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Mathematician Predicts Wave of Violence In 2020
ananyo writes "In a feature that recalls Asimov's Foundation series and 'psychohistory', Nature profiles mathematician Peter Turchin, who says he can see meaningful cycles in history. Worryingly, Turchin predicts a wave of violence in the United States in 2020. Quoting from the piece: 'To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator-prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analyzed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. 'I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,' he adds."
We recently discussed similar research into predicting violence in the short term.
We already know the world ends on December 21, 2012, so why is he speculating about a future that won't even happen?
Obligatory xkcd.
This is the stupidest made up bullshit I've ever heard. At 50 year intervals, the sample size is like 3 or something. That's well within the range of coincidence! Since people going totally apeshit doesn't happen for no reason, I'd say it's more reason based than some natural recurring phenomenon based on time.
It will happen.
If you're vague enough about your predictions... you won't be wrong often.
Let's see:
1. "Extrajudicial" killing of US citizens
2. Use of drones against US citizens
3. Cameras recording activities
4. Government snooping into private conversations
Good damn thing there is a 2nd Amendment.
And if I flipped ten heads in a row the next one must surely be tails right? Right?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
While I agree that the sample size is small, there is certainly reason to think that if the political discourse continues as it is now, in eight years we could be in for that talk to start manifesting itself physically.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Uh duh, the Aztecs already did this, the world is ending in 2012.
I wonder if this cycle follows the wave of economic depressions? It would make sense that people with less to lose who are hit by the recession and see others making more money from it might become restless
FTA: "For example, it seems that indicators of corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of instability or violence is imminent."
Why do articles like this act as though "violent acts" were the essential force, and "corruption" some kind of indicator symptom? I submit that the latter is the cause and the former the resulting symptom.
The article includes this viewpoint, but you have to get all the way to the very last paragraph to see it -- "But perhaps revolution is the best, if not the only, remedy for severe social stresses. Gintis points out that he is old enough to have taken part in the most recent period of turbulence in the United States, which helped to secure civil rights for women and black people. Elites have been known to give power back to the majority, he says, but only under duress, to help restore order after a period of turmoil. “I'm not afraid of uprisings,” he says. “That's why we are where we are.”"
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Politics and divisions between people are not the cause of war. (Politics is how we operate as a society and it can be good or bad. If politics turns from good to bad and then to war, the cause of war is what caused the change from good to bad politics).
Similarly, the differences between groups, say Sunni and Shi'ite to let Americans off the hook, does not _cause_ the fighting between them. They live together side by side in other countries and they live together side by side in the same country before and after the fighting.
The root cause of war is having fewer resources per person this year than last year. How we move from less money to war is done politically and part of the politics is finding a group to place blame on, but the underlying cause is not politics or divisions between groups.
(For folks who think divisions between people should go away, consider there are 950 different Christian religions and 700 different Islamic ones. None of them, not a single one, was created by non-believers or dis-believers. All 1600 religions were created by true believers. Belief is not a solution).
You are full of shit and hatred. There are over 2 million muslims in the USA who have been here for over 2 decades who haven't been "biding their time" to do anything. I have over a dozen muslim friends, their families came over here to get away from the B.S. at home and to live a happy non-violent life in a prosperous country. they excel in business and academics, asian people tend to be funny that way (there is a racial stereotype for you, and it's a useful generalization)
Of course, psychohistory doesn't work if you publish the results -- so all of this is bullshit. This implies that the psychohistorical result is actually not violence in 2020, but something else that they're trying to steer us towards. Maybe this is also why we're not supposed to be aware that psychohistory exists.
Back to the Prime Radiant, guys.
Get off my lawn.
Why those Mayors discuss feeding their city's poor but are silent on starvation in Africa. Come off it people, you fight battles you can win. I'm sure they'd love to spread tolerance throughout the world, but their Mayors, not God-Kings.
Speaking of religion, have you ever actually read the Christian Bible? You can do all sorts of things to people you don't like and it's A-OK. And don't forget, blacks weren't people until the last 1970, so says Mitt Romney (or at least his religion). Every religion that's existed for any length of time has terrible things in it's dogma.
