Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Welcome to our final episode of the voter Nomics series where Politics and Markets Collide. I'm Stephanie Flanders.
I'm Adrian Woodridge, and I'm alegra Stratton.
So we set up this podcast with the working thesis that this year of elections would not just reshape politics, but teach us some lessons along the way about the conflict between politics and economics. Now that year is nearly over, we've got most of the elections behind us. We're not forgetting the Garnian elections on December seventh, and I think we now have German elections coming up in the next
few months. But we did think this was a good moment to reflect on how all of those votes have panned out and what it means for markets and economies. A bit later, we're going to speak to Peter Turchin, professor and author whose recent book End Times, Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration offers a pretty overarching explanation for all of it, not just America's division and civil strife, but the device of politics we're seeing
around the world. He says it's all part of a basic cycle of integrating and disintegrating forces within societies. That gets repeated again and again throughout history. And before you dismiss all that, you should know that he first predicted we would do one of these cycles back in twenty ten. But first, Adrian Allegra, it's a big question. But maybe Adrian, first, what are the big themes that you're taking away.
Well, it's a year of anti incumbency votes overwhelmingly, not not quite in India, but almost in India. That is to some extent driven by inflation. And you know, we've had inflation ripping through the economies of the world and creating a lot of annoying about existing ruling classes or existing political regimes. But I would have add two qualifications
to that over arching view. One is that despite the anti incumbency things, this anti incumbascy revolution has tended to resolve in favor of the right rather than the left. You know, it hasn't been the Corbyns of this world that have been leading the anti incumbassy revolution. It's been the Trumps. It's been people on the right in general. Written a bit of an exception, but overwhelmingly it's a sort of populist right wing movement. And secondly, America wasn't
entirely an anti incumbency vote. It was a sort of restoration vote. You know, people voted for the guy who was in charge in twenty sixteen because they perceive him to be a stronger person, perceived that a better age than one that the Democrats had created. So anti incumbency driven by inflation, but a strong flavor of the populis right, and some extent a restoration of the old Trump order in the most important of these elections, which is United States.
So for me, I think one big theme very similar to Adrian's what a surprise. But then actually other than that, I don't I think it's quite difficult to see themes. So, yeah, inflation is the big killer. It's really hard to get back in if people have been made to feel even if things getting better, people have been made to feel poorer. We did say at the beginning of the series that one term governments might get more likely people are dissatisfied
and choppiness is the result. And I think if you look at the actual results, I mean, Adrian's sort of sweep is right, but actually the French election, Macrong reduced his number of seats, but actually it was the left that were victorious there, not per se the far right. In the UK, you had a landslide for Starma. I think that we were worried about the rise of misinformation and so on. We questioned how much social media would play a part. In the end, it was podcasts that possibly,
if not won it, then swayed it in America. I am uncomfortable saying they are kind of left right findings that were really clear.
One thing for me, and it maybe that I've been thinking too much about the book that we're discussing later
in the episode. But the economic blowback was very much about the legacy of COVID for the economy, and there was a reaction to the inflation that had come after COVID and possibly the sort of mismanagement of some of the response to COVID, and that obviously was one of the overwhelming things driving dissatisfaction with the economy, whether in the US or elsewhere, but there's also been a react in many places. There was also a reaction to the lockdowns and to what that had done to people, the
isolation that had brought, the impact on schools. It felt like there had been a sort of building reaction which I think a lot of sort of mainstream opinion had just underestimated how wounded people felt and were angry at the way that COVID not just not about parties and number ten or anything else, but about the lockdowns and how the inequity that demonstrated in society, the people who could work from home versus the people who couldn't, the people who were at schools that found it quite easy
to work from home, and versus the vast majority who work. When you mix in with that, immigration, which is probably the second biggest feature driving a lot of these elections, there is that feel of a scarcity of resources and the focus on the haves and the have not. And it's not just money, it's housing and being able to afford housing. It's schools being full of immigrants. So it's very striking because it does feel like a throwback to earlier times.
