When Nick warned back in 2013 that the pitchforks were coming, he meant that if we continued immiserating the majority of citizens by enriching a wealthy few at the expense of everyone else, an uprising was inevitable. Unfortunately, this warning is still just as relevant ten years later. Peter Turchin joins the podcast to discuss his new book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which looks to history (as well as the current turmoil in the United States) to better understand exactly what causes political communities to fall apart.
Peter Turchin is Project Leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Research Associate at University of Oxford, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Connecticut.
End Times https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703238/end-times-by-peter-turchin
Nick’s new book, Corporate Bullsh*t, is out now! https://www.corporatebsbook.com
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
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Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
During these tumultuous times, I’m not sure if it’s good news or bad news to have Peter Turchin on the podcast, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age.
David Goldstein:
Your models predict that we’re probably in some sort of end times right now.
Peter Turchin:
Well, in fact, that prediction was published 13 years ago. And the purpose of this prediction was I’m not a professor of doom, rather, it was a scientific prediction.
Speaker 3:
From the Home Offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Adventures.
Nick Hanauer:
Goldie, during these tumultuous times, I’m not sure if it’s good news or bad news, to have Peter Turchin on the podcast, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age. A person that I know you and I both greatly admire, who has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields like scientific fields for more than a quarter of a century. And talked to him about his new book, End Times Elites: Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. Because we’re seeing just a lot of political disintegration go on right now. But we’ve been watching and reading Peter’s work very carefully, Peace and War, Ages of Discord and other books.
David Goldstein:
Ultra society.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And he’s just a fascinating guy who has applied complex systems analysis to history and it’s super interesting, but it is very depressing because-
David Goldstein:
Really you think a book titled End Times is depressing? No, let’s be clear. He’s talking about now.
Nick Hanauer:
Right. and Peter, I think in a much more sophisticated way is predicting the kind of doom that we’ve been predicting for a long time, and which in fact why we named the podcast Pitchfork Economics, in his words, if you immiserate the majority of citizens by making the society radically unequal, really terrible things will happen to everybody.
David Goldstein:
And that’s the main thesis of your 2013, the pitchforks are coming for us plutocrats piece, which is that you look at history and at no time does this sort of rapid and rising extreme inequality end in anything but a revolution or a police state. It’s one or the other, which isn’t good for you plutocrats-
Nick Hanauer:
No, it’s not good for anybody.
David Goldstein:
… generally, especially not the revolution part.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, exactly. So with that, let’s talk to our old friend Peter.
Peter Turchin:
I am Peter Turchin. I am a complexity scientist who studies complex human societies both how they evolved and also why do they periodically breakdown. I have retired from the University of Connecticut and now I have a position as project leader at Complexity Science hub in Vienna. And my latest book is End Times, the one we’ll be talking about. And it actually explains the different types of results that you got by the historical analysis of past societies sliding into crisis but also emerging out of it.
Nick Hanauer:
Peter, we’re going to start with two questions. The first is, can you give our listeners a general explanation of your approach to history and social systems?
Peter Turchin:
Of course, history is a wonderful discipline. It requires from its practitioners quite a lot of expertise. However, traditional historians are not scientists. They do provide explanations for why different events happened or not, for example, the collapse of the Roman Empire. But unlike science, they don’t test their hypothesis with data. And that is what cleodynamics, that you discipline that started about 20 years ago aims to supplement. So we are not trying to replace history, we need historians because they provide the bulk of data. But what we are trying to do, we are trying to bring the scientific method. So one German historian has enumerated the list of hypothesis about why the Roman Empire fell. His list includes more than 200, and since then even another dozen or two have been proposed. So what’s been happening in history, it’s that explanations multiply, but there is no process that would weed out worse explanations in favor of better explanations. And that’s what we do.
Nick Hanauer:
Interesting. And what kind of data do you use?
