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“You’ve got to be very
optimistic to think that this
is just a blip on the screen”

patterns that link social factors such as wealth a par with what happened around 1970, at the University of Maryland. He noticed that while,
and health inequality to political instability. peak of the civil rights movement and protests in nature, some prey always survive to keep
Sure enough, in past civilisations in Ancient against the Vietnam war. the cycle going, some societies that collapsed,
Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two This prediction echoes one made in 1997 by such as the Maya, the Minoans and the
recurring cycles that are linked to regular two amateur historians called William Strauss Hittites, never recovered.
era-defining periods of unrest. and Neil Howe, in their book The Fourth
One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three Turning: An American prophecy. They claimed
centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society, that in about 2008 the US would enter a period Borrowed time
then, as the population grows, the supply of of crisis that would peak in the 2020s – a claim To find out why, he first modelled human
labour begins to outstrip demand and so said to have made a powerful impression on populations as if they were predators and
becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while US president Donald Trump’s former chief natural resources were prey. Then he split
the living standards of the workers fall. As strategist, Steve Bannon. the “predators” into two unequal groups,
the society becomes more unequal, the cycle Turchin made his predictions in 2010, wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.
enters a more destructive phase, in which the before the election of Donald Trump and This showed that either extreme inequality
misery of the lowest strata and infighting the political infighting that surrounded his or resource depletion could push a society to
between elites contribute to social turbulence election, but he has since pointed out that collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when
and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a current levels of inequality and political the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each
second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and divisions in the US are clear signs that it is other,” says Motesharrei.
made up of two generations – one peaceful entering the downward phase of the cycle. Part of the reason is that the “haves” are
and one turbulent. Brexit and the Catalan crisis hint that the US is buffered by their wealth from the effects of
Looking at US history Turchin spotted not the only part of the West to feel the strain. resource depletion for longer than the “have-
peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. Worse, As for what will happen next, Turchin can’t nots” and so resist calls for a change of strategy
he predicts that the end of the next 50-year say. He points out that his model operates at until it is too late.
cycle, in around 2020, will coincide with the the level of large-scale forces, and can’t predict This doesn’t bode well for Western
turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a exactly what might tip unease over into societies, which are dangerously unequal.
period of political unrest that is at least on unrest and how bad things might get. According to a recent analysis, the world’s
How and why turbulence sometimes richest 1 per cent now owns half the wealth,
The gap between rich and poor is growing, turns into collapse is something that concerns and the gap between the super-rich and
seeding unrest among the have-nots Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the everyone else has been growing since the
financial crisis of 2008.
The West might already be living on
borrowed time. Motesharrei’s group has
shown that by rapidly using non-renewable
resources such as fossil fuels, a society can
grow by an order of magnitude beyond what
would have been supported by renewables
alone, and so is able to postpone its collapse.
“But when the collapse happens,”
they concluded,“it is much deeper.”
Joseph Tainter, an anthropologist at Utah
State University, and author of The Collapse
of Complex Societies, offers a similarly bleak
outlook. He sees the worst-case scenario as a
rupture in fossil fuel availability, causing food
and water supplies to fail and millions to die
within a few weeks.
That sounds disastrous. But not everyone
agrees that the boom-and-bust model applies
to modern society. It might have worked
MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER BROWN/MAGNUM PHOTOS imagine the US dissolving in an internal war
when societies were smaller and more
isolated, critics say, but now? Can we really
that would leave no one standing? There are
armies of scientists and engineers working on
solutions, and in theory we can avoid past
societies’ mistakes. Plus, globalisation makes
us robust, right?
This comes back to what we mean by

30 | NewScientist | 20 January 2018 collapse. Motesharrei’s group defines