I think there's a sense in which there's a feeling of the elites getting it wrong again. The elites, when they were in charge of the global financial system says that we can regulating all this finance, and we're in charge, and we'll be able to do it. And in fact two thousand and eight came along and they got it wrong, and the elites united behind the idea of the lockdown, with Sweden as the big exception. And there's a sort of in retrospect more and more of a sense that actually,
they may have got it wrong. This may have been a judgment call. That was that they overreacted and they used their power to lock us down in all sorts of ways, which was a and overreaction, exposed the over zealousness of the state. But also they didn't always apply it to themselves, which is why the parties in number ten and Dominic Cummings and the rest were so important
to them. And also I think that the thing that the last point that you talked to, which is immigration, I think we're at the beginning, not at the end of concerns, anxieties, the backlash against immigration, and this is going to sweep through European societies and indeed American and has swept through American society in a way that's going to be extremely discombobulating to those elites unless they can recalibrate. And I would point to the example of Denmark versus Sweden.
Sweden took in as many immigrants as will want it, and is now going through a massive reaction against that. Denmark was much much more control and it's not a big political political issue in Denmark. So I think this populist wave will be more driven in the future. Even if inflation is tamed, immigration will drive it and continue to push politics towards the bopylist right in Europe.
I agree with both of you that the effect of lockdown and the pandemic on the UK election and on elections around the world has been under reflected on. But the aspect I find most challenging is the economic one, which is because I think you guys have touched on the sort of social aspects of telling people to not leave their homes and so on, which still to this day is extraordinary, isn't it. But it's more the furlough
and other bits of economic policy were extremely expensive. That's partly why we've then got to a general election where a conservative government of all governments has found themselves defending having put up taxes and people feeling very kind of beleaguered financially. But actually, if we think back to the pandemic, we had a situation where the government was paying people's
wages to not go out. For me, that kind of dissonance between Wow, there's a huge amount of financial support that flowed from the central government to the people, but it was quite quickly forgotten. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been forgotten. People move on very quickly, but I think there was an economic lag to that that had a political consequence. And one of the disappointments for me about the COVID inquiry is that if we have another pandemic,
what is the right way to handle it? Is the right way to handle it furlough and huge central government programs, and of course your challenges are right around is the right way of lockdown and so on? And we didn't
really see the inquiry go into that. And obviously that's slightly marginal issue compared to all these elections we've had this year, But equally, if we have another pandemic or another phenomenon that challenges our sense of the nation state and the fundamental need for a government to protect people's health and so on, what's the right response and what's the response that doesn't mean that you are bringing up your national debt and your levels of expenditure to eyewatering levels.
What about technology? We're not talking very much about technology or Russian interference or the political processes being revolutionized by AI. Was this a year in which the technology dog didn't bark?
We saw a few, didn't we We saw a few sort of fake news and manipulated images, but we didn't see it be that instrumental turning factor in an election.
No.
I think it's hard to say. I think that the very obvious misinformation sort of AI produced videos and things like that didn't happen. But I mean, when you consider that the election campaign that different people in America saw over the last year was completely different, and we're only just beginning to get our heads around how much X
has changed the way it's feeding things to people. We had also quite old school techniques around direct mailings to people that were providing quite a lot of misinformation about candidates in different places, targeting Jewish voters to say a certain thing, and targeting Muslim voters for other things. And ironically that's all enabled by technology because you can send it to the right person, but it's actually even more below the radar because it's not online.
You could argue the opposite case that this was a case of very old style politics that Biden clung on to power for too long. It was too arrogance, he was too insensitive that he put in a deputy who is really not very good, and partly did that deliberately because he didn't want to be challenged. And the Democrats said enough stupid things that you didn't need lots of AI to invent stupid things for them to say.
Especially if it's selectively quoted. But no, I think you're absolutely right, Adrian. I was going to go to a last question, which was just the one that I think was raised by many people at the beginning of the year, which is is it going to be a good year for democracy? We have all these elections. Was it a good year?
Broadly yes, I would say broadly yes. There wasn't social breakdown, there wasn't a lot of a lot of violence. We got a clear result in the United States, which was the big thing that we were worried about, and bad incumbents were punished, not always good rivals being promoted instead. But yeah, I think it was a world in which democracy did its thing and adjusted to popular sentiment.
