Shut Down the Wealth Pump!

My conversation with Daniel Davis

On September 2, 2025 I was on Daniel Davis Deep Dive, discussing my book End Times. Lt Col (ret) Daniel L. Davis served in several hot conflicts (Desert Storm, twice in Afghanistan), so nobody could question his credentials as an American patriot. But he is also known as one of the critics of the American foreign wars. In particular, he was one of the earliest military officers to criticize the War in Afghanistan.

Most of our conversation was devoted to me explaining the inner workings of the structural-demographic theory. We talked about popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and state fiscal fragility. Towards the end, Davis asked me, “If you could pick one thing to give America the best chance to avoid a violent collapse… what would it be?” I, of course, replied that what we need to do is shut down the wealth pump. For the details, see the last chapter (Chapter 9) of End Times.

I should add that since the book was published two years ago, my research team has been gathering detailed quantitative data on how past societies exited their crises. This project is still developing, but it looks like shutting down the wealth pump is a necessary condition. See How Do Societies End “End Times”?

We also discussed some of the recent headlines, such as the coverage of the Tianjin Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, leading me to talk about The Deep Roots of Today’s Geopolitics.

When Danny and I listened to the speeches of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, one thing that struck me was how often they repeated the word “cooperation” (and it’s also part of the name, SCO). The evolution of cooperation remains a contentious issue in social sciences. It’s what my book Ultrasociety is about. The problem is that the fruits of cooperation are shared among all, but costs are born only by those who contribute. This creates a huge incentive to free-ride. To cut the long story short (as I wrote a whole book about it), cooperation evolves when a group of potential cooperators is threatened by an outside force. In other words, it is the pressure (military, economic sanctions, ideological) from the West/NATO that is inducing China and Russia (and India, Iran, North Korea) to strengthen their cooperative organization.