 You actually enjoyed your sumptuous lunch. So the next presenter is Peter, and the third of the presentation is The World's Pump, Popular Immiseration, Elite Overproduction, and the Path of Political Disintegration. So over to you, Peter. Thank you. Okay, so, sorry that I can't attend. Physically, hopefully this distant presentation works. The main question that motivates my presentation is whether there is a causal connection between economic inequality and social and political instability. Growing economic inequality, especially inequality in income and wealth is currently a broadly shared concern. It has been one of the topics of the Davos meetings, and obviously this conference today is addressing that. And it is often adused that growing inequality is a source of political discord. But is it, and if it's the case, how does it do it? What is the direct mechanism? In fact, there are some reasons to doubt that growing inequality might be a direct mechanism of instability because humans are very bad at perceiving inequality. There is a number of studies that show that people, when they are asked to estimate the degree of income or wealth inequality, they are basically, their opinions essentially have nothing to do with what is actually, is measured by economists. So what I will argue in my talk is that inequality is an excellent proxy for the actual mechanisms that drive instability. But the actual drivers of instability are several of which I will focus on two popular immiseration and elite overproduction. And at a deep structural level, the force that drives those and ultimately instability is what I would refer to as the wealth bump. So that's the plan. To motivate a little bit what's coming, let me go back to 2010 when Nature, the journal Nature asked a number of scientists to make some forecast for the next decade, that is from 2010 to 2020. And that's when I published the forecast that political instability, the growing political instability, may be a contributor in the coming decade. And 10 years later in 2020, together with my co-author, Andrei Karateyev, we have revisited this forecast to see whether it had anything to do with reality. And this is one of the graphs that we have looked at. We looked at several measures of instability. One of them was anti-government demonstrations. A very similar picture shows up when we look at violent riots. And so we submitted this paper in early 2020 saying that this forecast was actually right on the money. And of course, as the paper was in review the summer of 2020, the riots following the death of Jim Floyd and have exploded. And of course, in January of 2021, we had the shocking event of, which has been known as the storming of the capital. So the forecast seems to have been quite good. The question is, what was it based on? It was not what I would call a prophecy. It was a scientific prediction because there is a specific mechanism on which it was based. And it was also, the forecast was a scientific prediction in the sense that I wanted to stick my neck out, make an out of sample prediction to see whether the mechanisms that have been identified by our theory have actually are working in the way that we thought they are working. So here's what I would do now is I would talk about the theory. So this is structural demographic theory and it posits several forces that drive social instability and political violence for because I don't have a lot of time, I'll focus on two main ones. These are the, first of all, mass mobilization potential and it is based on popular emissaration resulting from the decreased living standards for the majority of population which results in growing mass mobilization potential. This is a fairly obvious effect of growing inequality which many have brought up and of course, since the days of Malthus that this particular force has been much in demand in the discussion. But it turns out that while it's one of the important conditions the second condition is much actually much more much more predictive of immediate troubles to come. And that's inter-elite competition which results from when elite numbers increase relative to the general population. As a result of that, we have too many elite aspirants flying for a limited number of positions in power and as a result of that, this elite of reproduction causes elite inter-elite competition, eventually conflict and that is the result of that. In our analysis of about 100 now cases of past societies sliding into crisis and then out of it that turns out to be the most universal and most important force. In addition to that, there are other dimensions the state fragility and international environment especially for smaller countries international environment plays a vital role but those I will focus on the first two. So let's talk about and specifically I will use the example of the United States which I have started to vary from inside out quite over the past 20 years. And I will illustrate how these two forces lay out in real life in a particular example of one particular state. So let's look at real wages, so wages adjusted for inflation. As you can see here on this graph I'm looking at two measures of unskilled wages and manufacturing wages. Manufacturing wages is a pretty good proxy for median wages for which we have better data more recently but for manufacturing wages we actually have data going back 200, more than 200 years I'll show that graph in a minute. And what you can see is that in the late 1970s there was a definite phase transition up to that point for the previous two generations the wages for both unskilled and manufacturing workers have been growing quite rapidly and almost linearly. And in the process, let's say the wages for manufacturing workers increased by increased four fold which is quite a remarkable achievement for the, in fact, it was unprecedented in human history to see such a long-term sustained increase in the general well-being. But then there was a something happened and the wages stagnated or even declined. So what was the reason? Very briefly, I have built a very simple model in which we look at the effects of, first of all, the GDP per capita, which is the blue line here. You can see that the GDP per capita shows no break in