Ecologist turned historian. Turchin spent decades studying population dynamics in animals before applying the same mathematical tools to human societies — founding a field he calls cliodynamics.
In 2010, writing in Nature, he predicted that the United States would face a severe spike of political instability by the early 2020s. End Times is his account of why — and what history says about what comes next.
Turchin describes elite competition as a game of musical chairs. The number of power positions — top jobs, political offices, prestigious roles — stays fixed, while the number of elite aspirants keeps multiplying. The result: more frustrated ambition, more rule-bending, more chaos. He calls this elite overproduction.
Think about your own field or industry. Does it feel like there are more qualified, ambitious people than there are seats at the table? Have you seen the competition grow more cutthroat or "rule-bending" over your career — and if so, what changed?
Turchin's central mechanism is the wealth pump — an economic arrangement that systematically redirects GDP growth away from workers and toward the elites. Since the 1970s, US real wages stagnated while the economy kept growing. By 2010, the relative wage of unskilled workers had nearly halved compared to GDP per capita — a reversal from decades of shared growth.
Turchin argues this isn't an accident — it's the predictable result of elites using their growing power to extract more. Does Bitcoin's fixed supply change the rules of the wealth pump? Could sound money make it harder for elites to redirect productivity gains to themselves?
When aspirants outnumber seats, some decide to break the rules to win. Turchin calls these people counter-elites — wealthy, educated, ambitious individuals who, having failed to enter the ruling class through normal channels, turn to disrupting the system instead. He argues Trump is a textbook example: a billionaire who mobilized popular discontent to challenge the established elites.
Turchin says counter-elites need a mass of discontented people to succeed — and popular immiseration provides exactly that fuel. Is this dynamic playing out globally right now? Who are today's counter-elites, and are they genuinely challenging the system or simply replacing one ruling class with another?
Turchin's boldest claim is that history has quantifiable, predictable patterns. His field, cliodynamics, treats the historical record as Big Data, building mathematical models of how societies enter and exit crises. He predicted US instability in 2010 — and says the same forces he traced across five thousand years of human history are operating now.
Bitcoin was partly born from the idea that monetary systems follow predictable patterns of debasement and collapse — hence the hard cap. Does Turchin's scientific approach to history strengthen or complicate that thesis? And if these cycles are predictable, does knowing about them actually help us escape them?
History's crises usually end badly — civil war, state collapse, mass death. But Turchin finds rare success stories: 19th-century Britain and Russia both reached revolutionary boiling points, yet managed to reform their way through without catastrophe. The key was elites willing to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term collective survival — shutting down the wealth pump before it destroyed the system entirely.
Turchin's "iron law of oligarchy" says that any group that acquires power eventually uses it self-interestedly — making reform inherently temporary. Is there any institutional design — or monetary system — that could make the wealth pump structurally harder to turn on? Or does the cycle always resume?
Turchin's MPF model says the Turbulent Twenties cannot be averted — too much inertia. But the choices made now determine what comes after. He lays out three scenarios: Inertial (do nothing — crisis peaks, calms, then repeats every ~50 years); Suppression-only (state force contains violence but leaves immiseration intact — society is permanently stuck in high stress); Shut down the pump (raise relative wages — painful short term, but breaks the cycle for good).
Which of these three trajectories does the US look most likely to follow right now? And is there a fourth option Turchin doesn't consider — a technological or monetary disruption that changes the rules of the game entirely?
One of Turchin's sharpest observations: by 2000, the Democratic Party — historically the party of labor — had become the party of the credentialed 10%. The Republicans served the wealthy 1%. The result: both parties cater exclusively to elites, and the bottom 90% has no political home. Turchin and Piketty call this the transition from a "class-based" to a "multi-elite" party system.
If neither party represents working people, what fills the vacuum? Turchin says this is precisely where counter-elites recruit their armies. Is Bitcoin — as a monetary system outside government control — a form of political exit for people who've lost faith in both parties? Or does exit make organizing for reform less likely?
Turchin's most arresting conclusion: "It is too late to avert our current crisis." The social inertia built up over fifty years cannot be unwound before the Turbulent Twenties run their course. But he insists the current moment is not hopeless — it is precisely the choices made during and after the crisis that determine whether the cycle repeats in 2070 or whether something genuinely different emerges.
If you accept that the crisis is already here and unavoidable, does that change how you think about your own decisions — financial, geographic, political? And what does "winning" look like on the other side: a reformed wealth pump, a new social contract, or something the historical record hasn't seen before?
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