Echoes of inequality and its effects through the ages

I've just read a fascinating article in New Scientist (18th August 2012 P46-49) about a mathematical ecologist by the name of Peter Turchin who has turned his hand to developing models based on history.  Turchin notes that there are cycles inequalityand civil unrest and that their length is approximately two generations. This two generation idea captured my attention because I'd read about Kondratieff,a Russian economist, who noted economic cycles of approximately 50-60 years.  I had always thought that this was about two generations: i.e. enough time for people to forget and, once again, allow the conditions that caused the problems to reoccur. 

As a modeller, Turchin is essentially looking for patterns across different histories and societies around the world.  All models simplify reality and his model leaves out the effects of climate change, or of remarkable individuals (for example), both of which have had significant effects on past societies.  However, the model provides a way to take lessons from the past and project them into the future, to make predictions.  Turchin predicts major civil unrest in the US and Europe around 2020 - not that far away (he adds that he hopes that he is wrong about this).  As part of his reasoning, he points to problems with the distribution of resources across the population - something that he argues is destabilising the social order.

Why does this excite me?  As a social scientist I am aware that civil unrest is very likely to be the outcome of overpopulation and us hitting resource limits.  In these, I also include climate change and its predicted effects. When resources become scarce, and the uneven distribution of these resources makes it difficult for much of the population to provide for their children, you have a system "primed with people who feel that they have very little to lose. However, Turchin notes that it is not the poor who usually rise up.  Generally the rich and powerful are the ones who incite unrest because they want to increase their status and power.  As we saw in Rwanda, the unrest can be triggered by people who incite violence by scapegoating a section of the community, but the underlying instability comes from the lack of resources.

We could work to do something about this - tax the rich, prevent them getting all the economic advantages they currently do, ensuring fair pay for employees (a decent living wage), work at community level to get people to know each other well and to learn to pool resources.  But, as we've seen, those in power are acting to prevent the rest of us from learning what is going on  and many of us feel too busy to do much and lack a plan of action or even to get to know our neighbours.

The other thing that Turchin’s work suggests to me is the importance of respecting all knowledge if we are to build a sustainable society.  The learning and ideas of young people give a society huge adaptive capacity, but it is equally important that this knowledge sits alongside the knowledge and collective experience of a society’s older members rather than just discarding it as outdated. It is this that can help us move past repeating the mistakes of the past.

Check out more about 'cliodynamics' (the mathematical study of history) here