law schools overproduce lawyers, which causes a glut of people wanting to enter politics.

I’ve just read 5 of Peter Turchin’s books: Historical Dynamics, War & Peace & War, Secular Cycles, Ultra Society, and Ages of Discord. I did this because I love careful big picture thinking, and Turchin is one of the few who does this now on the big question of historical cycles of conflict and empire. While historians today tend to dislike this sort of analysis, Turchin defies them, in part because he’s officially a biologist. Turchin collects much data to show that this is a robust pattern, even if there are many deviations. For example, in Europe, 33 of 43 frontier situations gave rise to big empires, yet only 4 of 57 of non-frontier situations did. “Secular cycles” vary in duration from 1 to 4 centuries; Western Europe saw 8 cycles in 22 centuries, while China saw 8 cycles in 21 centuries. During the low instability part of each cycle, instability shows a rough “alternating generations” 50 year cycle of conflict. Just as science fiction is often (usually?) an allegory about issues today, I suspect that historians who blame a particular fault for the fall of the Roman Empire tend to pick faults that they also want to warn against in their own era. Similarly, my main complain about Turchin is that he attributes falling cohesion mainly to increased inequality – an “overproduction” of elites who face “increased competition”. Yes, inequality is much talked about among elites today, but the (less-forager-like) ancients were less focused on it.

peter turchin’s theory of elite overproduction causing instability rings true. lots of people are pursuing dubious degrees, and then fail to find the kind of employment they imagined they would, while being saddled with debt. many of them would be far better off not going to college and learning a trade instead. the vilification of trades has led to skill gaps, and “send everyone to college” is one of the worst ideas in the context of this overproduction.