Carolina QuotesSpecific triggers... are difficult, perhaps... impossible to predict. ...[S]tructural pressures build up slowly and more predictably, and are amenable to analysis and forecasting.
Peter Turchin Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Introduction
- work
- The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade (Aug 17, 2020)
- year
- 2010
Cite this record
“Specific triggers... are difficult, perhaps... impossible to…” Peter Turchin. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-1985D9E6A7. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/1985d9e6a7
More from Peter Turchin
[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 ...
Let me go back to 2010 when Nature, the journal... asked a number of scientists to make some forecasts for the next decade... (2010-2020) and that's when I published the forecast that.., the growing political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade. ...10 years later ...together with my coauthor, Andrey Korotayev, we have revisited this forecast to see whether it had anything to do with reality, and... this is one of the graphs... We looked at several measures of instability, one was anti-government demonstrations. A very similar picture shows up when you look at violent riots. And so we submitted this paper in early 2020 saying that this forecast was actually right... [A]s the paper was [under] review, the summer of 2020, the riots following the death of George Floyd have exploded and... in January of 2021 we had the shocking event... known as the Storming of the Capitol.
[T]he second condition... is absolutely much more predictive of immediate troubles to come, and that's intraelite competition which results... when elite numbers increase relative to the general population. As a result... we have too many elite aspirants vying for a limited number of positions... elite overproduction causes... intraelite competition, eventually conflict, and that... in our analysis of about 100... cases of past societies sliding into crisis and then out... That turns out to be the most universal and most important force.