Looking at the UK, I think I'll make two different arguments. One is that you saw a level of sophistication in how people were voting potentially tactically in various areas, and
there's some evidence of that in France as well. So firstly that, but secondly, I think that our election in the UK was sort of marked for what wasn't said and how things have sort of since then been gone back on, and I think that is something that will leave many people on unsettled that you could have an election of six weeks fought on particular issues and then actually in the months afterwards some of that is gone back on. And that is not just a criticism of
how Labour won the election. Other parties did it too, and.
The UK maybe has some slight exception to this. But I think I agree with Adrian that it was a good year for democracy as an instrument, because it has expressed the people's will pretty effectively in most countries and
power has shifted to those who inspired more support. I think it's another extremely difficult year for the political center, and in France we sort of they've cobbled together a center right coalition, but I think it was another year in which we see fewer and fewer voices at the center of politics, in the middle ground of politics, where compromise is possible, actually able to command the support of voters. And I think in the US you have both parties going to the extremes.
I think the great challenge your head is for the center to reassert itself, rethink its basic principles, and to try and produce a program that satisfies and addresses the discontent of regular people while addressing the need for orderly and sensible government.
Because otherwise I think you do have to worry about the health of democracy long term.
Absolutely.
In twenty ten, Peter Urchin made a prediction that the next decade was quote likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe. His models developed over many years showed instability could well spike around the year twenty twenty. Now, if we look back, that seems like a pretty good prediction, and an awful lot of things have happened since. That seemed to support the big themes and cycles that he identified in history
and that led him to that prediction. Churchin is a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna and a research associate at the University of Oxford. Also Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He has written many books related to his analysis of history going back centuries, and his latest one is End Times, Elites, Counter Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Peter, thank you very
much for being our valedictory guest on voter Nomics. You get to be part of our reflections on the past year, but you're taking as giving us a much longer perspective with this book and the cycles that you identify. There's so much to go into, and I know that there's far too much to summarize in a fairly short interview, but I think your basic point is that there are cycles which are set off by equilibrium or disequilibrium between
the number of ruling elites and the majority. And I think particularly, I think for me was very striking is the critical role that overproduction of elites plays in triggering a period of political disintegration and ultimately crisis. So if you're able to summarize just to give us a brief sense of how that equilibrium disequilibrium works.
Well, First of all, I defined elites as simply power holders. Social power is ability to influence the behavior of other people right, and that takes several routes economic power, political power, military power, and so and so forth. Now, my research group has been studying literally hundreds of past societies leading into crisis in an emergence from them, and we found that the common precursor to the crisis is what you
call elite overproduction. It really should be said overproduction of aspirant elits, those pupil elite when avis people who desire to feel for our positions. I like it in the book to a game of musical chairs, but except like an usual game where you keep removing chairs, you keep the number of chairs constant, but instead you increase the number of players. So it's certainly the original eleven players
for ten chairs, but then fifteen to twenty authority fority. You can imagine the kios that would result as the numbers of losers who when you of home become angry increases so dramatically, and so the same thing happens in the run up to crisis. There's really a universal feature of those what do you call structural genographic crisis in our technical language.
You have many examples, and you go back through a
lot of European history. I think the striking ones that you use to crystallize people's thoughts at the beginning of the book is that the run up to the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln's election in a similar time in the nineteenth century, also the Typing rebellion and the threat to the ruling order that happened in China which killed potentially tens of millions of people, and used to draw comparisons between those two, and also what we're seeing
now tell us how those two fit the pattern that you're discussing, and then also sort of now give us an insight into what's happening now.
Yes, well, as you mentioned, my research group studies the dynamics of complex societies organized as states.
We shall been around for about.
Five thousand years, and you know that for a while, maybe a century or so, they can actually enjoy intermal peace and order, and then they get into periods of social discombobulation, political disintegration, and the search, which we call end times. Right, So, these end times happened on the rough diedle of maybe about a couple hundred centuries. Previous wave of revolutions and civil wars was is what historians called the Age of revolutions which started in seventeen eighties
and ran into eighteen sixties and seventies. So the American Civil War ended typeing rebellion that you mentioned got part of this world wide wave of revolutions in civil wars. Here in Europe we had revolutions of eighteen forty eight that affected most major countries except for a British Empire. By the way, we can talk about why it did not happen in UK in any case, because this is the previous complete wave of revolutions, you know how it ended.
