This Salon article summarizes many of the conclusions in Turchin's new book: Hope in "End Times": Peter Turchin's analysis of our coming collapse could help us avoid it:
For all its breadth and depth, there's a simple message at the core of "End Times": At the heart of our problems, Turchin writes, is "a perverse 'wealth pump' ... taking from the poor and giving to the rich," and we have to find a way to turn it off.
This reflects "one of the most fundamental principles in sociology, the 'iron law of oligarchy,'" he writes, "which states that when an interest group acquires a lot of power, it inevitably starts using that power in self-interested ways." For example, while wages fell far behind the growth of economic productivity from 1979 onward, Turchin cites analysis from the Economic Policy Institute indicating that three-fourths of that gap was due to elite-driven policy shifts: weakened labor standards, the erosion of collective bargaining, corporate globalization and so-called fiscal austerity.
Diminished economic conditions for the less educated were accompanied by a decline in the social institutions that nurtured their social life and cooperation. These institutions include the family, the church, the labor union, the public schools and their parent-teacher associations, and various voluntary neighborhood associations."
