Here is how my AI summarized this article. I agree with it.
1. Ambiguous use of “wages” or “relative wages.”
If the reader hears “wages stagnated,” they may infer broad middle-class decline. But the stronger empirical claim is narrower: typical labor compensation underperformed GDP/productivity/top incomes. That is important, but it is not the same thing as ordinary Americans getting poorer.
2. The chart visually compresses several distinct phenomena.
A falling relative wage can reflect worker exploitation, yes. But it can also reflect globalization, rising returns to capital, rising returns to entrepreneurship, changing household structure, China’s labor-market integration, immigration, automation, benefits replacing cash wages, or high-skilled assortative mating. The chart does not sort these mechanisms.
3. “Wealth pump” is a loaded metaphor.
It suggests extraction from workers upward to elites. Sometimes that is accurate: rent-seeking, monopoly, regulatory capture, zoning, credential cartels, political access. But sometimes higher rewards to capital and entrepreneurship reflect genuine value creation under new scarcity conditions. “Wealth pump” blurs productive inequality and extractive inequality.
4. He treats inequality as a stress indicator too quickly.
Inequality can correlate with instability, elite overproduction, and status competition. But rising inequality alone does not prove systemic pathology. You need to know whether the inequality came from value creation, global factor-price shifts, rent extraction, demographic change, or blocked opportunity.
5. His model has a tendency to absorb contrary evidence.
If median household incomes rise, the answer becomes “but relative wages fell.” If relative wages improve, one can shift to elite overproduction, fiscal distress, political fragmentation, or popular immiseration. That does not make the theory wrong, but it can make it hard to falsify in casual essay form.
So I would distinguish Turchin the model-builder from Turchin the polemicist.
The model-builder is asking useful questions about structural stress. The polemicist sometimes seems to choose framings that maximize alarm and narrative coherence, rather than carefully separating:
absolute living standards, relative standing, wage compensation, household income, factor shares, rent extraction, and global welfare.
That separation matters enormously.
A more value-adding version of his argument would say:
The US has become much richer, and median households have become materially better off. But since the late 1970s, gains have been distributed unevenly; returns rose for capital, skill, entrepreneurship, and asset ownership; some regions and workers suffered severe adjustment shocks; elite competition intensified; and institutions failed to maintain legitimacy across the whole system. These are real instability risks, but they are not evidence of broad middle-class immiseration.
That would preserve the good part of Turchin without the loaded part.
My blunt assessment: he is probably directionally right about structural stress, but rhetorically sloppy — or strategically imprecise — about economic welfare. The article would be stronger if it made your distinction explicit: inequality and relative-wage decline are not automatically pathologies. They become problems only when tied to rent-seeking, blocked mobility, deteriorating median welfare, or destructive political coordination.
I do believe many in the bottom quartile today are worse off than their parents. On AVERAGE, you are right that the numbers look pretty good. But that’s why good statisticians want to see histograms, not averages.
Defend my position?! Well, the flying drink cups seem like a pretty good sign, as does Turchin’s stature data. To that I’ll add the price of a 25th percentile home, which is at realtor.com.
Many will choose, based on a Potemkin average, to believe our bottom 25% are doing great. But that may prove to be a fatal blindness.
Regarding names and definitions, Newton named a force “gravity”. It applies to many very different masses of objects and levels of force. He named it that because it felt “grave”…heavy. He did not describe it, I think, at the level of precision you are asking for, but it is incredibly useful. If you have a better word for “popular immiseration” or “gravity” please put it forward.
He didn’t invent the term gravity, it was already in use. As for definition he specifically mapped it out using a mathematical formula. You can even look it up.
Turchin is taking a population with improving living standards, calling it “immiseration” and hoping his readers don’t notice the rhetorical trick.
Perfect illustration of AI failure: misses the main point and spurts out clever-sounding irrelevant details.
Lacks wisdom - aka (usually painful) experience that allows one to see what matters and what does not.
The main point in this article is very important, novel, and is amazingly well supported by data - can't hope more for such a complex and noisy system. AI misses that.
The data is cherry picked using well known bad sources of data (specifically the inflation measure). If you want to read economics blogs written by left leaning people who know what they are doing, read Noahpinion’s substack.
He has stated publicly that he does not like inequality measures like GINI as proxies for elite competition or popular immiseration. Unfortunately, it’s often most readily available and the press eats it up.
I am more worried about the use of a term like “popular immiseration” or even relative immiseration when applied to the richest people in the history of humanity who are actually gaining in wealth faster than average for developed nations. If he wants to apply the term to his native Russia, I might agree. But to the US?