We're not pretending Islam is just fine. But we're rationalists. Give people enough food, shelter and some discretionary income for hobbies and they mellow out. Ever wonder why terrorists don't send deep cover moles over here? It's because give them a taste of good life and they stop being psychotic extremists. The challenge is giving that life to everybody. Not just the vague promise that you might have a chance at it that economic conservatives and 'libertarians' favor, but the real thing.
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People who have options don't get violent. Not in mass anyway (yes, chemical imbalances will result in the occasional horror story like that Batman shooting). That's why Canadians are so well behaved. They feel secure in their well being thanks to an extensive safety net and healthcare system. Systemic violence is an outgrowth of poverty. The single most enlightening moment of my life was when I realized that every war ever fought was over money in one form or another.
e.g. the American South wasn't fighting to defend slavery, but to defend the right to oppress blacks. Blacks were oppressed not for the economic benefit (immigrants where cheaper and disposable) but because it gave poor white southerns someone to look down on and kept them from asking questions like, how come I barely make it through the winter while that guy sips mint juleps? Don't take my word for it, google Karl Rove and the Southern Strategy.
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You mean all those Muslims who, much like the Minutemen and colonists, have risen up and overthrown oppressive regimes in many middle eastern countries?
Ha ha ha .. tell that to the non-Muslims in those countries. They were actually a lot better off under the "oppressive regimes"
If the current trend of inequal distribution of wealth continues then yes, we will see increased violence. It's a formula that's a old as civilzation itself. Poverty is and always has been the root cause of most crime, including violent crime. (Some of it is due to crazy. You will always have jealousy, rich people shoplifting for thrills, adultery, etc)
Whatever your political creed or economic philosophy, you must recognize that gross wealth inequality /always/ leads to bad things. It's a common theme of all civilizations world wide throughout all recorded history. It's the destroyer of nations. It's the murder of kings. It's the ruin of the most mighty military forces. It's the trigger of violent, bloody revolution where the innocent and the guilty both suffer alike.
Our country used to recognize this function but in the last few decades it's been ignored wholesale. The rich are getting very very rich and have somehow convinced everyone that they "deserve" it while our nation stumbles with infective public programs and crumbling infrastructure. Wealth redistribution used to be a clear, stated goal of our government and now, somehow that idea is taboo and evil.
Linear time is useless to predict cyclic anything where modern human society is involved. Ten years of innovation today (and its effects on society) is greater than thirty years of innovation two hundred years ago. The scale just isn't linear. Nothing has a significant long term stable frequency.
If you are a cicada, you have reasonable grounds to disagree. Sadly, you can't talk and aren't real big in the innovation space.
Moreover, it was a unique peak in US history.
This guy's model needs an overhaul -- either that or its intend use is useless for phenomena that are really interesting.
Seastead this.
And what makes you an authority on the matter? Fuck, you don't even have the balls to post with an account.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Let me break it down for you. Christians are white therefore it is perfectly politically correct to demonize them. Contrast this with muslims. I'm not trying to conflate your viewpoint with racism and I wish there were a better explanation because I do not consider myself a racist but that's the explanation occam's razor leads me to.
Well, that can't be right. My family is Baptist and Negro.
As a historian with a lot of statistical study under my belt, call me skeptical. I don't see how we're able to make the leap from his observations to cycles at work in wildly variant institutions and cultures. This sounds an awful lot like the wide-eyed promise of cliometrics to revolutionize history starting in the 1950s.
In the mid-twentieth century, cliometrics (ah, look how much it reads like cliodynamics!) was going to save us all from the loosey-goosey styles of history that just weren't as good as honest-to-gosh social science. (This is why many mid-twentieth century universities placed history in their social science faculties rather than humanities where it was categorized in older university systems.) Certainly, learning how to handle large data sets and tackle questions of change over time with accurate analysis has been good, but stats wasn't the smoking gun to solve historical debates. Look how hard some of the great works of cliometrics crashed and burned when they tried to assert a grand rule of human behaviour: just two examples off of the top of my head, the Tilly's "The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930" which tried to unify the study of European revolutions over a century or Theda Skocpol's "States and Social Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China" which claimed that you could come up with a universalizing analysis of authoritarian state collapse. Both are interesting and ambitious books but ultimately unconvincing as they attempted to assert a general rule-set for history.