the 1970s that has slowed down prior to around the crisis of 2007-2008. And by the way, notice that all these graphs they end in 2012 because that's when I published a book Ages of Discord in which you can see all the details. This publication happened in 2016 just a couple of months before the elections in which Donald Trump became the president. Anyway, so it's not because economists load that much. That's not the reason why real wages stopped growing. If you include estimates of labor demand and supply, you'll get now more something less linearly increasing but still not quite right. But if you include praxis for social norms, which here are proxied by real minimum wage. And you can discuss that during questions, why this is actually a good proxy for that. So once we include those ideological and institutional factors, certainly the model works very well. In fact, it even predicts that decrease up to 1990s and slight increase during the 1990s. Right, so essentially, again, I don't have time to go deeply into this model, but the main take-home message that I take from here is that we can delve into this processes and understand why economic measures of well-being went through a phase transition during the 1970s. And the economic well-being measures have been paralleled by additional measures of well-being. I have looked in particular into biological proxies and also other proxies such as social proxies. But here again, let me just briefly say that here's one very good measure which actually works very well for the thousands of human history in terms of measuring well-being. And of course, it is actually a surprise that such Malthusian measures work so well in our supposedly post Malthusian age. In any case, this graph shows the average height for four different segments of population, white men, black women and black women. And notice that the scales from men and women are shifted because for obvious reasons. And what you see here again, you see that this proxy for biological well-being was showing quite a nice increase and then stagnation. If you compare it to the average height of let's say Western European populations, they continue to grow. Whereas in the United States, they stagnate it. So if we now look at the average of these things rather than four different segments, the average is this thick gray turf. And if we compare it to economic wages, but shifted in time, okay? So average height is by the birth cohort of the cohort of the population. So this is the upper scale. You can see the break here happens around 1960. Whereas the real wage, the break happens in the late 1970s, as you can see on the bottom scale. So the shift here is 15 years. The way I interpret this graph is that first of all, we know that there are two growth spurts. The first growth spurts when babies grow, then the growth slows, and then there is a second growth spurts during the teenage years. And we just roughly speaking about 15 plus, minus years of age. So essentially what this graph says is that when the economic well-being of the parent generation stopped growing, right? It has affected the heights of the next generation of their children or who were born, let's say the breakpoint, the children born in 1960 or about 15 years in 1975, all right? And so the conditions under which they have experienced their second growth spurts were the economic conditions. Apparently it was the driver for this stop in the advance of average stature. And, okay, I'll mention some other biological proxies or social biological proxies, but let's talk about some other biological proxies. I'll mention some other biological proxies or social biological proxies, but let's, as I said, we have data going back more than 200 years actually to the very beginnings of the American Republic. And when you do that, if you look at real wages, right? And especially if you look at GDP per capita, you don't see, well, let me put it this way. United States has changed quite dramatically during the last 200 years, especially in starting in the mid-19th century as a result of industrialization and things like that. And so when we look at this data, especially on GDP, what we see is increasing even seemingly accelerating growth of GDP per capita, which is, as economists make this point, is a measure of average income, right? But there are some very important and interesting cyclic processes happening around this overall increase. And we can reveal it by looking at what I call relative wage. So the relative wage is we take the median, some measure of median wage, and divide it by a measure of average income, all right? And so when we do that, when we divide this graph by that graph, we get this. So suddenly what we see here is there are periods when the relative wage was growing up and there are periods when it was growing down or stagnating. And then again, there are two cycles here. And this, I argue, it's a very important thing. So what's happening during these periods up to the 1830s and then from 1910 up to the early 1960s is that the wage grew faster than GDP per capita. So a measure of median income grew faster than mean income, right? So clearly something is happening with the redistribution here. And then there are periods when the opposite was happening. And so we looked at, in the previous slides, we looked at this period. And of course, there was some delay before the relative wage started decreasing and that has caused real wage, which is inflation-adjusted wage to start growing. But essentially during these periods, what we see here is that the fruits of economic growth are not equitably distributed between workers and others. They are disproportionately flowing towards the economic elites during these periods here and there. And so we can think about this process as a kind of wealth pump, which is of course the title of my talk. So the wealth pump at this point is pumping income from workers to economic elites. So the economic elites are not only capital holders. They are also CEOs who get wages, right? But they are economic elites. That's why it's important to look at the median wage rather than average wage. Because average wage averages CEOs together with their workers, but median wage or wage of unskilled labor, which