@samuelszuchan: In 2017, a former beetle ecologist predicted that the United States would experience more than 100 events of political instability in each five-year period of the 2020s. This past February, 2026, he counted how many such events had occurred over the most recent five-year period. The total had just passed 100. His name is Peter Turchin, and he first made his name studying population cycles in pine beetles before shifting to people. He later explained to Time that nobody had much reason to believe he wasn't crazy for switching subjects. In a 2010 letter to Nature, Turchin pointed to four drivers of future instability: stagnant wages, rising inequality, high public debt, and "elite overproduction": a surplus of young people with advanced degrees. The 2026 data is striking. The United States awarded a record number of doctorates last year, 58,131, but just 8,100 Ph.D.'s received an academic job offer. In China, 3.7 million candidates applied for 38,000 civil-service positions (98 candidates per job); the government increased the age limit for Ph.D. holders taking the exam to 43. South Korea has the highest proportion of college-educated young adults in the O.E.C.D., 70.6%, and last year saw a record number of people in their twenties and thirties not working or looking for work: 717,000. That said, the theory has serious critics. The political scientist Yascha Mounk has called the broad claim of Turchin's theory "flat out wrong," and pointed out that the median household income for Americans with a bachelor's degree is $117,600. And last December, Turchin's own team published a paper finding that how crises are resolved is mostly unpredictable. The college wage premium has remained flat since 2000, though the proportion of workers with college degrees rose from thirty-one percent to forty-five percent; the reward hasn't shrunk, but the number of college graduates has ballooned. Yet Turchin's original claim was not that graduates would be poor but that there would be more of them than there were positions for them. Absorption, not income, was the variable. In 1843, after failing the imperial licensing exam in China for the fourth time, Hong Xiuquan declared himself God’s second son. The rebellion he led claimed the lives of at least twenty million people. He was a failed scholar, whose family had made great sacrifices to educate him.

Sam Szuchan

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Region: US

Friday 25 September 2026 22:00:00 GMT