Perhaps he can even share some ideas of how we can improve the US to be as good as Russia. Great leadership. Immense standards of living. Long lifespan. No problems with substance abuse and drinking. Freedom. Equality of opportunity for gays. No problems with declining birth rates. Best in class satisfaction/happiness/optimism surveys. And best of all, no million young men killed or maimed in pointless wars!
Whatever you call it, popular immiseration is a predictive variable that comes up repeatedly throughout history. It is a fair critique that USA “popular” in 2026 are not the same as French peasants rioting over bread. But all that is needed is for the population to feel miserable enough to riot…to kill. I for one think we are getting close enough for concern. (1) Turchin points to the stature data. (2) I run on rural roads…a demonstration of my quasi-elite status, and vehicles frequently swerve towards me, and occasionally throw drink cups.
We have many, many ineffective counter-elites, who do not know (and often actively dislike) the miserable masses, but I fear that one day some will make the connection, and start a violent movement.
Sounds close to being circular reasoning around a fuzzy term. First, define popular immiseration or relative immiseration. You can’t point it out as the conditions that were prevalent after the revolution. You need your define it carefully and then test whether it predicts specific outcomes which also need to be defined (cup throwing while jogging may be a bit nebulous).
Second, studies of civil revolution have tended to show that they often emerge not when conditions get worse, but when they better, but not as fast as people want. You kind of point this out in your third sentence.
However if it is based on subjective feelings, then one important part of reducing civil disruption is to NOT hype negative spins on reality (which Turchin clearly does here). Again, median standards of living, freedom, health, opportunity, lifespan etc are incomparably better now than in any other era in history. Incomparably. We aren’t more immisearted in any possible objective way, but less so.
If the masses are miserable about living twice as long with better health and earning twenty or thirty times as much as their ancestors with more freedom and better living conditions (toilets, antibiotics, lighting, safe high speed transportation, low crime rates, etc.) Then we have done a poor job of educating the masses.
There is no arguing with you. Anger is the key result. It may not make sense to you that people who are measurably better off than in past centuries might get angry (because they are worse off than their parents). But they can.
So you believe we are worse off than our parents? Please defend this position. If you actually look at the data, incomes adjusted for inflation in the US are up. Lifespan just hit a new record (read it in the news earlier this week). Medical care is simply incomparable. Just about every person in my extended family would be dead if we had 1970s level medical technology. Pollution is down. Entertainment and dining has increased beyond comprehension. Equality of rights is best ever. Unemployment is low. The poor are supported with unprecedented safety nets and transfers (our poor are significantly above the average globally)
I am sure if you took a hundred objective factors you could find a few that deteriorated (housing affordability over last 4 years?), but the overall trend is good, and clearly and objectively better in the IS than in just about any other developed country (Europe and Japan are not doing as well).
If you get angry discussing contradictory views or being presented with facts that disrupt your opinions, then you may want to check whether you are an ideologue.
Observe the recently popular communists and other outliers in blue cities. These are not 'poor' areas and the people radicalized are not poor. They 'feel' cheated and are willing to overturn US norms to get their way. Actual immiseration is not necessary.
You are asking for the degree of specificity of a formal scientific paper in a popular Substack article.
See my comment above. I am agreeing with your comment in some ways. As for specificity, you are correct. The problem is that Turchin is using cherry picked data with widely known problems, adding in BS terms (immiseration and wealth pump) and implying that inequality is a problem rather than a statistical measure which may or may not reflect problems (it could reflect the system adapting perfectly to external conditions).
Somewhere along the line he shifted from being a historian to an ideological pundit (one with a terrible grasp of economics).
Vers une extension de la cliodynamique : intégrer la chronologie de naissance et la fonction historique des États
La cliodynamique a démontré qu'il est possible d'étudier l'évolution des sociétés au moyen de modèles quantitatifs fondés sur des variables économiques, démographiques et sociales. Cette approche constitue une avancée majeure dans la compréhension des cycles historiques.
Toutefois, il me semble que ces variables décrivent principalement l'état d'un État au cours de son existence. Elles permettent d'identifier des déséquilibres, d'en mesurer l'intensité et parfois d'anticiper une période d'instabilité. Elles ressemblent, en ce sens, au travail d'un médecin qui interprète les analyses biologiques de son patient afin d'évaluer son état de santé.
Mais un diagnostic complet exige également de connaître l'origine du patient, son âge réel, son histoire médicale et la cause profonde de son état. De même, une science véritablement prédictive de l'histoire ne peut, selon moi, se limiter à l'analyse des symptômes d'un État. Elle doit également chercher à répondre à des questions plus fondamentales : pourquoi cet État est-il apparu à ce moment précis de l'histoire ? Quelles sont les causes profondes de sa naissance ? Quelle fonction historique remplit-il dans l'évolution de l'humanité ? Quelle est la durée probable de son cycle historique ?
