This Strange Scientific Model Has A Worrying Prediction About 2020

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This Strange Scientific Model Has A Worrying Prediction About 2020



EDITOR'S BLOG


By Robin Andrews
05/01/2017, 16:30

Want to use science to predict the future of human society? Welcome to cliodynamics.

This is a somewhat nebulous field of research that attempts to merge together cultural evolution, economics, large-scale sociology, and even the mathematical modeling of various historical epochs. The idea is that everything is quantifiable, and patterns can be discerned from the chaos of human activity over time.

Peter Turchin, a cliodynamicist at the University of Connecticut, has spent much of his career attempting to build predictive models of the real world. Writing a piece of correspondence to the journal Nature back in 2010, he claimed that a period of incredible instability is coming to both the US and Europe by no later than 2020.

“Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent – and predictable – waves of political instability,” Turchin noted. “In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt.”

He points to data revealing that periods of instability, driven by such interconnected factors, happens in 50-year cycles within the US.

Giving examples, he cites the 1870s (featuring a financial crisis that caused a depression in North America and Europe), the 1920s (the end of the decade triggered the Great Depression), and the 1970s (featuring Watergate and the destabilizing effect of the Vietnam War on American society).

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Winter is coming? Roman Mikhailiuk/Shutterstock

With the sudden rise in right-wing populism across both, peaking with Brexit and the election of Trump, Turchin has recently claimed that his theories have been validated.

“My model indicated that social instability and political violence would peak in the 2020,” Turchin writes, pointing to his 50-year cycle theory. “The presidential election which we have experienced, unfortunately, confirms this forecast.”

Not just content with this possible coincidence, he also points to factors leading to this point: wealth inequality, growing governmental dysfunction, and the fragmentation of political parties into moderates and more hardline populist factions, to name just a few.

Few would doubt that the US, and Europe, is entering a period of instability. These factors, among many others, are clear drivers of this, and can clearly be quantified and used to make such predictions. However, we would suggest that the 50-year cycle is perhaps not as precise as it may seem.

Under Reagan, there was an initial thaw in US-Soviet relations, but around the time of his infamous “evil empire”speech, things became frosty. In fact, it was during the 1980s that the US came about as close to nuclear war as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Sure, the 1970s were a little unstable too, but they also featured better relations with China and the end of the Vietnam War. Landmark social advances, like the nationwide right to have an abortion prior to six months, were made.

Also, if the 50-year cycle theory applies before 1870, then why were the 1820s in America relatively peaceful? The American Revolution had all but concluded, and the British forces had since retreated from much of the territory.

If we’re also using quantifiable data to look for instability, then why not highlight the number of deaths due to conflict or crime worldwide as a key measure? The rate of such violent deaths has fallen very sharply since the end of the horrific peak of the Second World War, a sure sign of increasing stability.

The point that there are many ways of quantifying instability, and the data is not so clear cut (yet) that we can predict spikes of it in neatly defined cycles. For one thing, Turchin’s sample size is actually a little too small.

We can nonetheless agree with Turchin on one major point. If quantifiable data reveals key factors that will lead to instability, then we should be able to more precisely act to mitigate them.
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This Strange Scientific Model Has A Worrying Prediction About 2020


Didn't know this was a science, but it's intriguing.

I mean the part about their being a lot of geopolitical instability is obvious, but the idea that political instability spikes every 50 years or so is pretty interesting. I guess we'll see how things look in 2020..
 
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Then you had that one professor who moved his prediction up from 2025 to 2020 for the fall of the usa.

Still think he shoulda kept 2025 though
 
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Peter turchin has been preaching this since the early 2000s. The thing that scares me from so called psychic predictions is all his worked is based around data analysis of historical trends. The fact that he accurately predicted this moment is very scary folks. Scarier even that his predictions are far worse. This is not y2k or Mayan shyt doggies, this is peer reviewed scientific research. I’m fukking scared that all these articles are from YEARS AGO!!

Historian Predicts Collapse Of Civilization In The 2020s Due To Political Turmoil


Historian Predicts Collapse Of Civilization In The 2020s Due To Political Turmoil : Culture : Tech Times
Latest research by a historian predicts that the rising social imbalance in the state and increasing political chaos might lead to collapse of the civilization by 2020s.