Now you don't know what's gonna what the future holds for us, right because we cannot really predict the future, but you know how it all ended in the previous wave of revolutions. And that's why, because it's to the closest to us in time, and the societies were quite similar when you waste That's why it gives us a very useful map for understanding where we are now.
I suppose one of the great analysis of the over production of elites is Topville's The French Revolution and the regime in which you know that is the ultimate cause. I think he puts to the to the breakdown of
the regime. But I wanted to think a little bit about diversity, because what we've seen over the last ten to twenty years is a simultaneous development of the overproduction of elites, so people are scrabbling for jobs, and an enormous emphasis by organizations, particularly in the United States but also everywhere else on diversity, on the idea that if there are two people for an elite job, but then we should put our thumb on the scale of the
ethnic minority candidate, or the female candidates, or the diverse candidate in various ways. And that combination of these two doctrines, of this doctrine of diversity plus the over production leads seems to have driven the explosion of Trumpism. Would you agree with that?
Let me step back and see that, actually, in more general terms, the ideological content of revolutionary parties or sides in civil wars, that's various, right, So in the previous way of revolutions, it was liberalism.
Before that, it was.
The Crisis of the seventeenth century, it was religion. In the late medieval crisis, it was like the game of thrones essentially, So then content changes depending on circumstances.
But what is.
Invariable is that the road to crisis is driven by several factors, two of which are the most important ones.
First of all, popular inveseration.
It is just what happened in the run up to the French Revolution that you mentioned. In fact, the trigger was the increasing prices of food, and then riots, urban riots and so on and so forth. But by that point there was a huge number of elite one abs and they are the ones who channeled and organized popular discontent to overthrow the uncild regime. And this is a
very very generale thing. In fact, today when we go back to look at the United States, what we see we see the revolt of counter elites, right, because I consider the elections of this year on November five as a successful battle in that ongoing revolutionary wars between the ruling class, which was represented by the Democratic Party and the country leits which have found their home in the Republican Party.
The reason why I think diversity is so important is that diversity is about we're talking about the allocation of scarce goods, of goods that getting scarcer, and what diversity is is a principle for allocating those scarce goods, which has losers as well as winners. And a lot of those losers, whether they were poorer people or richer people,
coalesced around Trump. There were you know, a lot of men, a lot of people who didn't have the right credentials, a lot of people who felt that they were being a bit done down, and amongst ethnic minorities, people who were business people rather than members of the credential deletes. So I think diversity is a particularly dangerous thing in an era of scarce resources, or of a perception of
scarce resources. But I wonder if you could say something a bit more about the counter elites, as it were. I'm just thinking, for example, to what extent does Trump represent the revolts of family businesses against big public corporations.
For example?
What are these counter elites and is what is driving their annoyance with the status quo?
Well, first of all, that's historical.
Examples of counter elits are Lagid religion and the bolshidiits in Russia, or Fidel Castro and Los Barbudos in Cuba. All right, So what happens is that, remember we talked about this game of musical cheers. As a number of angry losers increases, some of them accept downward social mediolity and don't make trouble. But a certain proportion of them are actually they turned into counter It's now their goal is that they have not made it in the following normal channels.
That's because there are just too many of.
Them, right, and so now they start using extra legal channels to get into power. Now, Donald Trump is a classical count relate because if you think about it, you go back to twenty eleven, that famous junior ker for reporters at the White House where Obama publicly you.
Know that was in the White House corresponds dinners that were saying that it's extraordary.
No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. Why did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?
I don't know what happened in his mind, but he started plotting revenge for his head.
And he was not laughing. He was not laughing, and everybody else was laughing.
Yeah, exactly. He was very green and you know, well, but more recently his counterleit status is proved by ninety four ninety six, you know, criminal charges against him. Right Basically, the way he is treated in the press, the mainstream press always says that he always lies, which he does, but the treatment is very different from established politicians. Right now, my point is that he is just the tip of the iceberg.
