alt Hacker NewsNot a historian nor economist, but to my layman's mind, these revolts seem like a recurring phenomenon whenever long running economic cycles reach that point at which the aristocracy overreaches while trying to suppressing growing public sentiment against them, not unlike in Polybius' anacyclosis. But unlike Polybius' cycles, as technology improves, the likelihood of a successful reset at the end of a cycle, gradually diminishes with each cycle. I've recently started on Piketty's Capital, and he too alludes to the possibility that the post-industrial-revolution spiral into inequality could have continued uninterrupted into the 20th century and beyond, had it not been for the socioeconomic shock of the world war. Looking at the current trajectory of automation of intellectual labour and surveillance technology, I too am starting to worry that the odds of breaking the current cycle are slim.
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I know there are some criticisms of Capital in the 21st Century and Picketty himself, but the book changed how I see the world profoundly, I cannot recommend it highly enough to anybody interested in these topics. The audiobook is a good way to digest it for the average person.
The world war helped via wealth destruction and redistribution. Polybius' theory also has Arabic (Khaldun) and Chinese analogues. In China it looks like a 300-ish year cycle driven by wealth/land concentration and elite corruption which ends with peasant revolts, a power vacuum, peasants taking back their own land, and a new dynasty formed by rebels or invaders, after which the new elite slowly begins encroaching on the peasants and taking their land again.
If I generalize a bit: sometimes conditions change enough for the system as a whole to become unviable, but the entitled part of the population still tries their utmost to keep those entitlements.
Usually, it was a tiny elite, but nowadays, in the time of heavy pension systems, we might actually have succeeded in building an untenable system for a massive part of the population.
The revolts kept on coming back because people hated to being slaves and working for others for (almost) free.
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Something else is going to happen this time, or really is happening already: people vote with their feet and stop having children.
On one hand wealth is being pooled into a smaller number of people, on the other it's becoming difficult to have anyone invested in working harder - and for good reason, as there's little payoff in that.