
A Quantitative Prediction for Political Violence in the 2020s - metasean
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/quantitative-prediction-political-violence-2020s/
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metasean
Asimov introduced the concept of "psychohistory" in his Foundations series
[1]. Psychohistory "combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics
to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of
people" [1]

Almost a decade ago I heard about a researcher who took up the gauntlet of
developing psychohistory. His name is Peter Turchin. Because there was an
established academic field already named psychohistory [2], he named his field
of study "Cliodynamics" [3].

When I first heard about Dr. Turchin, he had recently made a prediction that
we were likely to see political violence in the 2020s [4, 5].

In this current blog entry he talks about factors that are likely to influence
whether there is or is not political violence in the next few years.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_\(fictional\))
[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory)
[3]:
[http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/](http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/)
[4]: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/cliodynamics-a-science-for-
pred...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/cliodynamics-a-science-for-predicting-
the-future/#)! [5]:
[http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf](http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf)