Peter Turchin:
Any kind of data that is relevant to testing theory.` So think about it. So let’s suppose you want to understand why societies periodically get into trouble, right? So we want to quantify this process. We can quantify it in a variety of ways. So for example, when a society is in crisis, what are the demographic effects? For example, what proportional population might actually disappear due to a variety of sources? Is there political fragmentation? Is the ruler deposed or assassinated? And so on and so forth. There are multiple dimensions along which a society can crumble. So what we do, we capture data on all those dimensions. That’s our response variable. That’s what we are trying to explain. Now, a number of different theories propose explanations for why this crisis happened, and some theories evoke what happens to the population, the population immiserations, others talk about other issues and so on and so forth.
So these are predictors. We need to gather data on predictors, for example, population immiseration. How can we measure it? Well, we measure it by whether the standards of livings living are stagnating or declining by using measures such as economic measures of wellbeing, real wages or social aspects of wellbeing or biological ones, for example, life expectancy and things like that. So then in the analysis, different theories propose different explanations. And in the analysis, statistical analysis, formal statistical analysis, we test all those different theories. We find out what are the factors that play the greatest explanatory role. The idea is that a true theory can predict data that was not used in building better than false theories. And that is how we decide which theories are more empirically adequate and which are less. And that’s how we, by small steps, approach understanding of why things happen the way they do.
David Goldstein:
Let’s get specifically to the book. Your data and your models predict that we’re probably in some sort of end times right now.
Peter Turchin:
Well, in fact, that prediction was published 13 years ago. Where did it come from? So as I mentioned, cleodynamics, by the way, the name is a combination of cleo, the use of history and dynamics, the science of change. So about 20 years ago I was studying past societies, happily applying this scientific approach. And we noticed that there is a very strong recurrent pattern. Complex societies organized the states, which appeared about 5,000 years ago. They can go typically for some good periods of time when they profit from the internal piece and order and generally broad this spread wellbeing. But those integrative periods, good periods, they typically last about a century, sometimes less, sometimes more depending on the characteristics of the society. And then in the past, inevitably, the integrative periods at some point turn into these end times, these integrative periods. And so people, when I would report this findings for past societies, and this was for all the societies for which you could get good data on instability, quantitative data and stability, you see this recurrent pattern repeating.
So people kept asking me at seminars, well okay, where are we? And so I decided to look into the United States, the society which I know from inside. And it takes time to get this type of data, but to be truthful, I was appalled when I actually saw the data because the data showed unambiguously that we were by 2007 or eight, we were well on the road to crisis. And the turning point was during the late 1970s. We can talk about the specific variables in a moment. But when I did that, I published the prediction in 2010 in the journal nature. And the purpose of this prediction, I’m not a professor of doom, rather it was a scientific prediction. Remember that we want with test theories by their ability to make predictions. And there is nothing more difficult, as you said, than predicting about the future. And that’s why I published this prediction, not fully expecting that it would be fully fulfilled.
Furthermore, this prediction does not have individuals such as Donald Trump or anybody. I had no inkling who Donald Trump would be, but it talks about a generic class of counter elites. We can talk about that in a moment. All right, and so what happened the next 10 years was every time we’d give a talk, I would say, my God, we are on the same trajectory towards crisis. And of course 2020, especially January 6, 2021, pretty much dawned on everybody that United States was in crisis.
Nick Hanauer:
And so would you say just a bit more about your general perspective on the evolution of societies? Because you’ve talked about it obliquely, but just state your basic thesis.
Peter Turchin:
Well, my basic thesis is that first of all, it’s a very interesting question. How come the majority of humans, 99.9% live in large scale societies organized as states except for some few tribes in [inaudible 00:11:55] . That is another thing. For 97% of our evolutionary history, we lived in small scale societies and then beginning 10,000 years ago, but especially 5,000 years ago, the first states appeared and they took over the world. So that’s the first big question and that is the one which I spend a lot, my team spend a lot of time trying to understand, collected huge amounts of data and tested theories.
