The short of it: Turchin advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse.
Some of his group's work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1]. While some of his work may produce overdetermined models (trying to model history, considering all of the possible variables, can be tricky), the sorts of things he is interested in have been developed a fair bit, of late [2].
"... We prepared Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World to stimulate strategic
thinking about the future by identifying key trends, the factors that drive them, where
they seem to be headed, and how they might interact. It uses scenarios to illustrate some
of the many ways in which the drivers examined in the study (e.g., globalization, demography, the rise of new powers, the decay of international institutions, climate
change, and the geopolitics of energy) may interact to generate challenges and opportunities for future decisionmakers. The study as a whole is more a description of the factors likely to shape events than a prediction of what will actually happen ..."
I remember these articles, but sadly didn’t save them either. I believe the author was Peter Turchin, who studies “structural dynamic cycles” and advanced a theoretical framework called “cliodynamics”. He certainly seems to be onto something…[1]
Dani: There are a number of papers discussing the emergence of a "global superbrain". You might be interested in the work of Francis Heylighen and the ECCO group at the VUB (Brussels).
I try to observe things from "30 thousand feet", the current climate in Western countries is hysterical, emotional and it clouds a lot of things. Mostly try to keep it to Thomas Schelling's teachings when analyzing a given situation (behavior & deterrence being the important keywords).
Very interesting points, thank you for the references. Maybe I'm not so much convinced by Wallerstein as appreciative of the expanded perspective (and willingness to question) he provides. In taking a longer view (centuries), he's at least more interesting to me than the weak attempts at forecasting that are all too common, that try to paint an inevitable future based on one narrow domain, whether economics (e.g. The World is Flat) or technology (singularity worship).
I liked the World-Systems Analysis book - compared to most social science, it was at least readable and truly interesting in many parts. He's not so cagey, hedged, and recalcitrant a writer that one can't filter out his opinions, like the "burnt-out-hippie wishful thinking" parts. :)
Thanks again for the references. The future will be interesting.
Has anyone carefully checked his work? Skimming through his first few papers it seems he just built datasets covering the past several millennia and ran PCA (or models with similar complexity). Fine for explanatory purposes, but not so great if you want to make predictions when most complexity of the society arguably comes from the past few centuries.
Interesting ideas (even though your prediction regarding the next five years seems rather... bold).
Where is this vision sketched in some more detail? Any links?
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The world is changing faster than ever, and a lot of the countries, dynamics, peace treaties and structures we're familiar with may be about to come to an end. Peter's job consists of him analysing data from geography, demographics, and global politics to understand economic trends and make predictions. And if his predictions are correct, the next 50 years are going to look incredibly different.
I didn't have the patience to finish The Fourth Turning [1], but it's arguing that the US has been working on 80 year major cycles for a long time. I like "end of a cycle" better than "end of the world." :) I'd be interested to know if there are related studies outside the US.
Something I didn't learn about until recently [2] was Glocalization. Wikipedia [3] says it's been around since the 80s. Perhaps now's a good time to bring it out again.
Most people in the world only have access to public information so if you think most geopolitical events are brought about by "the masses" instead of by some Platoesque elites (which is of course very much debatable) it may well make sense to base your predictions on the data that is available to most players.
It occurs to me that what Strat4 is doing here is forecasting. Extrapolating from historic bases of power to predict the emergence of future hegemons. But wouldn't it be possible to achieve a more data-driven, empirical analysis? Might make a sweet Kaggle crowd prediction problem ;)
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