The End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

Peter Turchin claims to have developed a way of discovering statistical patterns in historical data that he believes can be used to predict future social and political instability. He calls his method "cliodynamics," and for the last twenty-plus years he has been publishing various books and articles that try to show there are quantitative ways of foreseeing future instability. His latest book, The End Times, continues these themes as he argues that four key features can be used to identify signs of impending disintegration: increased economic inequality, weakened legitimacy of the state, increased global instability, and increased intra-elite conflict:

Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability. And here we are...  The most common pattern is an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century.

It's all an intriguing exercise, but Turchin writes far too confidently and his predictions are not falsifiable. As a result, it's difficult for his thesis to be more than a very loose guide to the future.