Graz Schumpeter Lectures 2026 - Lecture 3

Complex human societies, organized as states, have been around for 5,000 years. For a while, they can experience periods of internal peace and order, roughly a century long, but inevitably (at least, in the past) they eventually enter periods of high social unrest and political disintegration—End Times. My research, which combines analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science, has identified the deep structural forces that undermine the stability of societies and drive them into a crisis. One of the most important, but little appreciated, such hidden forces is a perverse “wealth pump” that, under certain conditions, begins to transfer wealth from the “99 percent” to “1 percent.” If allowed to run unchecked, the wealth pump results in both relative impoverishment of most people and increasingly desperate competition among elites. Since the number of positions of real social power remains more or less fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. I will illustrate these concepts with historical examples.