We saw.
What we saw in the last year or so was the coal essons of very diverse group of country elits. If you think about it, some of them, like JD. Evans, come from a very humble background. But he's got excellent credentials. I believe it's Yale Law school, all right. That's that's the thing that many of these accountryles who come from below, they have excellent credentials. Right, So he rocketed his way
through the Republican you know, political ranks. But you have the factors from the Democratic Party Robert Kennedy Junior, RFK Junior or Tussy Gabbard, and then we have people coming from the wealth holders will Elan Mascow obviously is the most important one, and people coming who are influencers such
as Tucker Carlson and more recently Joe Rogan. So what we see here is you see this very diverse group and in fact it's not clear whether they would be able to hold these coalitions for very long because they're so different. But they have all collapsed with the goal of overthrowing the ruling regime.
It is striking that you have particular professions that end up attracting a particularly large number of revolutionaries or counter elites. And I guess it's it seems like it's the teachers and the lawyers that you have to particularly worry about. You point out that the Robes bier lenin Castro they were all lawyers. Also Lincoln, but you also and you had the leader of the Typing rebellion and Mao were both teachers.
Yeah, so China is somewhat different.
But lawyers are the most dangerous profession, especially in the United States. That your routes to political office in the United States, the wealth throughout and the credential route. Well but actually well noticed that podcasters have not been very eager to go into the official positions, or some who try it we're not successful.
But anyway, so lawyers is.
If you don't have wealth, then you go in the United States, you go to law school to play in politics, and in particular Jale Law School seems to have produced quite a lot of counter eliits.
Peter It is Alekra here, can I just ask you? You talked about Trump right now being the tip of the iceberg, and I kind of want to know sort of where next. There's many many ways that people simplify your analysis of the world, but one of them is sort of the apoge of these trends lead leads to collapse.
What I would like to know is when we are looking at the Trump administration right now, are we looking at a precursor to collapse or are we potentially looking at the sort of aversion the way to head it off, Because because as you say, you've got the kind of counter elites now looking like they're going to be in the extent to which they could potentially bring in policies that sort of address this and all become a valve. And if you look across the UK, Brexit was the
apogee of the counter elites getting their way again. How much how much did these phenomena did they avert it or hasten its likelihood?
One major point I'm making the book is that the road to crisis is actually fairly predictable. Obviously in twenty ten, I had no idea, would you don't know Trump, who would be the spearhead of this rebellion. But the structural forces were gathering scheme, and they continue to do so. In fact, they continue to do so even as we speak.
Your point about in miseration as a kind of the stalling of living standards. That's the moment, isn't it.
Yeah. So actually the key, the key idea here is what are called the weal's pump. So the weal's pump which basically started taking reaches from the poor and given
to the reach. It's actually started way back more than forty years ago in the United States, and so it is actually the deep reason why we both have immiseration and why we have a litle production, because we have created ten times as many other wealthy in the last forty years has existed in nineteen eighty, all right, And so some of them, like Trump, have decided to go
into politics. The second route two counter it leads, is that as you increase back in miseration, the more active, the more organized and smart members of these inviserated masses they want to escape. And that's why there has been such a huge demand for credentials. College degree doesn't work any more, Stule. That's why people go to professional schools, and particularly to the law school.
All right. So in order for.
Us to get out of this predicament that you find ourselves in, and that's what the previous societies have done, the wealth pump needs to be down, which will reverse the immiseration and the lid of a production forces. And that, after some years and sometimes decames of social and political turbulence, leads to the society reconfiguring itself and stepping on the road to a lengthy period of internal peace and order.
If you think of modern America, what would reconfiguration look like? Fewer university places, fewer public sector jobs, more dynamic private sector.
Would that be it?
Or it would look actually not very different from the new geo. Right, So what we need to do We need to give more power to workers. I mean that's one of the New Deal was rolled back starting in late seventies and especially under the Reagan administration. It was very clear when the ability of workers to organize and to push for their rights was severely curtailed.
So we need to do that. Remember that famous draft.
Where see the productivity of American workers keep going up, their and their wages, compensation going up until lateeen seventies and then becoming flat.
