Historians Counted the People Who Start Revolutions — The Count Is Rising Again

🔴 Support the channel and get exclusive content:   / meridianlabs   In 1837, a village schoolteacher in southern China failed a provincial examination for the third time and collapsed. He was carried sixty miles home on a bamboo litter. Thirteen years later he raised an army, and by the time it was put down, somewhere between 20 and 30 million people were dead — a toll comparable to the whole of the First World War. He was not a madman who came out of nowhere. He was one of hundreds of thousands of men the Qing state was manufacturing on a fixed schedule: highly literate, fully credentialed, and structurally guaranteed to fail. This is the story of elite overproduction — the claim that revolutions are not led by the desperate poor but by disappointed elites, and that the surplus which fuels them is countable, in ordinary published statistics, years before the unrest arrives. From Jack Goldstone's Political Stress Indicator to Peter Turchin's 2010 letter in Nature that named the decade in advance, from the Oxford enrolment records of the 1630s to the two-thirds of the French Third Estate who held a law degree, from Weimar students capturing the universities two years before Hitler took the state to a Federal Reserve spreadsheet published every three months, we follow the same ratio to its most unsettling conclusion — that every number in it is a measurement of a society succeeding, not failing, and that the two historical exits are either voluntary surrender by the wealthy or the destruction of the surplus itself. 0:00 Intro 2:10 Four Failures 11:09 Twenty Thousand Chairs 19:54 The Cancelled Class 31:11 A Room Full of Lawyers 41:14 The Letter in Nature 52:25 The Count, Published Quarterly 1:07:35 The Strongest Objection 1:20:11 The Immune System Turns 1:24:14 The Cases Keep Arriving 1:29:11 Why the Gap Becomes Violence 1:33:49 The Largest Crowd Ever Assembled 1:41:10 The Wall Starts Moving 1:49:07 The Only Two Exits 1:52:39 You Are In The Count Grounded in primary sources, including: Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1991), and "Demographic Structural Theory: 25 Years On," Cliodynamics (2017) Peter Turchin, "Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade," Nature 463, 608 (2010) Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord (2016) and End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023) Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov, Secular Cycles (2009) Peter Turchin and Andrey Korotayev, "The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade: A retrospective assessment," PLOS ONE (2020) Lawrence Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England, 1560–1640," Past & Present (1964) Mark H. Curtis, "The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England," Past & Present (1962) Robert Darnton, "The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France" (1971) and The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982) Francis Bacon, "Of Seditions and Troubles," Essays (1625) Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (1970) James C. Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," American Sociological Review (1962) Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society and Politics in Imperial Germany (1982) and The Unfree Professions (1990) Federal Reserve Bank of New York, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates National Association for Law Placement (NALP) salary distribution data American National Election Studies (ANES) feeling thermometer data Scott Alexander's critical review of Ages of Discord #EliteOverproduction #PeterTurchin #Cliodynamics #JackGoldstone #StructuralDemographicTheory #Revolution #CollapseOfCivilizations #TaipingRebellion #HongXiuquan #FrenchRevolution #EnglishCivilWar #WeimarRepublic #CounterElites #CredentialInflation #Underemployment #WealthPump #AgesOfDiscord #EndTimes #Polarization #History #Documentary #SystemsThinking #Sociology #PoliticalViolence #AIandJobs