But then also as I mentioned earlier, as you study the dynamics of past societies, we see that it’s not a cycle, it’s not mathematical cycle, it’s not precise. And in fact, we know why it’s not precise because we know, in my book I explain why some societies are on the fast cycles, others are the slow cycle and so on, so forth. So the next question was precisely why do Catholic societies periodically break down? And that’s the focus of my group’s current research.
Nick Hanauer:
And the thing that leads to the breakdown is I mean what we call inequality, what you call the wealth pump and elite overproduction. Basically the society becomes top heavy effectively and tips over.
Peter Turchin:
Inequality, to me, that’s not a driving force. Inequality is a good proxy. Growing inequality tells us that what’s happening is that the basic mechanism producing cycles, I call it the wealth pumps the wealth pump, this perverse wealth pump that pumps the riches from the poor and gives them to the rich. The action of this mechanism can be measured by the proxy of different types of inequalities, but the actual drivers are three. So maybe this is a good time for me to explain them. Well, first of all, what happens is that you get population immiseration. So in the United States, we’ve seen the real wages stagnate and in fact declined for many chunks of population such as the two thirds of the population without college degrees. Now this is the most obvious driver for instability because it creates a lot of discontent. And this discontent takes the form of, well, in the past this would be like peasant rebellions for example. You like to talk about pitchforks, all right?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Peter Turchin:
So that’s what we would see. The popular discontent would take the form of Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 14th century England or some similar rebellions elsewhere. However, by themselves, that popular discontent, and we call it mass mobilization potential to use the technical language, is not enough to tip a society into full-blown crisis. Because think about Wat Tyler’s Rebellion. Their armored and knights mounted and armored knights just had no problem killing off those peasants and chasing them away. Today, if you look at riot police, the state can be very strong and armed rebellion against the state really and well, thankfully, actually has no prospect for success. So you need other ingredients. And these are the other two drivers.
There are other two drivers. First of all, the money that the pump moves from one sector of this population to another has to go somewhere where it goes to the economic elites. And that’s what we see in the United State over the past 40 years, the number of uber wealthy, let’s say people who have 10 million or more of wealth, this numbers increased tenfold. Population grew by 40% by the number of deca millionaires increased tenfold. And the same thing you see, there are more billionaires at the top end and there are more millionaires at the bottom end. Now on the one hand you might say that, well, this is so nice in future after all, isn’t that what the American version of capitalism should do? And that’s fine in future for the 1% and 1% of 1%. But why is it bad even discounting the fact that the rest of the population is immiserating? Why is it a danger for the society?
Well, overproduction of wealthy elites has the seeds of the conflict because many of these newly wealthy people, they want to translate their economic power into political power. They either run for office themselves like Trump or Bloomberg or Steven Forbes unsuccessfully, or they run candidates, they fund candidates. And so as a result of that, this wealth, extra wealth is translated into the surplus of political aspirants. The field becomes much larger, but the number of position is still the same. And as a result, competition intensifies. Some competition is good, but excessive competition corrodes the structure of a society. I use the game of musical chairs in my book to explain this. Just imagine that instead of taking chairs away, after each round you merely add more players. So you start with 11 players and 20 players and 30 players, same 10 chairs. So you can imagine their potential for chaos. Somebody is going to start breaking rules. You can easily translate this abstract idea into practical examples. And then the rule breaking spreads. So the game of musical cheers as you increase the number of players massively two, three, four times.
And remember you have 10 times as very wealthy people, people with large amounts of wealth. Not all of them of course are going to turn into political aspirants, but some will. And that’s why we have a surplus of such aspirants. And then many of them become frustrated. And as they are frustrated, some proportion of those you’ll turn into what we call in the theory counter elites. These are people who are driven not necessarily by materialistic things because they perceive the whole system as unjust because here are very smart, good people, but they are frustrated in getting ahead. The system is clearly unjust. So the proximate motivation is often the struggle against injustice.
