt to apply Turchin’s theory to satisfy the complaints about the modern United States runs into another problem: the complainers seizing on his theory are generally trying to agitate for changing some aspect of public policy which they hold responsible for stagnant wages. But it cannot be ignored that the role of “wages” in the well-supported historical cases is to drop below subsistence, in order to skew the ratio of predators and prey. It also cannot be ignored that in Turchin’s cycle it’s the shift to an increase in real wages that sparks crisis by forcing society to reckon with its buildup of elite overproduction.

I’d suggest interpreting Turchin’s theory in a less appealing but cleaner way: The general population and its predator-prey dynamic with the elites used to be a common and logical mechanism for generating elite overproduction, but no longer applies. There is nothing that can reasonably befall the general population to constrict the resources available to the elite. Real wages, and therefore the general population as a whole, are now irrelevant to the model and we must search for other possible sources of elite overproduction. Similarly, I’d emphasize the relevant factor for “decadence” is not declining asabiya among the general population- it never was- but asabiya among the elites (ibn Khaldun is certainly referring to “generations” in the sense of the family tree of a conquering-then-decaying dynasty, rather than when we talk about Baby Boomers and Gen X and Millennials).

Building out the causal chain has made me suspect that reassembling Turchin’s theory in a way to accurately represent the present day United States points against discord-and-end-times. As discussed, the link between real wages and overproduction of true elites seems to have passed into history. And most elites can transmit a similar material lifestyle to their children solely through inheritance (or even more absolute wealth, given recent returns on financial assets).

A fair response would be to claim that elites care much more about relative position, cannot as easily transmit a place in the next generation’s elite in the sense of “the top 1%”, and so will unite and agitate against an economic system which enables new industries. The current US cycle, which includes dozens of super-wealthy entrepreneurs of middle-class, poor, or even immigrant backgrounds, would seem to be our purest test yet. I have three reasons why I come down on the side of a loss of relative status not triggering a crisis:

• In the closest historical analogy for this Thucydides’ Trap [5] of elite subclasses, the U.S. South’s secession, the Southern elites seem to have very particularly feared an assault on their absolute wealth (namely, emancipation) rather than a loss in relative position directly.

• I would note that European noble and even royal families seem fairly complacent with being surpassed in the wealth distribution by capitalists; I am unaware of any counter-elite movement by this class, so doubt that American trust-funders will be so politically activated.

• To the extent that legacy American elites try to sustain their children’s status, it is often through educational and philanthropic institutions- these institutions tend to be the most accessible ones in society through nepotism, with many educational programs even explicitly giving admissions advantages to family members of alumni. Yet these institutions also instill a consensus of progressive values, or in some cases compliance with or at least tolerance of these consensus values. This provides some guard against disunity.

I think there is some chance that the relative-position point is accurate, but my leading view is that the United States currently has a system in which elites are allowed to transmit their lifestyle intergenerationally, even as new upstarts build enough wealth that they statistically rise to a higher place in the wealth distribution.

The other fair response would be- with the general public and incumbent elites dispensed with- to identify “aspirant elites” as sources of discord. A read here would be that so many young people from non-elite backgrounds expect elite positions to be accessible to them that quite a few will inevitably be disappointed, and this group can form a counter-elite. Turchin is favorable to this view, noting that the number of lawyers and the number of applicants to medical school have increased (AD, 307).

First, this appears to be another leap from Turchin’s work on agricultural societies. In particular, the high baseline prosperity of the United States means that aspirant elites can still lead materially comfortable lifestyles. Second, only a narrow pathway exists for aspirant elites to be a threat to the social order. If these individuals had stayed among the general population, they would not have been of much concern. If they embark on a quest to join the elite, fail, and end up with little resources, they probably would not be a source of instability. If they are competent enough to enter the elite, they probably would not be a source of instability either. The most vulnerable societies in general would be those which manage to gatekeep competent people from rising into places of influence, which doesn’t fit the market economy of the modern United States, as our previous note about successful immigrants has shown (it might have been a better fit for the Jim Crow era).

VI. The Future Of The Cycle

In chapter 8 of End Times– titled “Histories of the Near Future”- Turchin offers a populist solution to the current state of affairs, but also a prediction (ET, 201):

No, to bring the system to a positive equilibrium, the pump must be shut down…by driving the relative wage up…(and then keeping it at this level by ensuring that worker wages increase together with overall economic growth). It turns out that this intervention will not eliminate or even have much of an effect on the 2020s peak…However, after a painful and violent decade, the system will rapidly achieve equilibrium.

As of mid-2026, we don’t yet see anything of this magnitude. I consider the entire Turchin model to need alteration for a modern context, such that the mechanisms which have turned the elite class against each other in the past and precipitated misery in broader society do not surface as easily. Stagnant relative wages in fact have no obvious place in the model as long as they remain as far above subsistence as they are. Economic growth and the resulting returns on investments mean the “musical chairs” metaphor no longer holds in the same way for enough elites to resort to the same society-harming behaviors we see in historical cases. Some other factor- and certainly a factor other than high-but-only-slowly-improving living standards for the general population- will be necessary to cause true end times.

[1] These will be cited as WPW, SC, AD, and ET. Note that SC is cited according to section of the book (e.g. 2.6).

[2] In Asimov’s science fiction series, a mathematician develops a theory of “psychohistory” that uses mathematical equations to predict the future of human society, including the impending fall of the Galactic Empire.

[3] The “Golden Age” is often a period of peak vulnerability to epidemics, because extraction has shattered the nutrition of laborers and the superior fortunes of the elites have possibly increased the volume of long-distance trade.

[4] “The latest USDA data indicate 226 pounds of red meat and poultry and about 22 dozen eggs are available per U.S. consumer” https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/113119

[5] “Thucydides’ Trap” is a political science concept that one circumstance of maximum potential international conflict is when an incumbent superpower observes that another state is increasing in power and threatens to displace it.