An economy that separates its women and its men.

Picture Germany in 1928. German universities are among the world's best. Women progress rapidly there, taking growing numbers of seats in medicine, law, sciences.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of young men — former workers, artisans, WW1 soldiers — remain without training or prospects. The 1929 Great Depression finishes them off. No work = no identity, no money = no respect.

You feel the cold crossing the thin coats. You hear the silence in kitchens, broken only by a bottle or a crumpled newspaper. Women keep the house running. Men sit for hours, blank gaze, pride broken.

And that is when the poison becomes explosive. These men without prospects, isolated, angry, become cannon fodder for extreme parties. The Nazi Party's storm troopers (SA) recruit massively from these ranks: a uniform, a hierarchy, an enemy, a recovered sense of meaning.

The Nazi Party goes from 2.6% of votes in 1928 to 37% in 1932. In four years.

The Soviet Union of 1970-1985. On paper, a superpower. Women are highly educated — doctors, engineers, scientists — and carry a large part of the civil economy.

Many men, however, are directed toward heavy trades: mines, steel, army. When the planned economy starts cracking, these sectors crack first. Male alcoholism explodes. Soviet male life expectancy falls while women's keeps progressing.

You feel the educational and social imbalance becoming a slow poison. Doctors on the ground see it in mortality statistics. Turchin, from the West, sees it in the curves.

When Gorbachev opens the system a bit with glasnost in 1985, everything explodes. The USSR, a nuclear superpower, disappears in 6 years.

In the USA from 2010, the university ratio exceeds 60% women among graduates. Medical schools, law schools, social sciences Master's degrees feminize rapidly.

Meanwhile, in the Rust Belt, rural Midwest, Appalachia, millions of young white men without degrees see their factories close (coal, steel, manufacturing). Their fathers had a clear role. They no longer do.

The opioid epidemic — Oxycontin, fentanyl — strikes these men first and most. American male life expectancy declines for the first time in peacetime.

In 2016, Donald Trump wins the presidency with a wave of white men without college degrees. In 2024, he returns with the same bloc. The most powerful democratic society in the world polarizes extremely.