Is there room in the world for so many rich people?

Is there a traffic jam at the summit?

For at least 30 years, Western societies have been producing more elites than they are able to digest.

There are more and more graduates from Cambridge or Harvard who do not find a place in the boards of directors of large multinationals, the leadership of the administration or the army, international institutions or parliaments.

At least a part of that surplus elite becomes indigestible.

They felt called to eat the world, but

overbooking

forces them to settle for the crumbs.

Perhaps they can afford not just the best wines on the planet, but even buy a vineyard in Tuscany or Napa.

But feeling deprived of access to effective political power and true social influence causes them a deep life dissatisfaction and, in some cases, incites them not to commit to the stability of the system (capitalism, parliamentary democracy, globalization, liberal consensus) or even to actively conspire to destroy it.

This supposed revolution of the disgruntled elites would explain, to a large extent, why we live in increasingly convulsive, violent and less stable societies.

That is the least the opinion of Peter Turchin, an American academic of Russian origin, father of a suggestive theory that he has baptized as overproduction of elites.

Turchin has gained a certain reputation as a guru in recent months.

He is supposed to have been the first to foresee, already in 2013, that 2020 would be a year of great disasters and political violence in the European Union and the United States, the preamble to a dismal decade.

The scholar assures that he reached his conclusion by applying to the historical events of the last 10,000 years a sophisticated qualitative analysis system that allows to detect recurring events and patterns.

And if there is a pattern that, according to Turchin, is always repeated over and over again, it is that of outbreaks of political violence that occur as elites proliferate in a disorderly manner.

The traffic jam at the summit would explain phenomena such as the crisis of feudal France in the fourteenth century, the fall of the Roman Empire or the collapse of the Jin dynasty, which made possible the invasion of China by the Mongols.

These principles were exhaustively developed in

Ages of dischord: A structural-demographic analysis of American history

("The ages of discord: a demographic-structural analysis of US history"), an essay by Turchin, unpublished in Spain, which was published in 2016 and which has been widely cited these days, as some of the predictions made in it were fulfilled, at least in appearance.

In his interviews and informative articles, Turchin draws on analogies that make the concept of elite overproduction more intuitive.

For example, the royal family of Saudi Arabia, an example of a manual.

The Saúd family has been expanding uncontrollably for decades and now has such a large number of princes and princesses that there are not enough positions to keep them all occupied.

Many of them lead an idle life, training in the best universities in the West, organizing parties or collecting art.

But for every wealthy, westernized princess who spends her life surrounded by wild orchids in mansions in London, Paris, and New York, there is at least one potential Osama Bin Laden: a resentful relative who dedicates her life to destroying the system she made for her family. immensely rich and prosperous.

Although his theory is partially inspired by the studies of social scientists such as James Wolf, who was the first to speak of excess elites as a factor of social instability, Turchin is a loose verse.

He trained as a zoologist and ecologist and studies human societies as if they were biological organisms subject to the laws of evolution.

Despite everything, more and more analysts pay attention to his theories.

Starting with the editor and finance expert John Maudin, author of an article in

Forbes

in which he assures that “the anti-system alliance between the victims of growing inequality and the dissatisfied elites explains current phenomena such as the emergence of increasingly aggressive populisms to the right. and left of the political spectrum: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders ”.

For Maudin, Turchin is probably hitting the nail on the head with his extravagant theory: “It may seem like a somewhat simplistic interpretation of a very complex phenomenon,” he argues, “but those who always insist that it is necessary to study phenomena in all their complexity they rarely reach conclusions or their conclusions do not explain anything.

Turchin has had the courage and intelligence to propose a plausible cause for the period of enormous political instability that we are experiencing ”.

Leticia Ruiz Rodríguez, vice dean of research at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid, admits that she is not familiar with Turchin's theory.

As soon as we expose it to him, he reacts skeptically: "I am reluctant to accept that the existence of a growing number of people trained to occupy relevant positions in the world of art, culture, politics or communication is a negative phenomenon."

In Ruiz's opinion, it is possible that this tendency to create “many” elite creates certain “collateral damages”, but it is very doubtful that these outweigh the benefits: “Improving the skills and capacities of citizens is one of the most effective ways that a society has to grow, strengthen and enhance its economic and social development ”.

When talking about traffic jams at the summit, Ruiz Rodríguez continues, it is forgotten that "we live in very dynamic societies where there is a continuous rotation of elites in the political, economic and social sphere."

In principle, they all fit.

There are no objective reasons why a surplus of talent, capacity and success produces social instability and leads to disaster.

Ruiz even questions the increasingly widespread notion that we are living in a particularly turbulent or unstable time: “I think that what is actually happening is that we have developed a strong collective aversion to uncertainty, when history shows us that even a few decades this uncertainty was the norm and stability was the exception ”.

For her, "in the most dynamic societies, citizens pose continuous demands to which the political powers must respond, and that generates a potential for change and instability that need not be negative."

What we have to worry about, in his opinion, "is not the instability itself, but the responses given to that instability."

Also the Canadian political scientist Eric Kaufmann, an expert in demography and social conflicts, disagrees with Turchin's “biased and opportunistic” analysis.

In an article in

UnHerd

magazine

, Kaufmann argues that political instability is not produced by an indigestible glut of elites, but by the usual suspects: unequal distribution of wealth and unresolved cultural and ideological conflicts.

Kaufmann shares Turchin's will "to inject a little more science into the study of history", but rejects the ancient zoologist's unlimited faith in "closed mathematical models that allow predicting how empires expand and contract and societies consolidate or they disintegrate following predetermined biological rhythms ”.

The political scientist recalls that Turchin began by studying how parasitic species such as the potato beetle behave and how they proliferate, and in his theory he seems to want to study the elites as if they were “not a sophisticated and complex abstraction, but the potato beetle of history and human societies ”.

Are the elite universities in which the ruling class is formed a hotbed of anti-establishment radicals frustrated because they do not receive the recognition they believe they deserve?

Kaufmann opines not: "It is true that the new left, populist and postmodern, has a lot of popularity among students of elite universities such as the so-called Ivy League," he explains, "but most of these young radicals, as soon as they get their title and enter the labor market, they become increasingly moderate citizens and prone to political correctness, as has always happened ”.

Turchin believes that a large part of contemporary political phenomena, from Brexit to the assault on the Capitol through patriotic, neo-sovereign, xenophobic or Eurosceptic revolutions, are explained by the existence of a dissatisfied elite that the system is not being able to digest.

His is a thesis as original as it is fascinating, although most of his colleagues in the field of social sciences do not share it.

You can follow ICON on

Facebook

,

Twitter

,

Instagram

, or subscribe here to the

Newsletter

.