History’s Sobering Warning About America’s Future
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Welcome to our final episode of the Votonomics series, where politics and markets collide. I'm Stephanie Flanders. I'm Adrian Wooldridge. And I'm Allegra 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 that's

That year is nearly over. We've got most of the elections behind us. We're not forgetting the Ghanaian elections on December 7th. 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 divisive politics we're seeing around the world. He says it's all part of a basic cycle of integrating and disintegrating forces and

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 2010. 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 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 annoyance about existing ruling classes or existing political regimes. But I would add two qualifications to that overarching view. One is that...

Despite the anti-incumbency things, this anti-incumbency revolution has tended to resolve in favour of the right rather than the left. You know, it hasn't been the Corbyns of this world that have been leading the anti-incumbency revolution. It's been the Trumps. It's been people on the right in general. Britain, 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.

People voted for the guy who was in charge in 2016 because they perceived him to be a stronger person, perceived that at a better age than the one that the Democrats had created. So anti-incumbency driven by inflation, but a strong flavor of the populist right and to some extent a restoration of the old Trump order in the most important of these states.

So for me, I think one big theme, very similar to Adrian's, what a surprise. But then actually, other than that, 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 are 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, Macron reduced his number of seats, but actually it was the left that won.

that were victorious there, not per se the far right. In the UK, you had a landslide for Starmer. 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 there are kind of left-right findings that are really clear. One thing for me, and it may be 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 10 or anything else, but about the lockdowns and how the inequity increased.

that it 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 versus the vast majority who weren't. When you mix in with that immigration, which was 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-nots. And it's not just money, it's housing and being able to afford housing. It's

schools being full of immigrants. 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 keep regulating all this finance.

And we're in charge and we'll be able to do it. And in fact, 2008 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 they overreacted

And they used their power to lock us down in all sorts of ways, which was a, an overreaction, exposed the overzealousness of the state. But also they didn't always apply it to themselves, which is why the parties in Number 10 and Dominic Cummings and the rest...

was so important to them. But, 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 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 people wanted.

And is now going through a massive reaction against that. Denmark was much, much more controlled. And it's not a big 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 populist 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 important

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

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 programmes. And of course, your challenges are right around is the right way a lockdown and so on. And we didn't really see the inquiry go into that. And obviously, that's a 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

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 eye-watering levels?

What about technology? We're not talking very much about technology or Russian interference or the political processes being revolutionised 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

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. So this was a case of very old style politics that Biden clung on to power for too long. He was too arrogant. 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 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 make two different arguments. One is that you saw a level of sophistication in how people were voting or 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 marketed 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 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 may be a 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 centre. And in France, they've cobbled together a centre-right coalition. But I think it was another year in which we see

fewer and fewer voices at the centre 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 ahead is for the centre to reassert itself, rethink its basic principles,

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 2010, Peter Turchin 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 2020.

Now, if we look back, that seems like a pretty good prediction. And an awful lot of things have happened since that seem to support the big themes and cycles that he identified in history and that led him to that prediction. Turchin is a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna and a research associate at the University of Oxford, also a 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 Votonomics. You get to be part of our reflections on the past year, but you're 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

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 define 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 on and so forth. Now, my research group has been studying literally hundreds of past societies sliding into crisis and then emerging from them.

And we found that the common precursor to the crisis is what you call elite overproduction. It's really, should be said, overproduction of aspirant elites, those people, elite wannabes, people who desire to fill our positions. I liken it in the book to a game of musical chairs, but except like in the usual game where you keep removing chairs, you keep the number of chairs constant.

but instead you increase the number of players. So you start with original 11 players for 10 chairs, but then 15, 20, 30, 40. You can imagine the chaos that would result as the numbers of losers, many of whom become angry,

increases so dramatically. And so the same thing happens in the run-up to crisis. This is really a universal feature of those what we call structural demographic crises 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 the run up to the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln's election. But in a similar time in the 19th century, also the Taiping Rebellion and the threat to the ruling order that happened in China, which killed potentially tens of millions of

And you sort of 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, which have been around for about 5,000 years. And we know that for a while, maybe a century or so, they can actually enjoy internal peace and order. And then they get into periods of social discombobulation, political disintegration.

and as such, which we call end times. Right. So these end times happened on a rough schedule of maybe about a couple hundred centuries. And so the previous big wave of revolutions and civil wars was what historians call the Age of Revolutions, which started

in 1780s and ran into 1860s and 70s. So the American Civil War and the Taipan Rebellion that you mentioned were part of this worldwide wave of revolutions and civil wars. Here in Europe, we had revolutions of 1848 that affected most major countries except for 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 example,

wave of revolutions, we know how it ended. Now, we don't know what the future holds for us, right? Because we cannot really predict the future. But we know how it all ended in the previous wave of revolutions. And that's why, because it's the closest to us in time, and the societies were quite similar in many ways. That's why it gives us a very useful map for understanding where we are now. I

I suppose one of the great analyses of the overproduction of elites is Tocqueville's The French Revolution and the Ancien Régime, in which that is the ultimate cause, I think, he puts to the breakdown of the Ancien Régime. But I want you to think a little bit about diversity, because what we've seen over the last decade

10 to 20 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, then we should put our thumb on the scale of the ethnic minority candidate or the female candidate or the diverse.

diverse candidate in various ways. And that combination of these two doctrines, of this doctrine of diversity plus the over-attraction of elites seems to have driven the explosion of Trumpism. Would you agree with that?

