Peter Turchin and Jean Twenge

Climatology, the Periodic Table, and Those Damn Millennials

I was initially writing this as a comment in response to Tove’s recent article at Wood From Eden, but it got huge.

Imagine you are a grad student working as a computational climatologist. In your current work, you’re focusing on weather patterns, and you’ve modeled the atmosphere as a neutral gas with temperature, pressure, position, and momentum in order to understand air currents. Your work is extremely useful at predicting temperature across the world, explaining why in London (latitude 51° N) winters are over 6° C warmer than winters in Boston (latitude 42° N).¹

Let’s say you are very successful. Your work is featured by important blogs, and a think tank hires you on to look at climate change. They want you to be able to understand and predict trends in precipitation and temperature on both a local and planetary scale, and, to offer policy suggestions for controlling the change in temperatures.

Question: Do you A) continue to model the atmosphere as a neutral gas with temperature, pressure, position, and momentum? Or, do you B) include some information about the chemical constituents of the atmosphere?

Hopefully you understand that A isn’t the right choice here. If your models don’t factor in the amount of water or CO2 in the air masses you’re looking at, you will now find you aren’t able to understand the way heat enters the system and is trapped, or released, through the atmosphere. You won’t even be able to predict rainfall or cloud cover without water.

This is something everybody gets: Matter is pretty well organized into this thing called the Periodic Table. The Periodic Table is a Big Deal. I don’t know where you grew up, but every high school student in Anglophone nations grows up learning about it in high school:

In case this is new for you, I’m not making it up, really, I got it from Wikipedia

There is nothing surprising, controversial, or even interesting about this. Climatologist? Studying stuff made of matter? OK! Understand the properties of different atoms and molecules that make up that matter! Not all matter is the same!

Peter Turchin and Just About Every Sociologist Ever

Much though I love climate, I’m not trying to talk about climate. Instead, I’m trying to talk about just about everybody who ever talks about society.

Society, like the atmosphere, has constituents. The atmosphere is made of gasses? Society is made of people. Not all gasses are alike? Not all people are alike.

But sociologists like Peter Turchin routinely want to talk about humans as though they’re a poorly differentiated mass of stuff. He has a background in biology, so he understands niches, ecosystems, rates of reproduction, all of that. He also recognizes that things like education and social status are variables that we need to reckon with, and he gets a lot of mileage out of those things, talking about elite overproduction as a driver of political unrest.

So Tove describes Peter Turchin’s model of historical cycles like this:

When people starve and see no realistic opportunities to have children and grandchildren, many of them get desperate and risk-taking… People whose job it is to kill people, will start killing each other when their job security and very existence is threatened. Makes sense. 

But Peter Turchin means that the same kind of structural-demographic cycles continued also in post-Malthusian times. In 2016 he launched Ages of Discord, a book on American history from the 1820s Era of Good Feelings to 2010. In that book he assumes that the same kind of cycles of popular well-being and immiseration, elite overproduction and elite contraction continues also now that starvation has ceased to be a concern.

…Saying that people get more violent than otherwise when they see their children starve to death is one thing. Saying that people get violent when they see their relative wages decline compared to those of their parents is another thing. Saying that people who trained as warriors for their whole lives will turn their warring capacity against each other when they need to is one thing. Saying that people who go to university and only get minimum-wage jobs afterwards will get radicalized and sooner or later contribute to a major disruption of society is another thing. 

And then she brings in Johnathan Haidt to the rescue, and draws some cute elephant cartoons showing people justifying their feelings using reason. That’s Haidt’s big claim—that the emotional tail wags the rational dog² (although others have written about it as well³ ). If people generally behave irrationally, then, well, maybe they don’t have to be actually threatened for their selfish anxieties to kick in and encourage them to endorse extreme ideas or start shooting people up at the mall?

Unfortunately the research of Jonathan Haidt on human emotionality and morality isn’t really enough here. If we propose a baseline of irrationality in the world, then having your living wages decrease would encourage some selfish defense mechanisms to kick in. But this still wouldn’t have the same effect as literally starving people’s children to death.

