The number of households worth $5 million or more increased sevenfold, and the number of mere millionaires went up fourfold. A similar, if smaller, upsurge happened lower on the food chain. That may sound like a lot, but by 2019, controlling for inflation, the number had increased tenfold. Back in 1983, 66,000 American households were worth at least $10 million. To understand the root causes of the current crisis, let’s start by looking at how the number of über-wealthy Americans has grown. Both offer lessons about today’s dysfunction and, more important, how to fix it. But the second led to a period of unusually broad-based prosperity. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. These forces have played a key role in our current crisis.
The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction-when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions. The first is popular immiseration-when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown.
My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?Īll human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today.
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