The new book is called Ultrasociety. It has many interesting ideas. However, some of them I find quite unpersuasive.

One of his core ideas is that because groups need to cooperate, competition within groups is harmful. Meanwhile competition among groups is helpful, because it promotes cultural adaptation. So if players on a basketball team or soccer team are competing with one another, the team will do poorly because they are not cooperative. But competition between teams will lead to improvement, as good ideas from one team get copied by another.

Turchin equates inequality within a team to competition within a team. He claims that this has empirical support, in that teams with less unequal salaries tend to win more games. This makes me think of Lebron James getting paid a lot more than a teammate who spends most of the game on the bench. If you really believe Turchin’s analysis, the team would cooperate better and win more games if it did not have Lebron. I call baloney sandwich.

Outside of sports, I am not sure that the terms “group,” “cooperation,” and “competition” can be defined clearly enough. Is a professor of ecology at the University of Connecticut a member of the “UCon group,” cooperating with other members of that group while competing against the “Harvard group?” Or is he a member of the “ecology group,” cooperating with other ecologists while competing against the “economist group” or the “sociologist group?” To me, neither description seems appropriate.

Turchin is quite contemptuous of the “Rank and Yank” personnel policies practiced by Enron, in which employees were ranked and those who did not make the grade are let go. But what is academic tenure other than a “Rank and Yank” system? The top law firms and management consulting firms also tend to operate on a “Rank and Yank” basis. Wouldn’t Turchin’s framework predict the collapse of these institutions?

If and when I review the book, I will have to remark on the irony that it is filled with mood affiliation for progressive attitudes and yet he keeps stumbling on ideas that are part of bedrock conservatism. These include the importance of culture, the fragility of civilized society, the benefits of traditional marriage, and the value of keeping nations culturally homogenous.