The Structural-Demographic State of America

The Wealth Pump

One recurrent question arising when journalists interview me is, “what is your prediction/forecast for my country (Germany, Brazil, Japan…)?” At this point I have to explain that cliodynamic analysis is not prophecy (see The Prophecy of the Fourth Turning and Scientific Prediction ≠ Prophecy). What makes it different is its reliance on three methodological foundations. The first one is computational models whose role is to translate verbal assumptions we make about processes driving dynamics into precise quantitative predictions stemming from these assumptions. Second, our forecasts have to incorporate uncertainty stemming from both our imperfect knowledge and from unpredictable actions of people in the future (thus, we need to use the method of multipath forecasting). Third, and most important one, is time-series data capturing changes in structural-demographic variables.

The main classes of variables we need to know about for a structural-demographic analysis are (1) popular well-being (or alternatively, immiseration), (2) elite overproduction and intraelite conflict (or not), and (3) state fiscal health and legitimacy. These are the driver variables, whose output is (4) social turbulence and political instability.

For each of these four variable classes, ideally, we would like to have multiple proxies. The first step in the analysis, thus, is to determine whether specific proxies give us a similar idea of what is happening with the underlying structural-demographic variable. For the analysis in my 2016 book Ages of Discord I was able to locate data on c. 40 specific proxies (see Table 11.1 there). Such detailed time-series data in my US database I’ve collected then up to 2015.

But in the past 10 years a lot has happened. Shortly after the publication of Ages of Discord, Donald Trump was elected for the first time, then we had four years of Joe Biden, and now Trump again. Furthermore, as I argued in the inaugural post on this Substack, we are now in revolution. What I’d like to do in the next several weeks is to bring up structural-demographic data up to date (realistically, up to 2024).

Between 1975 and 2015 all structural-demographic variables trended in the negative direction, predicting an impending crisis. The main question I want to ask with this data update is, what happened to these trends in the past 10 years? Are there any signs of a trend reversal in any driving variables? In this post I start with the most fundamental driver: the wealth pump.