Peter Turchin
Article
Peter Turchin is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 09, 2021 and September 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Peter Turchin has opinions”; “Peter Turchin has opinions !”; “Peter Turchin thinks of polarization as one aspect of a general trend towards more or less conflict in societies”. It most often appears alongside Google, Joe Biden, US.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: February 09, 2021
- Last seen: September 04, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Google (2 shared issues)
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- Joe Biden (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 1960s America (1 shared issues)
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- 1964 Civil Rights Act (1 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- abundance liberalism (1 shared issues)
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- Afghanistan (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- Agarwal caste (1 shared issues)
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- AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test (1 shared issues)
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- alt-right (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But also: the average country at the average time is about as polarized as the US is now. This confirms Klein’s thesis that the US isn’t in a historically unprecedented state of hyperpolarization. It’s coming out of a period of unusually low polarization, into a more normal era. We may have gotten a little more polarized than average in the past few years, but only a little. So Klein’s question is: does that mean we’ll eventually even out at a normal level of polarization? Or are we briefly passing through normal on our way from “super low” to “super high”? (Peter Turchin has opinions!)
Inline links: has opinions
(can polarization really have such major effects? Peter Turchin thinks of polarization as one aspect of a general trend towards more or less conflict in societies. The polarization does not directly and solely cause the trend - it's a combination of many things interacting - but it's a contributing factor. He links high points in polarization levels to low wages, poor health, and even organized violence.)
Inline links: Peter Turchin thinks
I find Peter Turchin’s theories of civilizational cycles oddly helpful here, maybe moreso than for civilizations themselves. Riffing off his phase structure:
Inline links: theories of civilizational cycles
I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.
Inline links: New study claims consultants are actually good, tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, The Argument, a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, criticizes the article, infant brain waves, debate on X, has a presponse here, first foray into housing policy