Je propose donc d'ajouter à la cliodynamique une dimension chronologique fondée sur la reconstitution de la naissance des États et de leur trajectoire historique complète. Cette approche ne consisterait pas seulement à mesurer leur évolution, mais aussi à identifier la logique de leur apparition, leur fonction dans l'histoire et les différentes phases de leur développement.
Une fois cette trajectoire reconstituée, il devient possible d'établir un bilan historique global de l'État. Ce bilan ne porterait pas uniquement sur sa puissance économique ou militaire, mais sur l'ensemble de son héritage dans l'évolution de l'humanité. Il s'agirait d'évaluer si les effets de son existence ont été principalement constructifs ou principalement destructeurs.
L'hypothèse centrale est la suivante : lorsqu'un État a accompli la fonction historique qui a justifié son apparition, ou lorsque le bilan global de son action devient durablement négatif, il entre dans une phase terminale de son cycle historique. Les crises économiques, les tensions sociales et les conflits politiques ne seraient alors plus les causes premières de son déclin, mais les manifestations visibles d'un processus historique plus profond.
Dans cette perspective, les indicateurs étudiés par la cliodynamique demeurent indispensables, mais ils représenteraient davantage les symptômes d'un cycle historique que sa cause fondamentale. La compréhension de cette cause suppose d'intégrer l'étude de la naissance des États, de leur fonction historique et de leur chronologie de long terme.
A question for Peter on our 250th birthday. Did the founding of the United States play any role in reducing the “amplitude” of Cliodynamic cycles? That is, did the principles outlined by our founding grounded in enlightenment rationality and the rights of the individual mitigate the often brutal nature of these secular trends that Peter has identified as endemic to the human experience?
Here is how my AI summarized this article. I agree with it.
1. Ambiguous use of “wages” or “relative wages.”
If the reader hears “wages stagnated,” they may infer broad middle-class decline. But the stronger empirical claim is narrower: typical labor compensation underperformed GDP/productivity/top incomes. That is important, but it is not the same thing as ordinary Americans getting poorer.
2. The chart visually compresses several distinct phenomena.
A falling relative wage can reflect worker exploitation, yes. But it can also reflect globalization, rising returns to capital, rising returns to entrepreneurship, changing household structure, China’s labor-market integration, immigration, automation, benefits replacing cash wages, or high-skilled assortative mating. The chart does not sort these mechanisms.
3. “Wealth pump” is a loaded metaphor.
It suggests extraction from workers upward to elites. Sometimes that is accurate: rent-seeking, monopoly, regulatory capture, zoning, credential cartels, political access. But sometimes higher rewards to capital and entrepreneurship reflect genuine value creation under new scarcity conditions. “Wealth pump” blurs productive inequality and extractive inequality.
4. He treats inequality as a stress indicator too quickly.
Inequality can correlate with instability, elite overproduction, and status competition. But rising inequality alone does not prove systemic pathology. You need to know whether the inequality came from value creation, global factor-price shifts, rent extraction, demographic change, or blocked opportunity.
5. His model has a tendency to absorb contrary evidence.
If median household incomes rise, the answer becomes “but relative wages fell.” If relative wages improve, one can shift to elite overproduction, fiscal distress, political fragmentation, or popular immiseration. That does not make the theory wrong, but it can make it hard to falsify in casual essay form.
So I would distinguish Turchin the model-builder from Turchin the polemicist.
The model-builder is asking useful questions about structural stress. The polemicist sometimes seems to choose framings that maximize alarm and narrative coherence, rather than carefully separating:
absolute living standards, relative standing, wage compensation, household income, factor shares, rent extraction, and global welfare.
That separation matters enormously.
A more value-adding version of his argument would say:
The US has become much richer, and median households have become materially better off. But since the late 1970s, gains have been distributed unevenly; returns rose for capital, skill, entrepreneurship, and asset ownership; some regions and workers suffered severe adjustment shocks; elite competition intensified; and institutions failed to maintain legitimacy across the whole system. These are real instability risks, but they are not evidence of broad middle-class immiseration.
That would preserve the good part of Turchin without the loaded part.
My blunt assessment: he is probably directionally right about structural stress, but rhetorically sloppy — or strategically imprecise — about economic welfare. The article would be stronger if it made your distinction explicit: inequality and relative-wage decline are not automatically pathologies. They become problems only when tied to rent-seeking, blocked mobility, deteriorating median welfare, or destructive political coordination.