So all that extra productivity went somewhere.
It went actually to the wall, to the one percent when it came two percent and flip percent in the process. Right, So what we need to do we need to get back the wages, worker wages and the media, the typical wages back on track, so they increased together with the economy.
G If you look at the coalition that is the Trump coalition, there's a new Deal wing of the Trump coalition that would agree with everything you've said. But then there's also a musk Till wing of the of the Trump coalition who believes exactly the opposite that we need more, we need more, you know, more billionaires.
Given that Peter has such a global focus in the book, I do want to make sure that we're not just I know, we find it hard to look beyond the US these days, and certainly that seems to be paving the way to a lot of this.
But Stephanie, let me just finish my thought very very bigly. So my major thing that I would like to add to the discussion is that once you get to the cusp right of the revolution, of civil wars, it's revolutionary situation. The future is very unpredictable. It depends very much on the actions of leaders. If readers are prosocial and understand even into each of you what they are doing, then you can escape oblige a civil war and revolution.
This is a big question.
Very it's not very encouraging the end of your book, when you look at what has how these periods of crisis have been resolved, it is not a very encouraging story. I think three quarters of the men did in revolutions. Also a wars nearly two thirds led to the states ceasing to exist altogether. The ruler tends to get knocked off or at least quite high chance of being assassinated.
If you think sort of how these forces are developing globally, and we've obviously seen some of these also operating, particularly in Europe. What makes these cycles longer or shorter. We've talked about the role of COVID and epidemics, for example, which is very striking when you look at your history record. And then yes, we are of course interested in what happens next, but maybe not just in the US, but sort of more broadly what you might see.
Cycles of peace and internal violence. They're not perfectly synchronized between different countries. So, for example, in France, you see that France is behind because the degree of you know, one useful measure is the degree of inequality. And then France inequality in wealth and the income has started increasing much later than in the United States or r Key, all right, and so that means that they have they're only in the middle of the degree.
Of political frustration seems to be catching up pretty fast. So were they somehow? So what is it about the French society which is translating a relatively into a large amount of political upset.
They're natural protesters.
The o vest and demonstration did not lead anywhere. They did not overthrow the Macron regime. Let's call it is like, right, and why because there were no countries and others they stayed away, right, They decided not to mount this wave of protests, unlike what happened in the population.
Is vaiting for the for marine le pen now at least a third.
Yeah, right, But Macron government managed to stay in power despite despite the crushing defeat at the polls. This is actually a quite typical behavior for unc and resumes.
So what makes the I think it's around two hundred years, you say, the sort of full cycle, but what makes what makes it longer or so, I mean, what are the kinds of futures that we could see in different places.
Epidemics certainly bring in times closer because they increased in miseration dramatically. But on the other hand, there's you know, let's go you're based in UK, so in the nineteenth century. One reason why United Kingdom has escaped the wave of
revolutions was because it had a huge empire. It shipped a lot of im miserated population to places like Australia, and it shipped a lot of surplus elites to be colonial administrators in India and as such, and that allowed them to flatten the curve, so to speak, using the coded language. That gave them time to actually adopt the necessary reforms. It took them, you know, the charges period was like twenty years, and in fact, this whole period
of reforms took like forty years. It took a long time to configure the British society that you could go get back into another period of quite high prosperity during the Victorian era. All right, So so what I'm trying to say, you're as looking for a general answer, and I'm trying to tell you that right now we don't see a general answer. There is no such thing as a typical collapse. Every collapse is you know, like every un happy family is happy in their own ways using
tells toys, uh, you know, an accurrna. So we are working very hard trying to understand, to get statistical classification and understanding. And that's why we need hundreds of past crisis right because you cannot do statistics just a few examples. But but we do. My group does not have yet good answers. And by the way, it would help if you would get funding. Actually, because we apply for grants, write proposals and we get you know, I guess it's not important.
So I understand how you get back.
How to get out of this?
It's in the name. Maybe End Times just sounds a bit kind of bad. Maybe you need a bit more of an upbeat title.
How to fix society.
There's a lot of those books already.
That's my next book, which I am pledging right now.