looks at even lower levels of income distribution, that cuts off those top wages. And the wealth pump can operate in both directions. So during this period here, the wealth pump was actually working in reverse. It was giving more to the workers and taking away from the economic elites and the wealth holders. Okay. And now if we look at the second part. So here, let's look at this cycle, starting from around 1902 today. Then here are some very familiar measures of economic inequality. Here I show share of income by top 1% and share of wealth by top 1%. And what we see here is the universe of that, of the relative wage. So when relative wage is declining, sorry, when relative wage is growing, the economic inequality is declining and vice versa. So this is the operation of this wealth pump that I'm talking about. And here, of course, looking at the same period, you see that other measures such as deaths of despair, they show a very similar cyclic behavior, which is paralleled by the economic indicators. All right, so so much. I don't want to talk too much about emigration, but just mention that several practices that we can actually look through the more than 200 years of American history, they are changing in this. You have seen two cycles, essentially, of well-being during this period. And this is quite typical when we compare it to many other past societies. We see these recurrent ups and downs in measures of well-being when we do have good enough data to detect it. All right, so what about elite overproduction? First of all, let me give you a few definitions. So by elites, I mean the small percentage of population that concentrates social power in their ends. So it's a neutral definition. There is neither good nor bad. They're simply power holders. All right, so what does the wealth pump do when we compare it on the elite side of the equation? Declining real relative wages of workers set up this wealth pump that transfers wealth from workers to the economic elites. And so as a result of that, a larger fraction of GDP goes to those who consume labor, the economic elites, which are both capital holders of the economy. And this creates a favorable economic conjuncture for the economic elites and results in high rates of upward social mobility. Elite numbers as a result of that grow and so do their consumption levels. So far, so good. But the problem is that as in many dynamical systems, there are some delayed effects of such dynamics. Well, but first of all, let's take a look at some numbers. Here is, here are some data on the relative distribution of wealth. In the American population, we have good data from 1983 to 2019. And there should be soon, 2022 coming on online. But in any case, when we look at the percentage of house codes with net wealth, we can see that there are some data on the relative distribution and the percentage of house codes with net worth exceeding a certain, and this is by the way, inflation adjusted. So you're talking about measuring net worth in 1995 US dollars. What we see here is that the proportion of households has been increasing. So this is the effect of this wealth pump operating. The millionaires roughly 10% of the population now, well, 7% now increased from 3% to 7%. But the growth in larger wealth classes, such as decade millionaires, was even more remarkable. Here we see the more than five fold, six fold increase in the proportion of households that are half a billion dollars wealth or more. So here is this effect on the numbers of economic elites. All right. So the problem is that eventually, if the wealth pump is allowed to run long enough, eventually what's going to happen is the growing elite numbers and their consumption levels will overshoot the productive base, which is what the workers are producing. And as a result of that, remember that elites need to reproduce themselves. So the new elites, let's call them elite aspirants, right, their numbers at some point begin to be so large that there is not enough power positions, let's say in the politics or in economics. So the numbers, let's say economics, the number of CEOs and other type of officers in Fortune 500 companies is obviously limited, but also even more obviously the number of positions in politics. So there's only one president, only 100 senators and so on and so forth. That's fixed. And as the numbers of elite aspirants vying for these positions increase, then first of all is a result of that, is inter-elite competition. And secondly, as the number of elite aspirants, numbers of elite aspirants grow, there are numbers of frustrated elite aspirants who are denied this access to these positions begins to explode. So here we see it laying out in the political domain. You can see that the numbers of candidates, now these are your new primaries, because of course, most of the time, after the primaries, there's only two candidates. But if you count the number of candidates in both parties during the primaries, you can see that their numbers have been increasing in just that decade from 2000 and 2010. But what's more interesting is the number of candidates who have spent half a million dollars or more of their own money. So these are the millionaires, right? They have doubled during this period. So what's happening is that many of the wealth holders apparently want to aim to translate their economic power into political power. And you can give, I'm sure, you can think of a number of such individuals in American politics. And another measure is the cost of winning. This is in inflation-adjusted dollars. It has been growing also, showing the greater demand for this position and greater willingness to spend money to get them. So this is a clear process for increased repetition for... By the way, not all of these candidates are wealthy in their own right. Many of the newly wealthy individuals, instead of running themselves for office, they choose to fund other individuals. So essentially, the effect of increasing a number of wealth holders is translated into increased competition for political positions. And the problem is that as we get greater numbers of these surplus elites, some of them turn into political counter elites. These are the individuals who are willing to challenge the reigning