But what if some people are more likely to explode when provoked than other people? What if some people are more emotional and neurotic, and thus prone to irrationality, catastrophizing, and overestimating the possibility of misfortune?⁴ What if some people are more ethical (i.e. higher in trait H) and thus averse to rationalizing what they want,⁵ as the narcissistic⁶ or subclinically psychopathic⁷⁸ (i.e. low in trait H) do? What if some people seriously have zero chill (i.e. lower in trait A), and are just prone to taking revenge?⁹

If we stop treating people as a poorly differentiated mass of stuff, then we’ll be much better able to understand 1) who is most at risk from minor stressors, and 2) whether the proportion of such people is changing over time. If more and more people are showing decresed ethical focus and increased emotional reactivity, that might indeed make more people prone to react to declining wages and social media unrest as Armaggedon.

So… is that what’s happening?

Jean Twenge to the Rescue

Jean Twenge has been researching the rise in cultural individualism for quite some time, now, finding generational differences in personality that flow downstream from technological changes, and the rising individualism new technologies make possible. If you’ve read my discussion on Human Societies Around the World, you might remember the way I’ve discussed how individualism dropped from foragers to agriculturalists, and then rose again towards modern society. In that article, I looked especially at ancient societies without survey data. But Twenge has data for people in the modern day world, and she found that as technology improved, as Boomers transitioned to Gen X to Millennials to Gen Z, individualism has risen across the Western world, bringing Narcissism and emotional reactivity in its wake.

For what it’s worth, I often feel disconnected from modern culture. To me, it looks like a lot of short-form comedy, shallow soundbites, and low-investment socializing. Some of it is hilarious, but there’s not much substance. (Submitted for your consideration: In the early 1990’s, George Carlin was at his funniest Jammin in New York; by the late 2010’s, Taylor Tomlinson was at her funniest reflecting on her dysfunctionality.)

Relating to people in the current cultural context can be difficult because of how often hyperventilating ego defenses come into play. I’m pretty confident, I’m not easily rattled, I score low in Narcissism, and the bizarre status games people play strike me as a bunch of zero-sum pointlessness.

But then, people high in H and A are largely inured to concerns about social status; it’s mostly Narcissists who care about that. This isn’t an inference based on my personal conception of what Narcissists are like; they straightforwardly endorse claims like “I want others to know I am a person of high status.”

I used to step on people’s toes saying obvious things like “You’re not special. None of us are special. Have you seen the world population figures lately?” You can probably imagine how that went down with the typical Westerner after about the year 2000. Instead, here is good social advice for placating New Capitalist Man: Avoid the obvious. The obvious will not help you. Instead, reassure him that he’s an Enviable and Important Person, and that no one notices what a mess he is.

If you want to understand the social media addiction, political polarization, and general unrest that’s infusing modern society, this matters. Because examining cross-generational trends, Jean Twenge finds Narcissism is increasing across society as Millennials and Gen-Z supplant Boomers and Gen-X. And so are the emotional anxieties that predispose people to irrationality.

Here’s what she finds in students, beginning with Millennials:

Today’s students score higher on assertiveness, self-liking, narcissistic traits, high expectations, and some measures of stress, anxiety and poor mental health, and lower on self-reliance. Most of these changes are linear; thus the year in which someone was born is more relevant than a broad generational label.¹⁰

And employees are more likely to have:

[U]nrealistically high expectations, a high need for praise, difficulty with criticism, an increase in creativity demands, job-hopping, ethics scandals, casual dress, and shifting workplace norms for women.¹¹

The usual caveats apply; you can never take any research without a pinch of salt. But I’ve been watching these changes for the last three decades ago, and personally find these results convincing.

