Our Age of Discord: A History of Possible Futures

Social and political turbulence in the United States and Western Europe has been rising over the past decade. Cliodynamics, the new trans-disciplinary field, which combines analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, has identified the deep structural forces that work to undermine societal stability and the negative socioeconomic trends that explain our current "Age of Discord."

One of the most important hidden forces is a perverse “wealth pump” that transfers wealth from the “99 percent” to “1 percent.” When unchecked, the wealth pump results in both relative impoverishment of most people and increasingly desperate competition among elites. Since the number of power positions in a society primarily remains fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order.

In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. In fact, today the USA finds itself in a situation that fits the definition of revolution, although, so far, fortunately a relatively non-violent one. How do we navigate our Age of Discord without descending into a hot civil war?

Peter Turchin is Project Leader at the Complexity Science Hub–Vienna, Research Associate at University of Oxford, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Connecticut. He is a Founding Director of Seshat: Global History Databank. Currently he investigates a set of broad and interrelated questions: How do human societies evolve? In particular, what processes explain the evolution of ultrasociality—our capacity to cooperate in huge anonymous societies of millions? What processes are responsible for the resilience of complex societies to external and internal shocks? What causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart? His books include Ultrasociety (2015), End Times (2023), and The Great Holocene Transformation (2025).