Did Peter Turchin predict 2020?

 Peter Turchin, along with Jack Goldstone, claims in an article in Noema (https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/) that he (they, I guess) predicted the ongoing turbulence of 2020. I believe Turchin has made this claim before, but it's a somewhat annoying claim for a pretty obvious reason: Turchin didn't, as far as I know, predict the pandemic that either caused or significantly contributed to most of the unrest of 2020. So he didn't really predict what's happening. Maybe it all would have happened anyway, but we don't know. He seems a lot like someone gloating about predicting a horse would a lose a race.. after the horse gets shot by a sniper in the bleachers. We all know that's not why he predicted the horse would lose. 

I have some doubts about Turchin's general theory that there are consistent social/political cycles in history that civilizations follow, and his 2020 victory lap ironically underscores my some of my issues with his theory. My suspicion is that non-social, non-political factors ('real' factors, I'm inclined to say) like biology, climate, epidemiology, and fundamental material conditions are what really drive cyclical patterns in history. To the extent that history today is being driven by epidemiology, I would say it undermines Turchin's model of sociopolitical cycles. It reminds us that, even if history books talk mostly about kings, nobles, revolutions and wars, it's actually often epidemics and famines that drive history. The plague is a great example of this. In ancient and medieval times, the plague (Yersinia pestis), would, much like Turchin's political cycles, recur over a short cycle and a long cycle, and the periods of these cycles don't seem that dissimilar to those found by Turchin. The plague (and sometimes similar diseases, like small pox) would typically show up every few hundred years, and major outbreaks would occur more or less every 20-40 years, for a period of roughly a few hundred years. Needless to say, plagues had the capacity to upend civilization, especially before modern medicine. I've wondered if the political cyclicality Turchin observes isn't, in effect, simply the result of epidemiological (or climatic) patterns.

In any case, I was still interested in Turchin and Gladstone's model of history and how it may be relevant to current history. After seeing their attempt to apply it to American history in detail, I found it pretty disappointing. It also shored up some of my doubts about Turchin's general model of history as defined by sociopolitical cycles. Turchin and Goldstone's efforts to explain modern American history in terms of this cyclical model expose serious issues with it in the attribution of causality.

For all Turchin's methodological innovation, his theory of the 20th century is more or less the garden variety progressive narrative of the last 100 years of history, the same narrative one sees breathlessly repeated by Paul Krugman and Binyamin Applebaum and so many others. The New Deal and the few decades that followed were pretty great, big government kept us unified, heavily taxed the elites, took care of the workers, infrastructure, and provided us with needed public goods and services; then, in the 80s, neoliberalism came in and ruined it all. Specifically, Turchin characterizes the ascent of neoliberalism as the elites stepping in to take an ever bigger share of the pie at the expense of workers by lowering taxes for the rich, eliminating regulations that boosted workers' wages, and cutting public services, and this political phenomenon precipitated rising inequality and the decline of civic culture in America. Modern day populists basically are trying to substitute for wages and public services by convincing the working classes that they are "but by persuading the working classes that they are beset by enemies who hate them (liberal elites, minorities, illegal immigrants)." They claim that we used to have a cooperative social contract between rich and poor, but that it has been replaced by a 'neoliberal contract: "But since the 1970s, that contract has unraveled, in favor of a contract between government and business that has underfunded public services but generously rewarded capital gains and corporate profits."

Naturally, much of what they write is just plainly wrong. Spending on public services - including education, infrastructure, and public health (the three they mention) have soared since the 1970s. Not only that, but education spending and public health spending have both grown as a fraction of GDP over this period, while infrastructure spending as a % of GPD has remained stable. Growth in NIH and CDC funding (and education funding in general) have accelerated during the 'neoliberal era.' I cannot state this emphatically enough, because this gets stated over and over and over by even ostensibly intelligent leftists, but the narrative of the neoliberal hollowing out of the public sector is a myth. Not an exaggeration, but a myth, like Beowulf and Grendel, repeated so often that it becomes received wisdom and few who believe it ever bother to actually look at the numbers (I'll link Russ Roberts's excellent article on this from a few months back on Binyamin Applebaum's criticism of neoliberalism below in addition to links to charts on public service funding at the bottom).

