Peter Turchin

I began my career... as an ecologist... studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer. ...I embraced the turn of the field to complexity science, which mixes computer modeling with Big Data analytics to answer such questions as... why many animal populations go through boom-and-bust cycles. By the late 1990s... I began to consider how the same... approach could be brought to the study of human societies. A quarter of a century later, my colleagues... and I have built out a flourishing field... (from Clio... the... Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change)...

... uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record... as Big Data. It employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions...

[M]y colleagues and I... focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse.

[S]ocieties have arrived at this crossroads before, and though... most of the time...the road has led to great loss of life and societal breakdown, sometimes it has led to a far happier resolution ...

In 2010... Nature asked specialists... to look ten years into the future, and I made this case... judging from the pattern of US history, we were due for another sharp instability spike by the early 2020s. ...The book is my best attempt to explain this model... I make no claims of radical originality.

[W]hen a state... has stagnating or declining ... a growing gap between the rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt... Historically such developments have served as leading indicators of political instability. In the United States all of these... started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to... around 2020... a spike in political instability. And here we are.

It became clear... through quantitative historical analysis that [throughout time] complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a... degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces...

[T]here are important recurring patterns... throughout... human history over the past ten thousand years.

[C]omplex human societies at base and at some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles.