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Elite Overproduction
Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status. However, Turchin's model cannot foretell precisely how a crisis will unfold; it can only yield probabilities. Turchin likened this to the accumulation of deadwood in a forest over many years, paving the way for a cataclysmic forest fire later on. It is possible to predict a massive conflagration, Turchin argues, but not what causes it. Overview According to Turchin and Jack Goldstone, periods of political instability have throughout human history been due to the purely self-interested behavior of the elite. When the economy faced a surge in the workforce, which exerted a downward pressure on wages, the elite generally ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Graduation (Unsplash)
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the designation is reserved for colleges that have a graduate school. The word ''university'' is derived from the Latin ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". The first universities were created in Europe by Catholic Church monks. The University of Bologna (''Università di Bologna''), founded in 1088, is the first university in the sense of: *Being a high degree-awarding institute. *Having independence from the ecclesiastic schools, although conducted by both clergy and non-clergy. *Using the word ''universitas'' (which was coined at its foundation). *Issuing secular and non-secular degrees: grammar, rhetoric, logic, theology, canon law, notarial law.Hunt Janin: "The university in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Millennials
Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the Western demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with the generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996. Most millennials are the children of baby boomers and older Generation X; millennials are often the parents of Generation Alpha. Across the globe, young people have postponed marriage. Millennials were born at a time of declining fertility rates around the world, and are having fewer children than their predecessors. Those in developing nations will continue to constitute the bulk of global population growth. In the developed world, young people of the 2010s were less inclined to have sexual intercourse compared to their predecessors when they were at the same age. In the West, they are less likely to be religious than their predecessors, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Societal Collapse
Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline, and mass migration. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear. Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity, but some of them later revived and transformed, such as China, India, and Egypt. However, others never recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Maya civilization, and the Easter Island civilization. Societal collapse is generally quick but rarely abrupt. Anthropologists, (quantitative) historians, and sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collaps ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Credentialism And Educational Inflation
Credentialism and educational inflation are any of a number of related processes involving increased demands for formal educational qualifications, and the devaluation of these qualifications. In Western society, China, and India, there has been increasing reliance on formal qualifications or certification for jobs. This process has, in turn, led to credential inflation (also known as credential creep, academic inflation, or degree inflation), the process of inflation of the minimum credentials required for a given job and the simultaneous devaluation of the value of diplomas and degrees. These trends are also associated with grade inflation, a tendency to award progressively higher academic grades for work that would have received lower grades in the past. There are some occupations that used to require a high school diploma, such as construction supervisors, loans officers, insurance clerks, and executive assistants, that are increasingly requiring a bachelor's degree. Some ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Power Struggle
In political science and political history, the term power vacuum, also known as a power void, is an analogy between a physical vacuum to the political condition "when someone in a place of power, has lost control of something and no one has replaced them." The situation can occur when a government has no identifiable central power or authority. The physical analogy suggests that in a power vacuum, other forces will tend to "rush in" to fill the vacuum as soon as it is created, perhaps in the form of an armed militia or insurgents, military coup, warlord or dictator. The term is also often used in organized crime when a crime family becomes vulnerable to competition. Hereditary or statutory order of succession or effective succession planning are orderly ways to resolve questions of succession to positions of power. When such methods are unavailable, such as in failed dictatorships or civil wars, a power vacuum arises, which prompts a power struggle entailing political competitio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Higher Education Bubble In The United States
The higher education bubble in the United States is the concern that excessive investment in higher education could have negative repercussions in the broader economy. Although college tuition payments are rising, the supply of college graduates in many fields of study is exceeding the demand for their skills, which aggravates graduate unemployment and underemployment while increasing the burden of student loan defaults on financial institutions and taxpayers. The claim has generally been used to justify cuts to public higher education spending, tax cuts, or a shift of government spending towards law enforcement and national security. There is a further concern that having an excess supply of college graduates exacerbates political instability, historically linked to having a bulge in the number of young degree holders. Some economists reject the notion of a higher education bubble, noting that the returns on higher education vastly outweigh the cost, while others believe that the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Youth Bulge