regime. And in history, oftentimes even by a violent means, and in fact, the other side of the United States, but certainly they're willing to break the rules of the game. So this is how elite overproduction drives inter-elite competition, inter-elite conflict, rise of the counter elites, and then social and political instability. And just returning back to where I started, we can see now that inequality is not in this at least model. It's not a direct driver. It's a proxy for the direct drivers, which is immiseration and elite overproduction. So if we look at, this is what I did in my book pages of discord. I looked at the more than 200 years of American history. So the blue curve is an aggregated measure of well-being. And we can see here that it has gone through two cycles. And the red curve is a measure of instability. And so this was published in 2016, as I said. All right, so let's see. I'm almost out of time. So what I'll very quickly just talk about implications. And there are a number of applications. So my colleague, Walter Scheidel, has expressed a pessimistic view in his book, Great Leveler, right? Where he says that death is the Great Leveler. So basically a major violent shock is needed to reverse the economic inequality. I see a bit more optimistic. Essentially, entering into the crisis is relatively stereotypical. That's what our crisis DB investigations show. And interrelated conflict plays a key role together with mass mobilization. But the exit is hugely contingent and in fact, there could be both good and bad outcomes, as indicated in this graph. Sometimes the decline is mild and followed for rapid recovery, but there's also, you can also have complete collapse. So what we did, we actually looked at outcomes of crisis, measuring them by a collapse. I don't like the word collapse, because who knows what collapse means. So what we did is we broke it up into various dimensions. And then we can look at more than 100 cases in crisis DB and look at the distribution of the severity, where the severity means basically, we simply sum up the possible bad things that happen to societies. And what you see here, it's quite lopsided. Most of the time, the crisis lead to pretty dire consequences, but there is about 10, 15% of cases where the elites manage to pull together, adopt the right set of reforms, and sail the ship of the state through the turbulent waters without major bloodshed. All right, so to conclude, the structural causes of this court, I have shown you example using the United States, but they're quite generic, and they show up over and over in the modern 100 cases of past crisis. And we are now in the United States, we are clearly in crisis. We are at the cusp where, in fact, collective action can result in positive outcomes or negative outcomes. What will happen, we will see. And finally, I just want to say that I have a book coming out in June, which describes my current thinking about these issues much better. So if you are interested in what I have just told you, you can read in detail more about it in that book. And thank you very much for your attention. I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you very much, Peter, for your presentation. What to do is open up the four questions. So thank you very much for your presentation, Matteo Marcelli. And so one question I have is, how specific is what you have been discussing specific to the UIS? Because there is a, I mean, it's the country of, say, liberal economies at its best. And then so this link between politics and economics is particularly strong. So I wonder how much of this conclusion can be generalized to other, say, countries? Yes, in fact, I should say that the theory was developed on pre-industrial societies. And I started on this project, applying theory to the United States, because many times when I gave talks about the previous crisis, such as the English Civil War, even going back to the crisis of the Roman Republic and so on and so forth, people kept asking me where are we? So at a very deep and abstract level, these forces, emissuation and a little reproduction, they are playing out in a very similar ways in very different societies. However, you need, the theory has to be tailored to each society because as I was arguing, the critical dimension is what's happening to the elites. Now different societies have, there is a variety of ways in which elites are defined and recruited, regenerated. And so even if you look at western democracies, you compare United States, let's say to France, United States is basically a plutocracy. The reigning elite is the economic elite in collaboration with the political elites. But France is a bureaucracy. In France, the elites are created in different ways. And there are other examples of other societies, like in Egypt for example, it's militocracy essentially. So those details are very important. And that's why the general ideas, a little reproduction, they have to be filtered through the specific structures of different societies. And of course, obviously the democratic societies have different ways that power flows in them compared to autocratic societies and so on and so forth. So in answer to your question, if we take a step back from specific arrangements in which power flows in societies and focus on more structural, more fundamental issues, then the theory works surprisingly well and seems to be at this point essentially at the all-state level of the societies. So it looks to me that there is a particularly important positive feedback between, say, economics and politics in the sense that the economic elite control political power. And I wonder how much this is specific to the U.S., I mean this rise, which control and distribution politics. So there is a positive feedback loop. And my question was how much this is a universal feature or how much this is a necessary feature in your theory. So the necessary feature, as I said, is the elite of reproduction and immiseration. So, okay, let me give you another example. Let's take, let's look at a more traditional society in which the elites are mobility, landed mobility and things like that. So the way the wealth pump operates there is that when the elite of reproduction occurs, then the nobles