Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Complex human societies, includingour own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible webof mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can frayeasily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internalconflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.

Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizinghistorical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and areslow to subside. The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medievaland early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, tocite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period ofinstability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Ageand the “violent 1910s.”