Pete, can I ask you perhaps something I don't particularly believe, but I'm going to posit it just just to see what you say, which is that elites are needed if you look. If you look in the UK, we have a debate here. For instance, the new labor government is trying to is trying to give more power to workers, and there's been a huge upcry about Hold on a second you have in the case, you know, we have big, big multinational companies saying you're adding to our wage bill.
You are, You've there's a number of policies that are making things more expensive for them. And firstly you have the fact that some elites are mobile, so they can go elsewhere. And then you have a different debate around oh goodness as a nation where we're not able to make as much money as we would like to and
therefore we can't share as much around. So there isn't there there's a kind of there's a complex of course your your analysis of complex societies, but there's a there's a difficult interplay between A elites can flounce off firstly, and B you need some of those kind of drivers of hyper wealth in order for wealth to be shared.
I would disagree with that because worldwide.
It's not just states, but UK also in particular has seen an explosion in the number of uber wealth all right, so that wealth came at the expense of the typical workers. So I'm sorry, but I just don't buy this thing that, you know, why do we need billionaires after all? I mean, if you think about that, you know, in order to have the most yeah, I know, Bloomberg.
Well, I think the role.
Of you know, of these billionaires in creating wealth is somewhat overstated. And secondly, I would say that look at the historical periods, you know, look at places like the Nordic countries that have produced a lot of successful business at Axbedien for example, Yeah, the Denbark, Sweden, Norway, all those countries have produced a lot of very successful companies.
Look at the United States during the Great Compression period, so from the new Geo antiore roughly speaking, nineteen eighty peak rates on even Texes well like over ninety percent in nineteen sixties, but the country was doing great. So I don't buy this argument that by increasing taxes on the wealthy we are going to shut down the economic growth.
It does seem to me that the fundamental point is the elites have to share, and they have to share because they have to understand that if they don't share, the music stops. To your point about the physical chairs, and it stops for them, and it stopped and collapse and so on. What are the best examples of the elite elite understanding that they have to share.
Yes, I talked about a number of such examples in my book, so I already mentioned the.
Chartist period in UK.
Another example that might actually surprise you is the Great Reforms in Russia in the Russian Empire in eighteen sixties, all right, when the Czar Alexander the Second basically told the elites that we either have revolution from below or reforms from above and so and the other one is, of course the New Deal, which followed on the Progressive era. So it took about thirty years to do this, And
there are a few other examples. As Stephanie mentioned. Unfortunately this is only ten or fifteen percent of crisis are resolved without a major revolution or civil war. But you have plenty of examples where we see this actually happening, and we can draw lessons. Maybe it doesn't mean that you have to do you have to free the serfs
as Alexander the second Gid. But the point is is that the large segments of the elites have to be persuaded that it's either you know those either lose everything and you don't believe that your house in New Zealand is actually going to save you.
Right the banker mte. Or you give up give.
Up some of that you know, of the wealth and privilege and power that you have accrued.
Do you think that things get worse from here in terms of violence and uprising And the point of your book, which is civil war.
The chances that you don't get worse and you have a had civil war a non zero. I would not say there are fifty percent. There's somewhere in zero and fifty percent. So those chances are very real and we should be really.
Worried about them. But it's not certain.
Judging from our analysis of historical societies, we know that there is no inevitability about this crisis. So it all depends on our collective decisions and of course on our leaders that who are the most consequential in resolving which trajectory we follow in the future.
But at least this time around, Viennery's safe well it's.
Good to be it's good to gain to experience audience right here. To be truthful, I'm not a.
Revolution I'm not revolutionary. I'm not going to fight on the very cads right. I don't want this to happen around me.
That's for sure.
And I hope the American lead's sort of understand that they have to give up some of their power, privilege, and wealth in order to have a pissel is alution. So that's sort of my major message for them.
Peterterchin, thank you so much.
That was fascinating.
Thank you for listening to Voter Nomics from Bloomberg. This episode was hosted by me Stephanie Flanders with Adrian Wildridge and Allegra Stratton. It was produced, as always by the inimitable Summer Sadi, with production support from Moses and sound designed from Blake Maples and special thanks.
To Peter Turchin.
Stay tuned to this feed for what we do next, and thank you again for listening.