Intro:
In February 2010, Peter Turchin, an ecologist from the University of Connecticut, predicted that 2020 would see a sharp increase in political volatility for Western democracies. Turchin was responding critically to the optimistic speculations of scientific progress in the journal Nature: the United States, he said, was coming to the peak of another instability spike (regularly occurring every 50 years or so), while the world economy was reaching the point of a ‘Kondratiev wave’ dip, that is, a steep downturn in a growth-driven supercycle. Along with a number of ‘seemingly disparate’ social pointers, all indications were that serious problems were looming. In the decade since that prediction, the entrenched, often vicious, social, economic and political divisions that have increasingly characterised North American and European society, have made Turchin’s ‘quantitative historical analysis’ seem remarkably prophetic.