David Goldstein:
So as a good example, you can see this happening right now over the past 40 years, as you said, the number of the super rich elites have increased tenfold, whereas the number of seats in Congress has remained completely stagnant. And so right now as we’re recording this, we have this fight in the house over who the next speaker will be. And you see all the norms and all the functionality decaying right before our eyes.
Peter Turchin:
Yes, precisely. In fact, in the book I explained that you can think of a new populist right wingers within that Republican party as a kind of dissident elites. They’re trying to take over that party. So it’s not a violent revolution like Bolshevick Revolution or French Revolution. It is a revolution which is laid out in the legal and public space. So this is a very good example.
David Goldstein:
And I know you’ve mentioned this, the lawyers are always the most dangerous when it comes to revolutions.
Peter Turchin:
Yes, precisely. So Lenin was a lawyer, Castro, let’s see, Robis Pierre of course, and also Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer. And if you can think of the American Civil War, it was often called the Second American Revolution and certainly resulted in the overthrow of one ruling class and replacement of it by another.
Nick Hanauer:
And what’s the third factor, Peter?
Peter Turchin:
Okay. So the third factor is also can be called overproduction of elites, but these are lower rank elites. So think about it. The general immiseration of the population creates a feeling of precarity when people live always on the edge of some kind of a disaster, perhaps medical disaster, or even sometimes people cannot even get enough food in a particular day. So that creates a strong push factor for people to escape precarity. Now if you don’t have wealth, how to escape precarity, of course you get some kind of a degree. So first you go to college, but now college is nothing. So then you go and get some advanced degree and that’s why you had a huge overproduction, especially of law degrees. We are currently producing three times as many lawyers as there are positions for them.
Now, situation is going to become even worse because there are other factors such as technology. With the spread of AI such as ChatGPT4, there are estimates that one half of law jobs will be replaced by the machines. So we will be overproducing lawyers by a factor of six to one. And so that results in the huge numbers of people who are frustrated in their ambitions. That’s the medium which breeds counter elites. It is not just lawyers, we are all producing PhDs, even in the STEM fields, remarkable as it may sound and especially, but of course the worst production is in the humanities fields. And that’s where we have-
David Goldstein:
That’s me.
Peter Turchin:
Yeah, exactly.
David Goldstein:
I was a history major.
Peter Turchin:
History, English, education, all of those people are usually overproduced. And that’s the breeding ground for radical movements. That has been the case before. So in the Bolshevick Revolution was not accomplished by the peasants or workers, it was accomplished by counter elites. What happened there, talk about this in more detail in the book, but the very successful reforms of 1860s produced unanticipated side effect. Most of the naibility became very impoverished and they went into the universities and that’s what basically created those radical movements. And so this is what we are doing and this is what happens in Europe as we speak, has been happening for the last about two decades, getting worse and worse. So this is the third. So three together, popular immiseration, overproduction of people with wealth and overproduction of degree holders. Together, that’s an explosive combination.
David Goldstein:
You’ve described my role in this, Nick, I’m a counter elite, but you don’t mention me by name in the book. You do however, mention Nick. Explain his role in this.
Peter Turchin:
Well, if we start thinking about, now, let’s start thinking about how do we get out of this? And here, let me just say that what we found is that the road to crisis is actually fairly generalized. It’s like the ball running valley with steep walls. There’s not only one place for it to run, but once you get the crisis, the whole avenue of possible trajectories open up for you. That’s actually a good thing. From the science point of view, it becomes very unpredictable. So science is not terribly helpful here, at least science at the current stage of development. And by the way, as an aside, we are building crisis debut, which has now nearly 200 cases of past societies getting into crisis and out. And our hope is that by having more data, you would be able to discern the patterns better. But for us right now, the hopeful lesson is that it is possible to get out of crisis without a major bloodshed.