Let me step back and say that actually, in more general terms, the ideological content of revolutionary parties or sides in civil wars, that varies, right? So in the previous wave of revolutions, it was liberalism. Before that, it was the crisis of the 17th century. It was religion. In the late medieval crisis, it was like the Game of Thrones, essentially.

So the 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 immiseration. This is what happened in the run-up to the French Revolution that you mentioned. In fact, the trigger was the increase in prices of food products

and then riots, urban riots, and so on and so forth. But by that point, there was a huge number of elite wannabes, and they are the ones who channeled and organized popular discontent to overthrow the Ancien Regime. And this is a very, very general thing. In fact, today, when we go back to look at the United States, what we see is the revolt of counter-elites.

Because I consider the elections of this year, on November 5, as a successful battle in the ongoing revolutionary wars between the ruling class, which was represented by the Democratic Party, and the counter-elites, 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 are 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 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 elite. So I think diversity is a particularly dangerous thing in an era of diversity.

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 what is driving their annoyance with the status quo? Well, first of all, historical examples of counter-elites are Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks 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 chairs. As the number of angry losers increases, some of them accept downward social mobility and don't make trouble. But a certain proportion of them are actually turned into counter-raids. 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. So now they start using extra legal channels to get into power. Now, Donald Trump is a classical country elite, because if you think about it, you go back to 2011, that famous dinner for reporters at the White House where Obama publicly, you know. That was in the White House Correspondents Dinner. I was there. I remember seeing that. It was extraordinary. 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. Like, 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 probably then. And he was not laughing, and everybody else was laughing. Exactly. He was very grim. But more recently, his counterfeit status is proved by 94, 96 criminal charges against him. Basically, the way he is treated in the press,

The mainstream press always says that he always lies and so on, 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. What we saw in the last year or so was the coalescence of a very diverse group of counter-elites, if you think about it. Some of them, like J.D. Vance, come from a very humble background, but he's got excellent credentials. I believe it's Yale Law School.

That's the thing, that many of these counter-reliefs who come from below, they have excellent credentials. So he rocketed his way through the Republican political ranks. But you have defectors from the Democratic Party, Robert Kennedy Jr., RFK Jr., or Tusi Gabbard.

And then we have people coming from the wealth holders. Well, Elon Musk 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 we see this very diverse group. And in fact, it's not clear whether they would be able to hold this coalition for very long because they're so different. But they have all coalesced 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 seems like it's the teachers and the lawyers that you have to particularly worry about. You point out that Robespierre, Lenin, Castro, they were all lawyers, also Lincoln, but you also, and you had the leader of the Taiping Rebellion and Herman Mao were both teachers.

Yeah, so China is somewhat different. But lawyers are the most dangerous profession, especially in the United States. There are two routes to political office in the United States: the wealth route and the credential route. And the podcasting route. Well, but actually, we've noticed that podcasters have not been very eager to go into their official positions, or some who tried were not successful.

But anyway, so lawyers, 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, Yale Law School seems to have produced quite a lot of counter-elites.

Peter, it's Allegra 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 apogee of these trends 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 as you say, you've got the kind of counter elites now looking like they're going to be in charge. The extent to which they could potentially be

bring in policies that sort of address this and are become a valve. And if you look across the UK, Brexit was the apogee of the counter elites getting their way. Again, how much did these phenomena, did they avert it or hasten its likelihood?

One major point I make in the book is that the road to crisis is actually fairly predictable. Obviously, in 2010, I had no idea it would be Donald Trump who would be the spearhead of this rebellion. But the structural forces were gathering steam and they continued to do so. In fact, they continue to do so even as we speak.

Your point about immiseration as a kind of the stalling of living standards, that's the moment, isn't it? Yeah. Actually, the key idea here is what I call the wealth pump. So the wealth pump, which basically started taking the riches from the poor and giving it to the rich, it actually started way back more than 40 years ago in the United States. And so it is actually the deep reason why we both have immiseration.

And why we have oil production? Because we have created 10 times as many Uber wealthy in the last 40 years as existed in 1980, all right? And so some of them, like Trump, have decided to go into politics.

The second route to counter elites is that as you increase popular immiseration, the more active, the more organized and smart members of this immiscerated masses, they want to escape. And that's why there has been such a huge demand for credentials. College degree doesn't work anymore. So 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 we find ourselves in, and that's what the previous societies have done, the wealth pump needs to be shut down, which will reverse the immiseration and the elite overproduction forces. And that, after some years and sometimes decades 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? It would look actually not very different from the New Deal.