Definitely they’re hard to explain in terms of brief changes that are going to return to normal any day now. People have blamed some of these changes on COVID, particularly those relating to anxiety and depression. But frankly, they were in the works long before that. For example:

We examined trends in mood, anxiety, and suicide-related outcomes among US college students from 2007 to 2018 across two large national datasets: (1) the National College Health Assessment (n = 610,543; mean age = 21.25; 67.7% female; and 72.0% White) and (2) the Healthy Minds Study (n = 177,692; 86% 18 to 22 years old; 57% female; and 74% White)… In both samples, rates of depression, anxiety, non-suicidal self-injury, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts markedly increased over the assessed years, with rates doubling over the time period in many cases. Anger, low flourishing, and suicide plans, each assessed in only one dataset, also exhibited upward trends. Conclusions: Findings demonstrate a broad worsening of mental health among US college students over the past decade, a concerning result meriting further attention and intervention.¹²

I’ve mentioned before the way today’s liberals have more psychological problems than conservatives. But everybody is becoming more fragile, even the conservatives. Maybe this explains why, when COVID did roll along, so many people whined like entitled little sissies showed such strong, principled objections to having to wear a mask in order to slow the spread of COVID.

So looking at society with more clarity, what we’ve got here is the sociological equivalent of global warming. With technological improvements and the rise of social media, social norms became more individualistic, and people became more narcissistic and sensitive. In this new cultural climate, having fewer opportunities than your parents is intolerable because everything is intolerable. Losing an election is intolerable. Getting kicked off of your favorite social media platform is intolerable. It’s like that meme that was funny a few years ago has gradually stopped being funny, because now we all have to live in this morass of narcissistic tantrums.

So in other words, the research of Jean Twenge verifies that Peter Turchin’s ideas about generational unrest can still apply, even during good times! All that’s required is for the social fabric to erode, just like it has.

Sorry if this doesn’t feel like much of a rescue. Maybe Twenge is rescuing us from not knowing whether Turchin’s thesis holds water, and we were, like, really really upset because we weren’t sure what to think? Whatever; hopefully I rescued you from being bored during the middle of the week while you waited for my usual Friday post.

1. I love the way this works: Winter temperatures in the midlatitudes don’t just drop as you go from the equators from the poles; they also drop as you move west to east along continents. Hate hot summers? Go upward, or poleward. Hate cold winters? Go west, towards the ocean.

2. Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological review, 108(4), 814.

3. Yong, J. C., Li, N. P., & Kanazawa, S. (2021). Not so much rational but rationalizing: Humans evolved as coherence-seeking, fiction-making animals. American Psychologist, 76(5), 781.

4. Newmark, C. S., Frerking, R. A., Cook, L., & Newmark, L. (1973). Endorsement of Ellis' irrational beliefs as a function of psychopathology. Journal of Clinical Psychology.

5. Hirsch, L. A., Ceschi, A., Sartori, R., & Weller, J. (2016). Are Honest People More Rational? Associations Between Personality and Decision-Making.

6. Rosenthal, S. A., & Pittinsky, T. L. (2006). Narcissistic leadership. The leadership quarterly, 17(6), 617-633.

7. LeBreton, J. M., Binning, J. F., & Adorno, A. J. (2006). Subclinical psychopaths. Comprehensive handbook of personality and psychopathology, 1, 388-411.

8. Dias-Oliveira, E., Morais, C., & Pasion, R. (2021). Psychopathic traits, academic fraud, and the mediating role of motivation, opportunity, rationalization and perceived capability. Journal of Individual Differences.

9. Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2012). Getting mad and getting even: Agreeableness and Honesty-Humility as predictors of revenge intentions. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(5), 596-600.

10. Twenge, J. M. (2009). Generational changes and their impact in the classroom: teaching Generation Me. Medical education, 43(5), 398-405.

11. Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, S. M. (2008). Generational differences in psychological traits and their impact on the workplace. Journal of managerial psychology, 23(8), 862-877.

12. Duffy, M. E., Twenge, J. M., & Joiner, T. E. (2019). Trends in mood and anxiety symptoms and suicide-related outcomes among US undergraduates, 2007–2018: Evidence from two national surveys. Journal of Adolescent Health, 65(5), 590-598.