Western societies are ‘far more likely’ to collapse or fall into civil war than they have been for the last 100 years, an historian claims.
Peter Turchin, who trained in biology and developed statistical modelling, uses massive mathematical datasets to try to discover statistical patterns in the great flood of historical data that might predict future instabilities in societies. In his new book End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, which has received considerable media coverage, he uses scores of expert collaborators from anthropology, archaeology and history to build the world’s largest collection of data on the prosperity and demise of societies, from upper Egypt to lower Manhattan.
The most common pattern he presents is ‘an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century’. His predictions have a special urgency because Western societies, and particularly America, are, he suggests, very near the end of that latter disintegrative phase, which makes the likelihood of civil war or potential systemic collapse far more likely.
