Peter Turchin has developed a methodology for predicting the destabilisation of societies from the Roman Empire to Imperial China in a book ‘War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires.’
Writing for Bloomberg View, he says that in addition to wage stagnation and income inequality, the overproduction of law degrees is also an indication. Mr Turchin says that the common thread to past political instability was ‘elite overproduction’ which, coupled with ‘stagnating and declining living standards fo the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state’ creates intra-elite competition, which ‘gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class.’
The professor of biology and anthropology at the University of Connecticut predicts many years of political turmoil, peaking in the twenties. Source: Bloomberg
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