Unfortunately, only about 10, 15% of societies getting into a past crisis we’re able to find this route. But now hopefully we know more, you should be able to do a better job. All right, so one thing that we see in success stories, the thing that essentially makes them similar to each other is that there are always a pre-social section of the elites who managed to persuade the rest of the elites using the popular discontent that we’ll either have reforms from above or will have revolution from below. That’s precisely what Alexandra II said, the czar of Russia who engineered the great reforms during the 1860s and postponed revolution by 50 years as the result. So here comes, and Nick is not perfect, but I use him-
David Goldstein:
I can vouch for that
Peter Turchin:
… but I use him as a representative of the pre-social elites who understand the problem and are trying to persuade the rest of them. Unfortunately, as I see up until now, not without huge success that we need to reform the society. But even on the local level, for example, working for increasing the minimum wage in the state of Washington, that was a great accomplishment because that’s one of the ways to not maybe shut down the wealth pump, but make it less powerful minimum wages. Well, the others are ability of workers to organize and bargain higher, taxes on the rich, and there are many other factors, but that has to start somewhere. So in the past when we look at successful case studies, there were always initially a minority that eventually persuaded the majority that we better take the reform route out of the crisis.
Nick Hanauer:
And Peter, I think you’ve said that inequality is the proximate cause. It’s not the cause of the problem, but do you agree that really the only path out of this crisis is a radical reduction of inequality, the de-immiseration of most people?
David Goldstein:
That’s one of two paths, Nick. One of them is a violent rebellion in which we deal with the problem of elite over production by getting rid of elites.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I know.
David Goldstein:
Exactly. Sometimes physically in some of these cases, elites were exterminated.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I was trying to avoid that. Dove is not as appealing to me as Dora.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, I know you see yourself now as Zara Alexander. You see yourself as Zara Alexander because you made the same argument he did but you could Zara Nicholas.
Nick Hanauer:
I could, yeah.
David Goldstein:
Which makes me [inaudible 00:28:47].
Peter Turchin:
Alexander II second was assassinated by radical part.
David Goldstein:
Oh, that’s true. I forgot.
Peter Turchin:
Yeah, I hope nothing like this happens.
David Goldstein:
You know what? It’s never a good idea to look to Russian history.
Nick Hanauer:
No. A lot of bleak outcomes there.
Peter Turchin:
Good lessons to learn though.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. But just being serious, I think that, and I hope you agree that radically reducing the amount of inequality in the society is not a guarantee out of this mess, but it is almost certainly the best path available and the most practical path available for us.
David Goldstein:
Right. Turning off the wealth pump. And you point out in the book, Peter, that the US has done that once before.
Peter Turchin:
Exactly. Yes. So okay, let’s talk about this. I have three comments to make. First of all, I think that exclusive focus on inequality is not very helpful because common people who are not quants, they actually cannot relate inequality numbers to their real life. People always hugely underestimate their degree of inequality. So inequality is an abstract thing. That’s why I think that we should turn to the popular immiseration. We have to reverse popular immiseration. That’s also an abstract thing. But what we want to do is to get the growth of real wages to go up together with GDP per capita. This is what the new deal accomplished actually. And so until late 1970s, the wages and GDP per capita grew together and then they departed and the gap is what creates the wealth pump. So if we shut down the wealth pump, if we get the wages to grow together with the rest of the economy, then first of all, we decrease the immiseration, increase the economic wellbeing of people.
Secondly, it’ll have the effects on sociological measures of wellbeing. So we know about deaths of despair. I talk about it in the book. So by giving people hope and also the feeling that their life is improving for them, that’s the important thing. We’ll ameliorate those things. And we also shut down the wealth pump and stop the overproduction of wealthy people. That’s the second point. The third point that I want to make is that we should do this, but we should not expect immediate results. Therefore, first of all, it’ll take time to persuade the other elites.
In all the success stories, for example, another success story was the charges period in Great Britain. It took like 30 or 40 years to actually accomplish the necessary reforms and shut down the wealth pump. All right? Hopefully it’ll be faster in our case if we are successful, but just don’t expect immediate results. Secondly, social systems have a lot of inertia. I have in fact ran some models, which you can show that even once you shut down the wealth pump, it’ll take multiple years, more than a decade for this effects to percolate and have an effect on instability. So we should be thinking about all these processes in the long term.