basically oppress peasants and turn on the wealth pump. So instead of economic mechanisms that transfer wealth from commoners to the elites, in this case we have more coercion methods. So this is a variation on the theme. But essentially in any society where however elites are defined, whether economic, administrative, military or ideological, they need to support a certain level of income. And so when their numbers grow, inevitably they have to extract that income from the commoners. Luis Betancourt, it's great to see you again, Peter. You probably can't see me, but great talk. I had a question related to what you just said in this argument for how necessary the elite of a production and inter-conflict is necessary for your theory. I know it is, but I'm asking a clarification. The immiseration part seems very clear and particularly one that affects large fractions of the population, right, large majorities. But the elite of a production, specifically there's been arguments for example by Douglas North and others that some elite conflict between different groups of the elite actually can lead to more impersonal institutions that then can start to serve the more general population and eventually lead to better government. But you seem to have an argument that doesn't open that as a possibility and tends to be negative. So could you elaborate a little bit on that? When is that potentially a good thing or what is it necessarily about? Sure. Yeah, we have to think dynamically, which is not probably a surprise to you. So I'm talking about as a scientist entering into crisis. And then remember then society somehow have to get out of it. So in Douglas North and his colleagues, for example, they look specifically at the glorious revolution. The glorious revolution was the exit from about 60 years of conflict which started, you know, in Scottish Wars 1639. And then it ended in 1690s with the new arrangements. So of course, when societies exit from this crisis, sometimes though, by the way, they don't exit. They essentially have political fragmentation. So think about Roman Empire, which has fragmented and there was no new Roman Empire. But frequently we do have reconstitution. And so England, for example, reconstituted itself. So think about it dynamically and both about, you have to look at the path to the crisis and then the path out of the crisis. Now, let me just add one thing. So, you know, immigration is important. But if you think about it, it's not, societies can leave actually be pretty stable with quite a lot of immigration as long as the elites are united and the state is strong that the state can suppress all those present rebellions. It's really, that's why the elites are critical. Successful, let's put it this in quote marks, all successful revolutions in civil wars were a result of intra-elite conflicts. Even today, if you look at Donald Trump, who is sort of the main revolutionary, so to speak, he is not practically immiserated himself. But he's channeling the tens of millions of immiserated Americans. So this is Sanjay Jain from Delhi. I'd like to ask a question which might or might not be related to what you're talking about, but I'm just wondering what it is. This is the question of climate change and ecological catastrophe. And first of all, do you think that the processes that are leading to the political instability that you talked about are the processes that are also leading to the climate change and ecological overshoot related? That's one. And the second is that how is this inequality and the wealth pump that you mentioned, how is this going to play itself out in the context of the climate crisis and the ecological overshoot? So the first question we have, this has not yet been published, but we have analyzed crisis GB because there's plenty of data on weather proxies. And essentially to cut the long story short, whether climate worsening seems to serve often as a trigger for crisis. But the key question is whether the societies have resilience. This resilience when population is not immiserated and elites are not overproduced, the social stability and resilience is very high. And societies adjust reasonably well to climate shocks. It's really when the drivers for instability have been working for a while. That's when the climate can often serve as the trigger. And the same thing, and this actually answers your second question. The societies adjust to climatic shocks when they are internally coherent and social cooperation is high. And therefore they can find solutions. But when the such crisis, such climate shocks happen when the elites are divided, essentially different factions of elites start using that climate shocks as a weapon in international struggle. We see this in the United States where one party denies the climate, tends to not everybody over there, but there is quite a large fraction of climate change deniers. And so it has become part of the political infighting rather than trying to find a collective decision, collective action that would address this issue. David Fiaschi from the University of Pisa. I'm really interested in the explanation or the true explanation of the change in the dynamics of real wages. So you have a model that if you are an economist, generally there are some variables that are considered endogenous. Demand, supply of labor, something like this. But have you any true intuition? In other words, your explanation is based, for example, a change in the technology used in the economy or there is some endogenous political cycle behind these after the Second World War, something like this. Because maybe you know, I'm sure that you know that there are different explanations on these evidence, technological against the competition between the two big system, no? Capitalists against the social system and so on. So I'm really interested in your opinion or your idea. Thank you. Yeah, well, both exogenous and endogenous. So of course, the human societies have changed dramatically over the past couple of hundred years and you have to take that into account. So one of these issues is, many people talk about now, especially because of chat GPT, the effect of technology, the automation and of, and robotization. And that is certainly a force that