Will the U.S. be Wracked by Violence and Riots by 2020? The Math Says So.

Mathematician Peter Turchin has run the numbers and predicts the United States will face a widespread wave of violence and riots by around 2020.

Turchin, a U. Connecticut prof, is the champion of "cliodynamics" which is drawing on mathematical models of the past to foretell the future.  The name comes from Clio, the Greek goddess of history.

“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. 

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.

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 Issac 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. 

Riots sweeping the U.S. by 2020?  It doesn't sound entirely implausible.  In fact it might be just what's needed for a democratic restoration, a progressive renaissance in the United States.  America's seemingly unstoppable plague of inequality may ultimately be the driving force to propel a 21st century Enlightenment into the American's public consciousness.  

The past thirty years have seen the outright theft of political and economic power from America's blue and white collar working classes directly into the offshore accounts of an emergent oligarchy by a corrupt political apparatus and judiciary.   Once that idea catches hold, all bets are off.