Peter Turchin’s State Collapse Formula

This has been on my mind lately.

It is Peter Turchin’s formula of state collapse.

Political Stress Index = Mass Mobilization Potential (MMP) x Elite Mobilization Potential (EMP) x State Fiscal Distress (SFD).

Mass Mobilization Potential has three components: relative wages, urbanization rate and the effect of age structure. Basically, a measure of a surplus of unemployed or underemployed young people in cities.

Elite Mobilization Potential has three components: elite composition, elite incomes and elite overproduction. Basically, a measure of the total number of elites, their relative wealth and competition over a limited number of government positions. It is high when we have too many bored, idle rich and overeducated people who are viciously competing with each other.

State Fiscal Distress has three components: total state debt, GDP and the proportion of the population expressing trust or distrust in state institutions.

According to Turchin, these are the key factors which bring on state collapse, revolutions and civil wars, which are foreshadowed by an uptick in political violence such as terrorism and riots. It is easy to see how COVID-19 and its economic aftershocks has pushed all these factors deep into the red.

Update: Damon Linker is also dreading the same unforeseen and yet imminent calamity. I also think we are stumbling in the dark toward a period of immense violence and destruction like the Blundering Generation. History shows that long stretches of peace never last indefinitely.

Update: Civil War II? … no longer a joke?

It is easy to imagine COVID-19 getting worse in the fall and winter, states going back into lockdowns to fight the virus, the economy crashing, violence breaking out regardless of who wins the 2020 election. No one knows what will trigger the avalanche, but the structural conditions for civil unrest are riper than at any point since the Civil War. It has become much easier to imagine how the world could descent into hell. China might surprise us and make a big move in challenging the United States.

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9 Comments

  1. Seems more complex than it need be. If you want to see “collapse” come visit me. A suburb 45 minutes out of the city that over 25 years has gone from close knit European to hijabs and saris as far as the eye can see. That is the nice part. Venture out and Mayberry has turned into a mix of El Salvador and Compton.

    You can’t even escape to the beach. Once mostly surfers, cute blonde girls and families, this weekend had a flare up as the Saturday day pass crowd (free of course for certain people) flock in. All Hispanic and black, within five minutes of me walking on the sand about 50 black people with open liquor and bbqing (all illegal) were screaming and refusing to show the cops their IDs, claiming “racism”. It went on for about an hour until the cops finally gave up and the music twerking resumed. My friends girlfriend looks and me and says “it is awful the way those poor people are treated”… Which is when i picked up my shit and walked a mile down to get away from her

    • Yeah. Same here. A couple of years ago we had a mass shooting with a lot of people killed. We still are in the dark about why. Last month a cop was shot in the back of his head by a demonic Mexican here in my lovely city. In his 20’s and will be in a bed for the rest of his life.

      Wild times. Hope we can get it back together soon. Harden your heart for now. People are going off.

      • I can’t believe people haven’t woken up yet after all this violence and destruction. The media openly attacking white people and culture. But no change, just white people quoting Martin Luther King and the Declaration of Indepence (“all men are created equal”)

        If this hasn’t injected a reality into their heads, nothing will. Lambs… They are lambs being led

    • yeah same here….once nearly all white, now it looks like Haiti and Mexico combined as the productivity, safety and aesthetics of the town crumble.
      All while the boomers confusingly scratch their heads as to why this is happening.
      I heard some guy at the restaurant i work the other night praising the beaners and haitian apes because they are “Christians”…..
      Its all so tiring.
      I just bought more guns and a lot of ammo.
      A lot of good it’ll do when the state backed orc hordes are given their orders to kill whitey and burn everything down.
      Most whites around here are beyond brainwashed and stupid and most of all, unwilling to fight back and fight for their people and hometown.
      They wouldn’t want to be called “racist” by those who hate them or by fighting back, now would they…..

      • You nailed it. I have yet to meet a Boomer who believes race and behavior is anything more than “culture”. They will ramble on and on, I will dismantle it with the most basic history and science, and then the same response….. Always. “You are a terrible bigot (or racist)”. I don’t exactly know what they did to people over 55 to suck all the courage and respect for their parents legacy out of them, but it seems universal.

        When i point to the area around the Boomer, not a white face. Depending on the area either all Indian or Muslim or small Central Americans and black people. The standard response is “that is America now. You either need to accept and deal with it or shut up”

  2. “Update: Civil War II? … no longer a joke?”

    Just a thought – I think this would be Civil War III, the reason being that what we regard as ‘The Revolutionary War’ was actually an early version of a 4th Generation war, this being that ‘Revolutionaries’ and ‘Tories’, as the American Loyalists were then called, regularly ambushed and killed each other, far out of range of any pertinent military operations.

    Atrocities were even committed against entire families, and neighbourhoods as well – and Indian allies were not necessarily involved, though, when they were, the atrocities were even more ‘atrocious’.

    As an author, novel research compelled me to do a study of the unfortunate events that had taken place in upstate New York, during that era, and, yes, that area was particularly rich in these kinds of criminal events, though, by no stretch of the imagination did these kind of events only take place in upstate New York.

    The area around what today is known as Fort Edward, Hudson’s Falls, and Kingsbury, was particularly savage – like something you would think out of a Balkan scene!

  3. Did you hear about GPT-3, Hunter? It was released a couple of days ago and is creating quite a stir.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technology/gpt-3-mind-blowing-ai-tool-can-design-websites-and-prescribe-medicine/ar-BB16XnQF

    https://arr.am/2020/07/09/gpt-3-an-ai-thats-eerily-good-at-writing-almost-anything/

    If its got this particular fellow worried about what he’s going to do for a living in 5 years, we’re going to have a lot more excess elites:
    https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1284901555917987847

    Also since it is centrally controlled, they will use it to give anti-Whites an economic advantage, because they are already discussing what it should be allowed to be used for. We all know what that means.

  4. The graph isn’t complex. The graph puts all teh anecdotes into an observable pattern.

  5. I noticed the average number of people being arrested daily has dropped down pretty low around here since covid and the antifa/chimp riots started.
    Was around 35 per day ,now it is less than 10.

    But i wouldn’t worry about it, goyim, because racism is the only violence that actually exists in talmudic clown world.

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