#cliodynamics

Elite overproduction is a structural imbalance where the number of highly educated and ambitious individuals exceeds the availability of elite positions, creating economic frustration, political instability and long-term societal risk. This concept, developed by Peter Turchin, provides a powerful framework for understanding why modern societies experience rising discontent despite expanding…

Most people follow politics through polls, headlines, and prediction markets. Those tools are useful, but they only capture the surface of what’s happening. They tell us what people think today, or how markets are pricing tomorrow. What they do not tell us is why the entire environment feels more volatile, more polarized, and more unpredictable than it did a decade ago. This article is the…

Politics feels chaotic on the surface, but the forces shaping entire eras move slowly and predictably beneath it. This series explores those deeper currents—starting with Cliodynamics, the science of long‑term political cycles. Discover why today’s turbulence isn’t random, how structural pressures build over decades, and what these patterns reveal about the moment we’re living through.…

I got through Peter Turchin’s book End Times. It is definitely an interesting book. To summarize, organized human societies tend to develop a “wealth pump” whereby the wealthy and powerful influence the rules of the game to appropriate an ever larger share of a society’s wealth and power for themselves, at the expense of ordinary people. “Ordinary people” is not just the median or what we think…