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DESCRIPTION:For our August and September meetings we are reading End Times: Elites, 
 Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter 
 Turchin.\n\nFor  our August meeting we’ll be reading the first two 
 chapters, which is about half of the book.\nFor  the  September  
 meeting  we will finish the book.\n\nBack in 2010, when Nature magazine 
 asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his 
 models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration 
 that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years 
 since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End 
 Times reveals why.\n\nThe lessons of world history are clear, Turchin 
 argues: When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips 
 too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As 
 income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the 
 hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to 
 become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth 
 pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of 
 such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites 
 inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular 
 resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show 
 that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death 
 spiral it's very hard to exit.\n\nIn America, the wealth pump has been 
 operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our 
 current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along 
 the path to violent political rupture.  That is only one possible end 
 time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.\n\nStrike Debt 
 Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and 
 radical economic thinking. Previous readings have included Doughnut 
 Economics, Limits, Banking on the People, Capital and Its 
 Discontents, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, The 
 Deficit Myth,  Revenge Capitalism, the Edge of Chaos blog symposium 
 , Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, The 
 Optimist’s Telescope, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing 
 Capitalism, Exploring Degrowth, The Origin of Wealth, Mine!, The Dawn 
 of Everything  A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Beyond 
 Money, Less is More,  Cannibal Capitalism,  Debt, the First 5000 Years 
 and Poverty, By America.\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2023/07/18/18857406.php
SUMMARY:Strike Debt Bay Area Book Group: 'End Times' by Peter Turchin
LOCATION:Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online 
 invite.
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2023/07/18/18857406.php
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