Predictions Based On History's Scientific Models
Peter Turchin, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, works in the field of cliodynamics, which comprises of mathematical reproduction and statistical examination of the historical societies. Cliodynamics is a novel "transdisciplinary discipline" that considers history as another form of science.

Turchin's study involves applying its tools to the social and political systems of the United States. He studied a scientific model that he had been working on for the past ten years. The model spots the point at which the political chaos would reach its apex in the United States and Western Europe.

The researcher's study focuses on 40 unrelated social pointers that led to the turn of events in the 1970s. By means of this research, he demonstrated how political disorder and social volatility would reach its height in the 2020s.

Turchin's article was published in the journal Nature.

Social Instability And Political Turmoil Might Cause Civilization To Collapse
"The presidential election which we have experienced, unfortunately, confirms this forecast. We seem to be well on track for the 2020s instability peak. And although the election is over, the deep structural forces that brought us the current political crisis have not gone away," wrote Turchin in his article.

Turchin has noted a critical advancement that is currently driving political chaos, called the "elite overproduction." The growing income is leading to rising inequality in people, with more people becoming rich. These rich people are inclined towards being more politically active. As a result, competition among the elite class is rising, ultimately leading to fragmentation.

Turchin points toward the division of Democratic and Republican parties. For instance, the idea of splitting the Republican Party into groups namely, Tea Party Republicans, Traditional Republicans and Trump Populists. These partitions run so deep that many Republicans voted for Hilary Clinton in the elections while others decline to support Trump.

According to him, elite overproduction is the primary driving force behind increasing social imbalance. The other major factors are fading financial health of the state and deterioration of the living standards.

Presidential Election Confirms The Forecast
As per Turchin, the recent Presidential election experienced in the United States seems to verify the forecast. The civilization is headed towards the instability apex that was predicted to happen in the 2020s. The election may have ended, but the profound structural energy that resulted in the current political catastrophe still exists. The negative trend seems to be on the rise.

Donald Trump getting elected as the President might not help in averting the proposed collapse. Trump's administration might not be able to turn around the negative trend. Moreover, some of the proposed policies would even tend to make things worse. For example, radical reduction on taxes on rich Americans might not be able to improve the financial health of the state.

See Now: 30 Gadgets And Tech Gifts For Father's Day 2018 That Dad Will Think Are Rad
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Article from 2013!!

Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past

In Issac Asimov's classic science fiction saga Foundation, mathematics professor Hari Seldon predicts the future using what he calls psychohistory. Drawing on mathematical models that describe what happened in the past, he anticipates what will happen next, including the fall of the Galactic Empire. That may seem like fanciful stuff. But Peter Turchin is a kind of real-life Hari Seldon -- and he's not alone.
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In Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction saga Foundation, mathematics professor Hari Seldon predicts the future using what he calls psychohistory. Drawing on mathematical models that describe what happened in the past, he anticipates what will happen next, including the fall of the Galactic Empire.

That may seem like fanciful stuff. But Peter Turchin is turning himself into a real-life Hari Seldon -- and he's not alone.

Turchin -- a professor at the University of Connecticut -- is the driving force behind a field called "cliodynamics," where scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future. It's named after Clio, the Greek muse of history.

These academics have the same goals as other historians -- "We start with questions that historians have asked for all of history," Turchin says. "For example: Why do civilizations collapse?" -- but they seek to answer these questions quite differently. They use math rather than mere language, and according to Turchin, the prognosis isn't that far removed from the empire-crushing predictions laid down by Hari Seldon in the Foundation saga. Unless something changes, he says, we're due for a wave of widespread violence in about 2020, including riots and terrorism.

>'We start with questions that historians have asked for all of history. For example: Why do civilizations collapse?'

Peter Turchin

This burgeoning field is part of a much larger effort to gain more insight into our world through the massive amounts of digital data that are now available via the internet -- a movement that ranges from Google's search engine to the data science contests run by San Francisco startup Kaggle. The difference is that cliodynamics uses data from the distant past. Turgin and his cohorts mine historical documents that have only recently come online.

Turchin didn't begin as a historian. His original area of interest was ecosystem dynamics, but he soon decided that many of the interesting problems had already been solved. So he started looking for ways of applying mathematics to other fields. "The only way to do science is to make predictions and then testing them with data," Turchin says. Many other social sciences -- including sociology, economics, and even anthropology -- had already been revolutionized by mathematics. But historians had resisted quantification.

