The Structural-Demographic Roots of the UK Crisis Peter — Turchin

I am often asked, after my talks or on social media, to pass a judgment on the stability, or lack of it, of a particular country. For example, looking across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, one sees a lot of parallels with the crisis we are currently living through in the US. The rise of populism, increasing fragmentation of the political landscape—do these similarities reflect deep structural trends below the surface? Such questions can only be answered with a proper structural-demographic analysis.

A research team based in Moscow’s Higher School of Economics recently published such an analysis in Cliodynamics. The article by Ortmans and colleagues brings a wealth of quantitative data (with over 30 figures) to inform our understanding of social pressures for instability in the UK. And it shows that similarities between the UK and the US go deep below the surface events.

As I explained in Ages of Discord, one of the most important factors in the structural-demographic analysis is the balance between the supply and demand for labor. The American economy has been operating under the conditions of labor oversupply since roughly the 1970s. The main causes were immigration, the entry of massive numbers of baby boomers and women into the labor force, the export of jobs overseas, and a few others (see a series of blogs I wrote on this).

Ortmans et al. show in their article that the UK developed the conditions of labor oversupply also during the 1970s, and for very similar reasons. The shift from labor undersupply to oversupply in the UK is clearly visible in the data on unemployment rate....

Ortmans and colleagues offer an answer—the rise and rapid triumph of neoliberalism, which happened during the same period in both countries. It would be interesting to make a formal test of this hypothesis. If we can develop a quantitative measure of the influence of neoliberal ideas over the minds of various governing elites in European countries, then would it correlate with the increased economic inequality and other structural indicators? 

This would be a very interesting project.

Cliodynamica — A Blog about the Evolution of Civilizations
The Structural-Demographic Roots of the UK Crisis
Peter Turchin | professor at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Mathematics, and the vice president of the Evolution Institute.