I do believe many in the bottom quartile today are worse off than their parents. On AVERAGE, you are right that the numbers look pretty good. But that’s why good statisticians want to see histograms, not averages.
Defend my position?! Well, the flying drink cups seem like a pretty good sign, as does Turchin’s stature data. To that I’ll add the price of a 25th percentile home, which is at realtor.com.
Many will choose, based on a Potemkin average, to believe our bottom 25% are doing great. But that may prove to be a fatal blindness.
Thanks for the excellent reply. You make good points.
By the way… Do you think the bottom 25% today are worse off than the bottom 25% of prior generations?
Do you think the bottom 25% always stay in the bottom 25%, or do they tend to move into higher quartile as they gain job experience and marry?
When you evaluate the bottom quartile, do you include social transfers and welfare payments? How does this change your perspective?
Regarding names and definitions, Newton named a force “gravity”. It applies to many very different masses of objects and levels of force. He named it that because it felt “grave”…heavy. He did not describe it, I think, at the level of precision you are asking for, but it is incredibly useful. If you have a better word for “popular immiseration” or “gravity” please put it forward.
He didn’t invent the term gravity, it was already in use. As for definition he specifically mapped it out using a mathematical formula. You can even look it up.
Turchin is taking a population with improving living standards, calling it “immiseration” and hoping his readers don’t notice the rhetorical trick.
Perfect illustration of AI failure: misses the main point and spurts out clever-sounding irrelevant details.
Lacks wisdom - aka (usually painful) experience that allows one to see what matters and what does not.
The main point in this article is very important, novel, and is amazingly well supported by data - can't hope more for such a complex and noisy system. AI misses that.
The data is cherry picked using well known bad sources of data (specifically the inflation measure). If you want to read economics blogs written by left leaning people who know what they are doing, read Noahpinion’s substack.
Here is an example. He addresses this exact issue in his second example on this article.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-not-to-be-fooled-by-viral-charts-563
He has stated publicly that he does not like inequality measures like GINI as proxies for elite competition or popular immiseration. Unfortunately, it’s often most readily available and the press eats it up.
I am more worried about the use of a term like “popular immiseration” or even relative immiseration when applied to the richest people in the history of humanity who are actually gaining in wealth faster than average for developed nations. If he wants to apply the term to his native Russia, I might agree. But to the US?
“If he wants to apply the term to his native Russia, I might agree.”
My sense from the alternative media is that life in Russia is pretty good and vastly improved under Putin’s leadership. Has Turchin analyzed Russia?
Perhaps he can even share some ideas of how we can improve the US to be as good as Russia. Great leadership. Immense standards of living. Long lifespan. No problems with substance abuse and drinking. Freedom. Equality of opportunity for gays. No problems with declining birth rates. Best in class satisfaction/happiness/optimism surveys. And best of all, no million young men killed or maimed in pointless wars!
Whatever you call it, popular immiseration is a predictive variable that comes up repeatedly throughout history. It is a fair critique that USA “popular” in 2026 are not the same as French peasants rioting over bread. But all that is needed is for the population to feel miserable enough to riot…to kill. I for one think we are getting close enough for concern. (1) Turchin points to the stature data. (2) I run on rural roads…a demonstration of my quasi-elite status, and vehicles frequently swerve towards me, and occasionally throw drink cups.
We have many, many ineffective counter-elites, who do not know (and often actively dislike) the miserable masses, but I fear that one day some will make the connection, and start a violent movement.
Sounds close to being circular reasoning around a fuzzy term. First, define popular immiseration or relative immiseration. You can’t point it out as the conditions that were prevalent after the revolution. You need your define it carefully and then test whether it predicts specific outcomes which also need to be defined (cup throwing while jogging may be a bit nebulous).
Second, studies of civil revolution have tended to show that they often emerge not when conditions get worse, but when they better, but not as fast as people want. You kind of point this out in your third sentence.
However if it is based on subjective feelings, then one important part of reducing civil disruption is to NOT hype negative spins on reality (which Turchin clearly does here). Again, median standards of living, freedom, health, opportunity, lifespan etc are incomparably better now than in any other era in history. Incomparably. We aren’t more immisearted in any possible objective way, but less so.
If the masses are miserable about living twice as long with better health and earning twenty or thirty times as much as their ancestors with more freedom and better living conditions (toilets, antibiotics, lighting, safe high speed transportation, low crime rates, etc.) Then we have done a poor job of educating the masses.
There is no arguing with you. Anger is the key result. It may not make sense to you that people who are measurably better off than in past centuries might get angry (because they are worse off than their parents). But they can.