He founded the movement in the late '90s, and since then, many more have joined in. In 2010, this growing community of researchers started the peer-reviewed publication Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History.

The basic idea is nothing new. Thinkers from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Oswald Spengler to Leo Tolstoy tried to develop cyclic theories of history that could also predict the future. Austrian philosopher Karl Popper critiqued this notion in his The Poverty of Historicism in 1957. And the '60s spawned a movement called cliometrics. But the approach eventually fell out of favor. "General theories of history are not accepted, in my opinion, for good reason," says Turchin. And yet he followed cliometrics with cliodynamics. The new field, you see, has an edge that predecessors didn't.

It's not the mathematics. Turchin says his methods aren't very complex. He's using common statistical techniques like spectrum analysis -- "I used much more sophisticated statistical methods in ecology," he says. And it's not "big data" tools. The data sets he's using aren't all that big. He can analyze them using ordinary statistical software. But he couldn't have built these models even a few decades ago because historians and archivists have only recently started digitizing newspapers and public records from throughout history and putting them online. That gives cliodynamics the opportunity to quantify what has happened in the past -- and make predictions based on that data.

In the simplest of terms, Turchin and his colleagues will build a mathematical model using one data set and then test that model against other historical data sets they're unfamiliar with. That way, they can see if the model holds. This isn't exactly the psychohistory described by Isaac Asimov. "For the most part, we don't predict the future. It's too far. We can't wait 200 years to see if something's right," Turchin says. "I'm not a prophet." But cliodynamics moves in that direction -- and it's not science fiction. Though traditional historians are often wary of the practice, others very much see the value.

"It's very important to do. It should force traditional historians to respond," says Yale historian Joseph Manning. "Most people in my field just publish documents and don't go behind them."

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Peter Turchin's graph describes the regular waves of violence -- including riots and terrorism -- that characterize U.S. history.

Image: Peter Turchin
Waves of Violence

What Turchin and his colleagues have found is a pattern of social instability. It applies to all agrarian states for which records are available, including Ancient Rome, Dynastic China, Medieval England, France, Russia, and, yes, the United States. Basically, the data shows 100 year waves of instability, and superimposed on each wave -- which Turchin calls the "Secular Cycle" -- there's typically an additional 50-year cycle of widespread political violence. The 50-year cycles aren't universal -- they don't appear in China, for instance. But they do appear in the United States.

The 100-year Secular Cycles, Turchin believes, are caused by longer-term demographic trends. They occur when a population grows beyond its capacity to be productive, resulting in falling wages, a disproportionately large number of young people in the population, and increased state spending deficits. But there's a more important factor, one that better predicts instability than population growth. Turchin calls it "elite overproduction." This refers to a growing class of elites who are competing for a limited number of elite positions, such as political appointments. These conflicts, Turchin says, can destabilize the state.

Many of these issues persist in industrial societies. Although population growth is no longer likely to result in mass starvation, it can push the supply of labor beyond demand, leading to increased unemployment.

>Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops -- just like in ecology

Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are -- though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time.

He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence.

Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops -- just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats."

There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute -- who practice a discipline called econophysics-- have built their own model of political violence and concluded that one simple variable is sufficient to predict instability: food prices. In a paper titled "The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East," they explain that although many other grievances may be aired once the violence begins, the cost of food is the primary trigger. They make a similarly grim prediction: large-scale riots over food, beginning around October of this year.

Into the Dark Archives

Much has been made of machine learning algorithms and software such as Hadoopand how they're used to mine the enormous amounts of data generated by the average internet user, but cliodynamics shows that we can find just as much value in "dark archives" -- the mounds of non-digitized records that we don't realize contain useful data. Quantitative biologist Samuel Arbesman calls this "long data," and he urges the world to take a closer look.

Arbesman says that many traditional historians are beginning to embrace Turchin's practices, opening up opportunities for academics in the humanities to collaborate with mathematicians and economists. But he adds that academics aren't the only ones who can benefit from dark archives brought online. Even businesses, he says, can mine such data.

Some businesses, explains says, have been around for hundreds of years, changing with the times. IBM was founded in 1911 and originally sold tabulating machines. Nintendo started out in 1889 as as a playing card company. The construction company Kongō Gumiexisted for over 1,400 years.

Their future, he says, can benefit from their past.
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Believe turmoil in America is the only thing that matters in the world brehs. As long as we can get trump out in November we’ll be good.
 
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