(11-12-2016, 09:56 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I may need to provide a fuller response later. That said, and with the caveat that I haven't gone through his actual equations yet, I don't necessarily buy Turchin style evaluations of the elites.
That kind of formulation just begs the question of why too many elites cause a problem. In my opinion, the answer is almost certainly that the problem is caused when the concentration of wealth and power gets to the point where oligopolies undermine market efficiency.
Too many elites don't cause the underlying problem. That is economic inequality. The proximate cause is too many elites. Too many elites lead to elite conflict, e.g. the high degree of polarity and the inability to compromise and that makes solving the underlying problem difficult.
The secular cycle is long, in agrarian times it spanned multiple saecula. In modern times one. The problem I am referring to is that resolved in secular restructuring that is characteristic of the 4T, a period that spans a single turning. For example the 400 year Plantagenet cycle when into secular cycle crisis mode around 1310. It was finally "solved" in the brief 30 year Wars of the Roses, which constitutes a 4T. The 4T problem to be resolved was excess elites. The underlying problem was internal instability because of war among elites and the state that occurred in waves (the instability under Edward II which led to his death, the instability under Richard II, which led to his death ad replacement by his cousin, who then faced a decade of civil war, and finally the Wars of the Roses. This final episode solved the problem of all these elite-fueled internal wars by killing off excess elites.
For the last 4T, the problem was rising inequality that produced political-economic problems resulting in changes in business practice (development of marketing as a discipline), in financial markets (the beginning of large scale secular stockmarket cycles, increased sociopolitical turmoil leading to immigration restriction, and finally the 29 crash and depression that induced the 1932 critical election, followed by the New Deal and WW II economic policies that explicly reduced inequality, ending the underlying problems. Falling elite number prevented an effective reaction against this, preventing the problem from reasserting itself.