Not shown: the millions of other predictions of trouble that didn’t turn out
He has a good point. Violence does go in cycles. People are happy to start a war when they haven't experienced the consequences it brings but they change their views once they experience the destruction and horrors.
The fact that he was able to pin 2020 is probably luck.
Predictions like this are made all the time, nearly all of them wrong. A few are bound to be correct(ish) by sheer chance, and when they are, people dig them up and think they've found something clairvoyant.
This prediction isn't even that accurate. 1870? The major upheaval around that time started a decade earlier. So if we're allowed to fudge the numbers by 5 or 10 years to make a pattern appear, who's to say the next upheaval isn't in 2025 or 2030? And is 3 instances of anything (1870, 1920, 1970) even enough to call a pattern?
> There are too many political entrepreneurs who are all trying to get power, and they get frustrated, which is how revolutions start: when members of the elite try to overturn the political order to better suit themselves.
So which elites are funding, and are ultimately behind today's violence? Unfortunately, any possible answer is a conspiracy theory.
Or conversely, 2020 is when we got our shit together.
Quick read, but ultimately pretty shallow.
Just a reminder how much Vice sucks
> Peter’s theory is the result of the hard work of a modern, living, and well-respected scientist rather than a bunch of dead dead Central American dudes whom hippies like to talk about while taking heavy psychedelic drugs
Yeah they're dead because they were fucking slaughtered by the same forces at play in today's "violence"
Seems it was a real prediction...
https://www.google.com/search?q=peter+turchin+2020&source=ln...
A Seldon crisis right there.
On a tangential note:
I guess that predictions and lottery tickets have similarly long odds.
Predictions are much cheaper, though.
"how revolutions start: when members of the elite try to overturn the political order to better suit themselves." - Kind of against the conventional definition of a revolution.
is this verified to be 8 years old? The prediction was completely correct but the shortness of the prediction makes it a bit suspicious. Although I have no idea why someone would fake this...
Looks like he's been writing for a while, including sticking his neck out quantitatively in a 2017 blog post: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/quantitative-prediction...
The linked short interview was probably prompted by his 2012 paper:
> Extending the sequence of 1870, 1920, and 1970 forward suggests that the next instability peak shouldoccur in the United States around 2020. This is a simple projection, rather than a scientific prediction (which requires an understanding of mechanisms bringing about outbreaks of political violence; see Turchin, 2006a). The analysis of structural causes of instability waves is beyond the scope of this article and will be pursued elsewhere(Turchin, forthcoming)
http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf (And yes, for the conspiracy theorists, you can search the DOI number to confirm this really was published in 2012.)