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The United State's Next 'Peak of Unrest' Will Occur in 2020, Says Math

At this point, ecologist pretty much have the predator-prey cycle figured out: As a rabbit population grows, a coyote population will follow, thanks to all the new, tasty rabbits. But once the coyotes are numerous enough to eat a _lot_ of rabbits, the...

At this point, ecologist pretty much have the predator-prey cycle figured out: As a rabbit population grows, a coyote population will follow, thanks to all the new, tasty rabbits. But once the coyotes are numerous enough to eat a lot of rabbits, the rabbit population collapses, and eventually so will the coyotes, since they’ve run out of food. And so it goes, on and on, just about forever — or at least until all their habitat gets converted into track homes.

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But could that same system — a cyclical series of events followed closely by a similar, connected cycle — be applied to human history? That’s exactly what Peter Turchin, a professor in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at UConn, argues in a new article in the Journal of Peace Research. Turchin lays down evidence for what he says is a 50-year conflict cycle in the U.S. that goes back to 1870 with the Civil War, which means the next peak of strife and conflict in the U.S. would be coming soon: right around 2020.

Turchin argues in his paper that the mechanism powering such a regular cycle is similar to that of classic population dynamics, but applied to humans. Called the structural-demographic theory, the mechanism proposed by Turchin suggests that “that labor oversupply leads to falling living standards and elite overproduction, and those, in turn, cause a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability.”

Rather than the rabbit and coyote competing with each other while still being intrinsically linked, Turchin writes that in this case it’s more or less the working class and the wealthy. When the elite gorge on the poor, and increase wealth inequality, the poor get angry and the wealthy lose their stable production base, and all of that strife leads to instability, volatility, and an eventual mixing of classes as both collapse towards the middle.

While that seems to fit in with a populist sentiment that’s certainly gaining steam, especially considering that the U.S. has some of the worst income and education inequality of all the major economic powers, can history’s ups and downs really be explained through number crunching?

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The idea that history could be explained through grand mechanisms has been repeatedly discounted by academics, whose prevailing theory is more akin to something of the butterfly effect: History has been shaped by an untold number of events large and small that all shift events to come in an unpredictable fashion. (I know that’s not particularly nuanced, and history buffs, I welcome your input.) But Turchin’s a member of the school of cliodynamics a new-ish movement in history circles that pushes using all this crazy computing power we’ve got these days to parse massive data sets and try to model trends.

The cliodynamics thing is explained pretty well over at Kurzweil AI

In their analysis of long-term social trends, advocates of cliodynamics focus on four main variables: population numbers, social structure, state strength and political instability. Each variable is measured in several ways. Social structure, for example, relies on factors such as health inequality — measured using proxies including quantitative data on life expectancies — and wealth inequality, measured by the ratio of the largest fortune to the median wage. Choosing appropriate proxies can be a challenge, because relevant data are often hard to find. No proxy is perfect, the researchers concede. But they try to minimize the problem by choosing at least two proxies for each variable.

Of course, data crunching to predict the behavior of such unpredictable beasts as politics and humans in general is extremely difficult. The big issue is how on picks the right data to look at in the first place. Turchin’s paper is based off of “1,590 political violence events such as riots, lynchings, and terrorism,” but looking at violence itself may not be the best way to predict future violence.

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Following trends in coyotes and rabbits is comparatively easy; you just have to count them over time, because you know that rabbits came from other rabbits and so on. But is a rash of violence in 1920 really connected to 2020; or is it based on a groundswell of other factors, like the aforementioned inequality; or is Turchin’s correlation simply a quirk in the numbers?

An interesting discussion thread at Reddit counts a number of skeptics, whose collective point is certainly valid: Turchin’s prediction is based on just three past data points — 1870, 1920, and 1970 — over 150 years that were absolutely full of violence and strife. That alone should at least make one take his conclusions with a rather large grain of salt; while Turchin pinpoints 2020 as the next time the shit will hit the fan, it should hardly be treated as a hard, definite number. At the same time, his underlying premise is certainly intriguing: Could basic economic and political cycles be producing corresponding swings in popular sentiment and even violence? More research is needed to tell, but it’d be nice to finally be able to mark on my calendar when I’m supposed to riot against the Man.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

Image via CBS.

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