Turchin and Goldstone are also wrong about the order of events. They - echoing many others before him, including Paul Krugman and Binyamin Applebaum - note that median wage growth was slower in the paste few decades than in the pre-neoliberal decades. The implication is that neoliberalism has been less economically successful than its predecessor regime. But this insinuation is plainly belied by the actual time series. Causality, in fact, runs in the opposite direction: economic stagnation started under the previous 'Great Society' policy regime, and neoliberal reforms were a reaction to this stagnation. Median income started stagnating - even falling - before neoliberalism happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Real_Median_Personal_Income_in_the_United_States.png). Median personal income was already clearly stagnating, even declining by the mid 1970s. Moreover, the Gini coefficient started going up steadily in the late 1960s (http://datatrekresearch.com/us-income-inequality-latest-data/). It was also in the 1960s that crime rates started to skyrocket, American cities started to depopulate, and out-of-wedlock birth rates started to rise rapidly. Robert Putnam furthermore traces the decline in civic culture (membership to organizations, etc.) back at least to the 1960s. 

The bottom line: if it can be said that we are in or approaching a low point in our sociopolitical cycle, that decline - defined by economic stagnation, rising inequality, declining civic culture - unambiguously predates the neoliberal regime change to which Turchin and Goldstone attribute the decline. This sociopolitical decline began, in fact, during a political era characterized precisely by the kinds of policies they themselves urge as a solution to the decline: high tax rates, extensive redistribution, large government, greater regulation of the economy, etc. Whether one believes neoliberalism helped mitigate these trends, it is clear that the rise of neoliberalism - both in the US and the UK - was a reaction to trends like these that were already ongoing, not the cause of them. The proto-neoliberal writings of the 1960s and 1970s by Friedman, Hayek, et al. and their growing popularity were clearly a reaction to economic stagnation and malaise already in progress. It requires considerable historical amnesia to pretend otherwise.

I'm not bringing this up just to express frustration at yet another public intellectual repeating the zombie narrative of the neoliberal bogeyman, but to make a broader criticism of Turchin's model of history. Specifically, that he doesn't confront the endogeneity problem that plagues his theory. He blames patterns of elite behavior - such as taking too much of the pie, overproducing themselves, trying to exclude new entrants into the elite class for the sake of their own progeny - for civilizational decline, but what the patterns he blames for decline, both in general and in the case of the US in particular, are themselves logical consequences of decline caused by other factors. In the case of the US, the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were concomitant with increasing competition between workers in the US and abroad and phenomena like the decline of union membership may have exerted a downward pressure on wages. This, however, was a necessary consequence of the increasing competitiveness of the global economy. The US no longer had a near monopoly on automobile manufacturing like it did in the early postwar era, for example, and so could no longer afford to keep wages well above marginal productivity via unions and regulations. Wages had to fall to avoid losing car manufacturing jobs altogether to Germany, Japan, and eventually many other countries. So to with steele, rubber, and other major manufacturing products. The fact that America's old industrial centers have been havens of chronic unemployment since the 1970s isn't a testament to the perils of de-unionization or deregulation; it's proof that wages couldn't fall enough to make it worth it for consumers the world over to keep buying American manufacturing products. 

