- This is an amazingly good book. It's a work of critical analysis and insight, and despite its often academic flavour it offers an enlightening historical perspective on our current global issues.
- Turchin is Research Associate at Oxford University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Connecticut. He's currently coordinating an innovative outfit called CrisisDB, a massive historical database of societies sliding into a crisis - and then emerging from it.
- His main thesis is that social and political change is far more predictable than we usually imagine - the emergence of Trump, for example, and why he is highly likely to win the presidency again in November. The overarching dynamic governing the history of all countries and empires is 'popular immiseration and elite overproduction'. When the lower working classes are increasingly less well off discontent brews and turns into anger. The elite cannot protect their wealth or administrative power for too long. Wars and revolutions inevitably follow after a few decades. This pattern is so well established that world history over the last three thousand years or so demonstrates it time and time again.
- His prime focus is on the US, but he also examines in detail England, France, Austria, Germany, Norway, Hong Kong and mainland China. The major causes of empire decline are evident in virtually every case, as are the reasons for peace, social harmony and stability. Fifty to one hundred years is about it - then radical change is inevitable. America, your time is up. There are simply too many billionaires.
- I virtually underlined every second paragraph of this book. It was so good.
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