reduces labor supply. But other things were United States that played United States at the level of labor supply were first of all, the baby boom that created a large cohort of workers. And secondly, the entry of women into massive entry of women into the labor force and immigration. Immigration actually is much discussed, but numerically, it's less, slightly less important than the demographic, the other demographic forces that we're talking about. So these are, in a way, what's exogenous, what's endogenous, it's really a matter of what our best model is because you can endogenize things, but some things cannot be endogenized. So the automation process, this is a very long-term process that has been happening over thousands of years, actually. And so in my model, that's clearly an exogenous mechanism. But what's the most important to me endogenous mechanism is the last thing that I included in the model, which is the attitudes. And so think about it as institutions. The labor promoting institutions were installed in the United States as a result of the New Deal. And they worked very well until the late 70s, and then they were started to be dismantled in the late 70s, especially under the Reagan administration. And so I use the minimum wage as a proxy for the elite attitudes towards workers. It seems to work quite well, but we could use other proxies such as illegal anti-labor moves by firms. So that is an endogenous mechanism in the theory, because I don't have time, I don't want to speak too much. Essentially, what happens is that when you have crisis that either destroys part of the elites or frightens them so much that they install institutions that are more pro-labor, and that lasts until the collective memory of the crisis fades, and then you have, it's a second process in this sense. And I talk much more about it in my book. So that's where I unpack these ideas. Thank you. Andreas Flacher from the University of Groningen. I was wondering how you think about the competition between different political systems as a potentially stabilizing factor. So there has been this argument by the German sociological economist or economic sociologist, if you want, Stric, who argues that, let's say, until the end of the Cold War there was a sort of pressure on the elites, particularly in the West, to show that their system is actually better than the communist system, and therefore a welfare state needed to be built up and maintained. But when that competition was winding down, this pressure was less, and so the welfare state relatively declined, which would have worked then against the stability of the system. So I'm wondering how you think about that argument. Oh, you decided this. So this actually feeds well into the previous question. In my book Ages of Discord, I talk about the progressive period, so 1920s especially. I remember the first, the original Redscare was in the 1920s. So when we look at the existence of the Soviet Union established in 1920 and collapsed in 1989, this is the period when I grew up, by the way, in the Soviet Union. And I remember how the newspapers like Pravda were talking about the horrors of capitalism and clearly, and that was, there's multiple lines of evidence that show that the influence from the Soviet Union, by the way, also from the Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Those were in fact important influences on the Brussels administration in them designing an equitable system. So, and then of course when Soviet Union was collapsed, it was misinterpreted as the triumph of neoliberal economics and so on and so forth. And here we are essentially. So I agree. This is an important factor. It feeds, so the fear by the elites, it would be both internal, due to internal challenges. And by the way, in the 1920s, there were challenges from early, from 1890s. There was a challenges from the populist movement in the United States and the socialist movement in the United States. So those were internal, but there were also an external influence from the competitors, such as the Soviet Union. Yeah, and also the German welfare state in the 19th century was built up partially to combat the social democrats or socialists, so to say, take away the social influence. Okay, thanks a lot. Any other questions? So thank you for the talk. I was wondering, going back to crisis that severely affects society, there is this ongoing crisis, this opioid crisis in the U.S., and this is a very unequal crisis. It affects very specific sociodemographic sectors. And I was wondering, can you formulate in the same terms that you have formulated other crises, I mean, within your framework, or is this something, a completely different mechanism? Yes, thank you for this question. So what I claim is that structural demographic theory actually allows us to, it gives us a very good theoretical framework within which we can look at many different seemingly disparate trends in the United States, and they suddenly start making sense when you put them into this demographic, structural demographic framework. Remember that I was talking about death of despair. So here I would argue that the opioid crisis is one of the manifestations of the immiseration. And in fact, I don't hear, I can just go to the case and did an original book project on death of despair. They made this argument very eloquently, with a lot of data, much better than I can do it. So opioid crisis is part of the bundle of reasons why immiserated population of people which result in large swaths of population who are falling down. And many of them take their way out by either drugs and overdosing, or from suicide, or from alcoholism. So those, or even simply become careless and die in accidents and things like that. So this is clearly, and thanks to M.K.s and Angus Dieten, for their excellent work, because here you can really see how these are collected. The book is excellent. They talk about social immiseration, broken families, and many other things. It really is a very coherent understanding of these problems. Thank you. Any other questions? Right. Thank you very much, Peter, for your talk. And thank you very much for the time to respond to the question that we have posed by the audience. Thank you very much. Thank you.