David Goldstein:
So what does this say about our short-term future? I know you’ve talked pessimistically about 2024, about the prospects for 2024. What’s it look like?
Peter Turchin:
Honestly, you are not worried about 2024?
David Goldstein:
I think liberal democracy is facing an existential crisis-
Peter Turchin:
That’s what I think also.
David Goldstein:
… right now. That’s how I feel. It’s never been so fragile.
Nick Hanauer:
We’re in violent agreement.
Peter Turchin:
So there’s nothing we can do about 2024, certainly not I, and not even you guys. So in a way here, this is doom basically. That’s the way I see it. I hope that I’m wrong because by nature I’m an optimist. So my personal thinking about it, there is nothing I or we can do for the short term, but we need to start working for the long term now. And so we need to get the idea. Let’s forget about inequality. Let’s get the idea that people’s lives should improve with every generation. That’s what Americans experienced prior to 1980s or so. We should get back on track. The children should live better than their parents. How do we accomplish this? This becomes a problem for politicians working together with opinion influencers and scientists.
Here, I would suggest that we also should invest more in quantitative social science so we can actually avoid unexpected results of our actions. Essentially what we should start doing is we should start to run models to run different ideas for how to get the situation better and see whether there is any non-linear feedbacks that come around and bite you in the behind. So we need to get on board general public then opinion influencers. It’s not necessary people who work for New York Times, but more social media influencers, scientists should be a part of that mix. We should get professional politicians and put pressure on the elites. Remember that the current situation is unfortunately quite lucrative for the 1%. So the 1% has to be convinced that in the long term it’s untenable and that it is in their long-term best interest to give up some wealth now rather than lose everything in some future.
Nick Hanauer:
Right. No, absolutely. Well, a couple of final questions, Peter. The first is the benevolent dictator question, which is if you were in charge of the world or the United States and you could do anything you wanted, what would you do to head off this catastrophe?
Peter Turchin:
Well, first of all, I would give hundreds of million dollars to social science research and put several teams actually on building models and testing them with data. We would then use those models to actually understand what specific actions we should take. Of course that is-
David Goldstein:
Okay, that’s spoken like a member of the social science elite.
Peter Turchin:
Yeah, well, I’m not really elites. Elites are the ones who are at Harvard and Stanford.
David Goldstein:
Okay, counter elite.
Nick Hanauer:
Counter elite, yeah,
Peter Turchin:
Right. I understand that. Without doing this, we would be blind people in the dark room. So I think it’s necessary, but of course it’s not sufficient. There are certain things we can do. We can use the previous success stories. So let’s go and take a look at what happened 100 years ago in the United States. So I think many of the recipes that the UDO actually fixed legislatively will work quite well. Of course we live in a very different society, so we should take that into account, but we should give workers power to organize that they have lost since 1980 or so, really badly. And right now there is a strong movement, labor movement from the grassroots, so it should be helped. And we should increase the taxes on the wealthy. I mean, back in 1960, their top incomes paid 90% of tax and the society was doing quite well and the wealthy were doing quite well also. Now, I’m not suggesting 90%, but at least 50%. Let’s split it up.
I’m an anti-war person. I study war so that we can learn how to abolish it. We should cut the military budget in half. This is going to paint me with a brush, but I think that is what we should do. And so extra money from the wealthy and taxes and the wealthy, the military budget, they can be used to do some things that everybody talks about and build infrastructure that’s all good. But you also should find either do some kind of basic minimum income or find jobs during the new deal. Especially if we should find jobs for all those overproduced English and history, actually, history, yeah, we should fund history just because historians are producing useful knowledge we need those data.
David Goldstein:
Part of Nick’s philanthropy is hiring me.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s it.
Peter Turchin:
So we should do it on a massive scale. By doing this, we first of all, we hire historians, archeologists, and others. First of all, they will start churning out useful data for their scientific program. Secondly, we take them out from the market of counter elites so they are not now feeding their radical movements.