A population pyramid (age structure diagram) or "age-sex pyramid" is a graphical illustration of the distribution of a population (typically that of a country or region of the world) by age groups and sex; it typically takes the shape of a pyramid when the population is growing. Males are usually shown on the left and females on the right, and they may be measured in absolute numbers or as a percentage of the total population. The pyramid can be used to visualize the age of a particular population. It is also used in ecology to determine the overall age distribution of a population; an indication of the reproductive capabilities and likelihood of the continuation of a species. Number of people per unit area of land is called population density. Structure A population pyramid often contains continuous stacked-histogram bars, making it a horizontal bar diagram. The population size is shown on the x-axis (horizontal) while the age-groups are represented on the y-axis (vertical). The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified in an outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. Attempts to contain it there failed, allowing the virus to spread to other areas of Asia and later worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020, and a pandemic on 11 March 2020. As of , the pandemic had caused more than cases and confirmed deaths, making it one of the deadliest in history. COVID-19 symptoms range from undetectable to deadly, but most commonly include fever, dry cough, and fatigue. Severe illness is more likely in elderly patients and those with certain underlying medical conditions. COVID-19 transmits when people breathe in air contaminated by droplets and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Underemployed Workers
In economics, a discouraged worker is a person of legal employment age who is not actively seeking employment or who has not found employment after long-term unemployment, but who would prefer to be working. This is usually because an individual has given up looking, hence the term "discouraged". A discouraged worker, since not actively seeking employment, has fallen out of the core statistics of the unemployment rate since he is neither working nor job-seeking. Their giving up on job-seeking may derive from a variety of factors including a shortage of jobs in their locality or line of work; discrimination for reasons such as age, race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and disability; a lack of necessary skills, training, or experience; a chronic illness or disability; or simply a lack of success in finding a job. As a general practice, discouraged workers, who are often classified as ''marginally attached to the labor force'', ''on the margins'' of the labor force, or as par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Right-wing Populism
Right-wing populism, also called national populism and right-wing nationalism, is a political ideology that combines right-wing politics and populist rhetoric and themes. Its rhetoric employs anti-elitist sentiments, opposition to the Establishment, and speaking to or for the "common people". Recurring themes of right-wing populists include neo-nationalism, social conservatism, and economic nationalism. Frequently, they aim to defend a national culture, identity, and economy against perceived attacks by outsiders. Right-wing populism in the Western world is generally associated with ideologies such as anti-environmentalism, anti-globalization, nativism, and protectionism. In Europe, the term is often used to describe groups, politicians, and political parties generally known for their opposition to immigration, especially from the Muslim world, and for Euroscepticism. Right-wing populists may support expanding the welfare state, but only for those they deem fit to receive i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Turchin
Peter Valentinovich Turchin (russian: Пётр Валенти́нович Турчи́н; born 1957) is a Russian-American complexity scientist, specializing in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics—mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies. He is currently Editor-in-Chief at ''Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution''. , he is a director of the Evolution Institute. Early life and education Peter Turchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, and in 1964 he moved with his family to Moscow. In 1975 he enrolled at Moscow State University's Faculty of Biology and studied there until 1977, when his father, Soviet dissident Valentin Turchin, was exiled from the Soviet Union. In 1980, Turchin obtained B.A. (''cum laude'') from New York University, and in his Ph.D. in from Duke University in 1985. Career Throughout his career Turchin has made contributions to various fields, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Structural-demographic Theory
In social science, the structural-demographic theory (SDT, also known as Demographic Structural Theory) uses mathematical modeling to explain and predict outbreaks of political instability in complex societies. It originated in the work of sociologist Jack Goldstone and has recently been developed further by the quantitative historians Peter Turchin, Andrey Korotayev, Leonid Grinin and Sergey Nefedov. Theory As applied by Peter Turchin and colleagues, SDT divides historically observed societies into four components: the state, elites, the general population, and one processual component designed to measure political instability. These four components are each subdivided into different attributes, which fluctuate dynamically and influence one another through a series of feedback loops. For instance, the theory takes into account the numbers and composition of elites, the age structure and degree of urbanization of the general population, and the revenues and expenditures of the state ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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