When a state finds itself short on resources, it must ultimately reduce spending (borrowing can't go on indefinitely). When it (or more precisely, its citizens) lose their competitive advantage over other societies in various industries, its wages must fall to avoid widespread unemployment. The state must also reform its tax code to appeal to investors if other societies offer increasingly appealing investment opportunities. These reforms are necessary responses to changing fiscal or economic circumstances, not causes of them. This is a common pattern throughout history: states lacking in resources find themselves cutting the provision of public services, for example. The Byzantine empire gradually reduced the size and eligibility of the dole - bread handouts - during its last few centuries. There was also undeniably an excess of elites in Byzantium causing touble But these phenomena weren't to blame for the Byzantine Empires decline and fall; the circumstances that caused them were: the loss of North Africa to the Caliphate (and later Turks) devastated the country's grain supply, and the loss of enormous amounts of territory in general led a great empire's worth of Byzantine nobles to flee into an ever smaller relic Byzantine state, while commoners who mostly couldn't afford to flee stayed behind and adapted to Turkish rule. The phenomena themselves were mostly just symptoms. Ironically, in the case of the modern US, the signs of our decline are partially the consequences of the economic convergence of the developing world with the developed world, as the former becomes competitive with the latter in industries previously dominated by the developed world.

Reading about the decline of specific civilizations in detail generally makes me question the need for a Turchinesque theory of history. Civilizational oscillations often have well-established explanations: the Sumerian Empire likely declined because the diversion and canalization of the nearby rivers for agricultural purposes caused salt to build up in the soil, causing a collapse in crop yield. The Bronze Age empires - including Egypt - likely fell because of a volcanic eruption that obscured the sun and dramatically reduced crop yields, and in the process caused a massive assault of starving Europeans (the best candidates for the fabled 'Sea Peoples') with iron weapons fleeing their now barren lands. The Crisis of the Third Century in Rome came on the heels of the Antonine Plague, the worst in Rome's recorded history up to that point (and also a changing climate reducing crop yields). The Byzantine Empire waxed and waned with the plague from the reign of Justinian onward, and the collapse of Mayan civilization was most likely caused by a massive drought. Elite overproduction and infighting and other signals of decline may have followed all of these civilizational declines - indeed were inevitably consequences of them (elites tend to be the last people to starve) - but cannot really be argued to be causative.

I therefore doubt whether the behavior of elites or the policies of the governments they run are themselves the drivers of rises and falls, bur rather are mostly just consequences. Of course, today, we are somewhat less constrained by climatic and biological factors like climate and disease (though not totally unconstrained, as we're learning today), but this may just make room for other factors like technological change or competition with other societies to determine when or how a civilizations rises, wanes, and falls. If the US is in a state of secular decline (I'm not completely convinced it is), it's doubtful that elite behavior or political trends are the root cause. It's even more doubtful that these trends, even they exacerbate social or economic problems, can be reversed by public policy, especially if they're rooted in deeper phenomena like technological change. Finally, it's highly unlikely that aping the policies that preceded the putative decline will help to reverse it. In previous civilizations entering into periods of decline, I think one would usually find what we see with the US in the 20th century: that the putative signs of decline first emerged during the policy regime associated with the society's peak. Some policies or elite practices surely do hasten the fall. Turchin and Goldstone are at least right to note that restricting trade and immigration, while effective at distracting the electorate by focusing its ire on foreign bogeymen, exacerbate the US's woes. However, declining economic growth can't be remedied by extracting more from 'elites,' but rather requires supply side reforms that make make American labor and capital like more competitive, much like those of the late 1970s-1990s, not policies that artificially inflate wages or prices, or make producing in the US less profitable than elsewhere. Dwindling resources due to many years of public profligacy require us to adapt to smaller, not larger government, in order to avoid a debt crisis down the road. This suite of policies on which Turchin and Goldstone lay most of the blame for America's supposed decline, usually pejoratively called neoliberalism, are in fact the best (maybe only) way to confront the stagnation and crisis of the status quo. Far from being the cause of the fall they think we are about to experience, they are rather the best way we have to brace for impact.

Links:

Infrastructure spending over time: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/05/21/the-state-of-american-infrastructure-spending-in-four-graphics/

Education spending: https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.html

NIH and CDC funding: https://www.cato.org/blog/coronavirus-nih/cdc-funding

Russ Roberts's article: https://medium.com/@russroberts/the-economist-as-scapegoat-91b317a6823e