So you believe we are worse off than our parents? Please defend this position. If you actually look at the data, incomes adjusted for inflation in the US are up. Lifespan just hit a new record (read it in the news earlier this week). Medical care is simply incomparable. Just about every person in my extended family would be dead if we had 1970s level medical technology. Pollution is down. Entertainment and dining has increased beyond comprehension. Equality of rights is best ever. Unemployment is low. The poor are supported with unprecedented safety nets and transfers (our poor are significantly above the average globally)
I am sure if you took a hundred objective factors you could find a few that deteriorated (housing affordability over last 4 years?), but the overall trend is good, and clearly and objectively better in the IS than in just about any other developed country (Europe and Japan are not doing as well).
If you get angry discussing contradictory views or being presented with facts that disrupt your opinions, then you may want to check whether you are an ideologue.
Observe the recently popular communists and other outliers in blue cities. These are not 'poor' areas and the people radicalized are not poor. They 'feel' cheated and are willing to overturn US norms to get their way. Actual immiseration is not necessary.
You are asking for the degree of specificity of a formal scientific paper in a popular Substack article.
See my comment above. I am agreeing with your comment in some ways. As for specificity, you are correct. The problem is that Turchin is using cherry picked data with widely known problems, adding in BS terms (immiseration and wealth pump) and implying that inequality is a problem rather than a statistical measure which may or may not reflect problems (it could reflect the system adapting perfectly to external conditions).
Somewhere along the line he shifted from being a historian to an ideological pundit (one with a terrible grasp of economics).
Vers une extension de la cliodynamique : intégrer la chronologie de naissance et la fonction historique des États
La cliodynamique a démontré qu'il est possible d'étudier l'évolution des sociétés au moyen de modèles quantitatifs fondés sur des variables économiques, démographiques et sociales. Cette approche constitue une avancée majeure dans la compréhension des cycles historiques.
Toutefois, il me semble que ces variables décrivent principalement l'état d'un État au cours de son existence. Elles permettent d'identifier des déséquilibres, d'en mesurer l'intensité et parfois d'anticiper une période d'instabilité. Elles ressemblent, en ce sens, au travail d'un médecin qui interprète les analyses biologiques de son patient afin d'évaluer son état de santé.
Mais un diagnostic complet exige également de connaître l'origine du patient, son âge réel, son histoire médicale et la cause profonde de son état. De même, une science véritablement prédictive de l'histoire ne peut, selon moi, se limiter à l'analyse des symptômes d'un État. Elle doit également chercher à répondre à des questions plus fondamentales : pourquoi cet État est-il apparu à ce moment précis de l'histoire ? Quelles sont les causes profondes de sa naissance ? Quelle fonction historique remplit-il dans l'évolution de l'humanité ? Quelle est la durée probable de son cycle historique ?
Je propose donc d'ajouter à la cliodynamique une dimension chronologique fondée sur la reconstitution de la naissance des États et de leur trajectoire historique complète. Cette approche ne consisterait pas seulement à mesurer leur évolution, mais aussi à identifier la logique de leur apparition, leur fonction dans l'histoire et les différentes phases de leur développement.
Une fois cette trajectoire reconstituée, il devient possible d'établir un bilan historique global de l'État. Ce bilan ne porterait pas uniquement sur sa puissance économique ou militaire, mais sur l'ensemble de son héritage dans l'évolution de l'humanité. Il s'agirait d'évaluer si les effets de son existence ont été principalement constructifs ou principalement destructeurs.
L'hypothèse centrale est la suivante : lorsqu'un État a accompli la fonction historique qui a justifié son apparition, ou lorsque le bilan global de son action devient durablement négatif, il entre dans une phase terminale de son cycle historique. Les crises économiques, les tensions sociales et les conflits politiques ne seraient alors plus les causes premières de son déclin, mais les manifestations visibles d'un processus historique plus profond.
Dans cette perspective, les indicateurs étudiés par la cliodynamique demeurent indispensables, mais ils représenteraient davantage les symptômes d'un cycle historique que sa cause fondamentale. La compréhension de cette cause suppose d'intégrer l'étude de la naissance des États, de leur fonction historique et de leur chronologie de long terme.
It would be fascinating to see data pre-1776 in America.
A question for Peter on our 250th birthday. Did the founding of the United States play any role in reducing the “amplitude” of Cliodynamic cycles? That is, did the principles outlined by our founding grounded in enlightenment rationality and the rights of the individual mitigate the often brutal nature of these secular trends that Peter has identified as endemic to the human experience?
Ну чё Петя, до конца или домой?