Cliodynamics

 I love predictions. In essence, that’s what science is about: reaching a sufficient mechanistic understanding that we can predict the future. The physical sciences have accomplished the most in distilling “laws” that allow us to understand the world. Biology, and in particular, the social science, are struggling to catch up.

History has its share of prophets, most of which are rightly seen as oddballs and cranks. But some general principles have been advanced that have the whiff of plausibility. Enter Peter Turchin, a Russian trained as a mathematical ecologist who trained his computer algorithms on bugs and now believes they can tell us what the future portends for America in the next 10 years. As H.L. Menken famously observed: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” As this article describes, Turchin has his logic, his predictions and his critics. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether they belong to Turchin’s “elites,” and what implications, if any, Turchin’s prophecies hold for them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/