Nick Hanauer:
And one final question, why do you do this work?
Peter Turchin:
I’m a scientist. I am motivated by the search for truth, and the only way to get at it in the reliable manner is by doing old fashioned science where we propose theories, translate them into mathematical models and then test massive amounts of data. That’s what I enjoy doing and that’s what I get my kick out of life.
Nick Hanauer:
I love it. Well, Peter, thank you so much for being with us.
Peter Turchin:
Good meeting you.
David Goldstein:
I think a lot of people might come away from this conversation with Peter, Nick and think, oh, that’s all very theoretical, cleodynamics and all that. You can look for patterns in history and make predictions. But really when you look at what he’s talking about, when you read that book, the specificity, and you look at what’s happening now, this really speaks to the moment. When he talks about the wealth pump, how we turn the wealth pump off with the new deal and had three decades of broad-based prosperity and relative stability. And then in the 1970s, we turned that wealth pump back on through the neoliberal revolution, through market fundamentalism. This is what we’ve been talking about for the past few years on the podcast, right?
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
David Goldstein:
You can go back to the late ’70s and see that divergence between productivity and wages and see this $50 trillion upward redistribution of wealth and income. And we see the results in the popular immiseration. The immiseration of huge segments of the American public and in the extreme wealth that has been accumulated by well, people like you, and the anger that it’s generated in counter elites like me. And what Peter is telling us is that this isn’t unusual. This has happened many, many times throughout history and it doesn’t end well. It has political and societal consequences that are often catastrophic.
Nick Hanauer:
And this is why when my rich friends tell me I’m too lefty, I tell them that I’m actually what stands in between them and the true left. They should be not crawling, not walking, but running towards increasing their own taxes and paying folks more. Because in the absence of that, the chances are not good that the cushy lives that we all lead will continue in the same way. I just think it’s so obvious.
David Goldstein:
And you know a lot of them understand that from the bunkers they’re buying, right?
Nick Hanauer:
No, exactly.
David Goldstein:
You know that’s happening. Look, it’s a terrifying prospect, but how can you live through this moment and not see it? And it’s not just this total disintegration of our political system, how half the country doesn’t trust elections anymore, how the house Republican caucus can’t even follow its own rules to elect a speaker. How Trump is out there threatening to round up and imprison all his political opponents and media critics. How you see all this disintegration, the violation of norms. We keep crossing lines again and again. You see all that at the same time, we have in the moment the war in Ukraine. We have what’s happening in Israel and Gaza as we’re recording this. And I got to tell you, this summer Nick, sitting here in Seattle where we had a rather pleasant summer, we were like the only corner of the United States that did and watching the rest of the world literally burn and we’re incapable of addressing this crisis. All these things that we know are real and are happening and need action now. And we’re incapable of doing it because our civilization, it’s falling apart.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. Because a few powerful elites are blocking the way.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. And the way I feel it, I don’t know if you ever saw it, Nick, it’s old, it’s like late ’50s, 1960 film On The Beach. The storyline being that the nuclear war has happened and it takes place in Australia and the Northern hemisphere has been wiped out and they know that the radiation is drifting their way and in a month or so they’ll all be dead. And it’s about that month or so just waiting for it to happen. That’s how I felt this summer sitting here comfortably in Seattle, watching the rest of the world fall apart. And I’m okay right now. I’m okay right now, but it’s coming. It looks like it’s coming, Nick. And so it’s just up to you as one of the pro social elites.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I’m on it.
David Goldstein:
Right. So do your job, Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I’m working on it.
David Goldstein:
Okay.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, that was a fascinating conversation. It’s never joyful to talk to Peter, but he’s smart. He has a lot of interesting things to say.
David Goldstein:
It is a fascinating book. Again, the book is End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration. We will provide a link in our show notes and we urge you to buy it at your local independent bookstore or if you have to, because it’s just more convenient at that big online monopolist that we shall not mention.
Speaker 3:
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