FLASHBACK: Peter Turchin: Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Society Frays. “Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse. . . . We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.”

That’s funny, I’m reading his War And Peace And War: The Rise And Fall Of Empires right now.

Related: How To Make The U.S. Collapse-Proof. Problem: Insufficient opportunities for graft.