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 70s by 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 graph where we see the productivity of American workers keep going up and their wages, compensation, going up until late 1970s and then becoming flat. So all that extra productivity went somewhere. It went actually to the 1% when it became 2% and 3% in the process. Right. So what we need to do, we need to get back.

their wages, worker wages, the median, the typical wages, back on track. So they increase together with the economy, GDP per capita. 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-Teal coalition

wing of the Trump coalition who believes exactly the opposite, that we need 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, very quickly. So my major thing that I would like to add to the discussion is that once we get to the cusp, right, of the revolution and civil wars, the revolutionary situation, the future is very unpredictable. It depends very much on the actions of leaders. If leaders are prosocial and understand even intuitively what they are doing, then we can escape a bloody civil war and revolution.

This is a big question to my mind. It's not very encouraging. The end of your book, when you look at how these periods of crisis have been resolved, it is not a very encouraging story. I think three quarters of them ended in revolutions or civil wars. Nearly two thirds led to the state ceasing to exist altogether. The ruler tends to get knocked off or at least quite a 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 in France, inequality in wealth and income is

has started increasing much later than in the United States or UK. And so that means that they're only in the middle of the road to crisis. But their degree of political frustration seems to be catching up pretty fast. So what is it about the French society which is translating a relatively small amount of immiseration into a large amount of political upset? They're natural protesters.

The Yellow Vest demonstration did not lead anywhere. They did not overthrow the Macron regime, let's call it this way. And why? Because there were no contrarians. Marine Le Pen and others, they stayed away. They decided not to mount this wave of protests, unlike what happened in the United States. But a third of the population is reliably voting for Marine Le Pen now. At least a third. Yeah.

Right. But the Macron government managed to stay in power despite the crushing defeat at the polls. This is actually quite typical behavior for unseeing regimes. So what makes the, I think it's around 200 years, you say the sort of full cycle, but what makes it longer or shorter? I mean, what are the kinds of futures that we could see in different places?

Epidemics certainly bring end times closer because they increase immiseration dramatically. But on the other hand, let's go, you are based in the UK. So in the 19th century, one reason why the United Kingdom has escaped the wave of revolutions was because it had a huge empire. It shipped a lot of immiscerated population to places like Australia, 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 Chartist period was like 20 years. And in fact, this whole period of reforms took like 40 years. It took a long time to reconfigure the British society so that you could get back into another period of quite high prosperity during the Victorian era.

All right, so what I'm trying to say, you're 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 unhappy family is unhappy in their own ways, using Tolstoy's unaccuracy theory.

So we are working very hard trying to understand, to get statistical classification and understanding. And that's why we need hundreds of past crises, right? Because you cannot do statistics with just a few examples. But my group does not have yet good answers.

And by the way, it would help if we would get funding, actually, because we apply for grants, we write proposals and we get, you know, I guess it's not important to understand how we get out of this predicament. 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. Actually, that's my next book which I am writing right now. Pete, can I ask you perhaps something I don't particularly believe but I'm going to posit it just to see what you say, which is that elites are needed.

If you look in the UK, we have a debate here, for instance, the new Labour government 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. There's a number of policies that are making things more expensive for them now.

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, 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 analysis of complex societies. But 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 the United States, but UK also in particular has seen an explosion in the number of uber wealthy.

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 it, you know, in order to have the most, yeah, I know I sound like a revolutionary here.

Well, I think the role of this billionaires in creating wealth is somewhat overstated.

And secondly, I would say that look at the historical periods. Look at places like the Nordic countries that have produced a lot of successful businesses, like Sweden, for example. Yeah, Denmark, 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 Deal until roughly speaking 1980s.

peak rates on income taxes were like over 90% in 1960s, 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 musical chairs.

and it stops for them and it stops and the collapse and so on. What are the best examples of the elite understanding that they have to share? Yes, I talk about a number of such examples in my book. So I already mentioned the Chartist period in the UK. Another example that might actually surprise you is the great reforms in Russia, in the Russian Empire in the 1860s.

when the Tsar Alexander II 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. It took about 30 years to do this. And there are a few other examples. As Stephanie mentioned, unfortunately there's only 10 or 15% of crisis are resolved

without a major revolution or a civil war. But we 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 II did. But the point is that large segments of the elites have to be persuaded that it's either, you know, they either lose everything

and don't believe that your house in New Zealand is actually going to save you. Or a bunker might. Or you give up some 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 it will get worse and we have a hard civil war are not zero. I would not say they're 50%, but they're somewhere between zero and 50%. So those chances are very real, and we should be really worried about them. But you

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, upon our leaders, who are the most consequential in resolving which trajectory.

we follow in the future. But at least this time around, Vienna is safe. Well, it's good to be, it's good to, again, to experience all this, to be truthful. I'm not a revolutionary. I don't want to fight on the very gates, right? I don't want this to happen around me. That's for sure.

I hope the American elites understand that they have to give up some of their power, privilege, and wealth in order to have a peaceful resolution. That's my major message to them. Peter Turchin, thank you so much. That was fascinating. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to Votonomics 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 Andam, sound design 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.

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