Now we're told that cliodynamics is going to solve the problem. Again, as the original article notes, most trained historians are skeptical. It's not just that we like futzing around with old documents, it's that we're aware of the weaknesses in ongoing research, holes in observations and the biases in the data. You want to point to huge amounts of populist violence in the U.S. circa 1920 as proof that it was a high in a fifty year cycle? I and other historians can point to stunning outbreaks a decade earlier related to the anarchist movements and a decade later with the unrest regarding the Great Depression. It's not so much cherry-picking counter examples: it's the wrongheaded concept of seeing people as pawns of historical forces. Asimov was fun to read, I'll grant you, but I'd hope that people can see that human agency has an awful lot more to do with historical change than the rules of psychohistory.
Stop looking for general rules of what's going to come next and consider, instead, clear-sighted analysis of how we've come to where we are and what that tells us about problems we've had and continue to experience.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
1888: Jack the Ripper active
1913: The eve of the First World War
1938: Hitler annexes Austria
1963: Kennedy assassinated
1988: The Lockerbie bombing
It's 2013 we need to worry about, sheeple!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
We were hardly any better 100 years ago, and there are no lack of Westerners who wouldn't mind seeing homosexuals shoved back in the closet.
And what is with these Aspergers accusations?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The guy isn't a mathematician, he's an ecologist. And I find it hard to believe that by 2020, social acceptance of domestic violence (say) rises again to mid-20th century levels. The reporter's suggestion that the precise moment in time of the Egyptian revolution was predictable is likely based on a misunderstanding of Turchin's work.
By the way, the field isn't as new as the article suggests. Steven Pinker's recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, collects quite a bit of quantitative research in this area, most of which does not support the existence of stable cycles.
The muslims in the west are just biding their time until they are strong enough to act like muslims in the middle east.
Heh.
One wonders why the Mayors of Chicago and Boston go off on fundamentalist Christian Chick-Fil-A, which voices opposition to gay marriage, but are silent against fundamentalist Islam extermination of gays themselves.
Probably because the Christians won't kill 'em.
Just ask Theo Van Gogh.
Oh, wait. You can't. Muzzies actually KILLED him.
Wonder if the Piss Christ artist has the balls to do a Shit Koran?
Yeah, we know the answer to that, don't we.
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that Islam is evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticism them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that Islam is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Let me rephrase that to make ti a bit more on-topic:
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that humans are evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticize them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that humanity is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Point being: people are greedy and violent and abuse power structures. The degree to which this happens in a given society seems to go in cyclic 2-generational waves, and this mathematician has found a way to model it. The rhetoric in this thread ascribing human faults to specific people groups (faith based or ethic based) and pointing out specific failings inside these groups is totally beside the point. If there were no non-white muslims living in the US, there'd be someone else, and the rhetoric would be almost identical. Eventually, the overall level of societal dissatisfaction with the way these issues are resolved by "peaceable" means will come to a head, and people will look to physical solutions. This will carry on until there is a majority formed who share strong core societal values that they then shove down the throats of everyone else, at which point "peace" returns and "everyone" is happy.
They say history repeats itself, and in this case they (and this mathematician) appear to be spot-on.
What these models don't factor in especially well though, is population density. I'd like to see this guy do a slightly more complex model that ties in the affects of density on the level and duration of the violence.
Cliodynamics is viewed with deep scepticism by most academic historians, who tend to see history as a complex stew of chance, individual foibles and one-of-a-kind situations that no broad-brush 'science of history' will ever capture.....Most think that phenomena such as political instability should be understood by constructing detailed narratives of what actually happened — always looking for patterns and regularities, but never forgetting that each outbreak emerged from a particular time and place.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Take your meds.
you don't have to steal from them, you just never let them have anything in the first place. I guess you can call that 'stealing', but it's not stealing in the traditional sense, so it's too difficult an idea for people to understand. This is why R Money and Billy G have billions and 46% of the rest of us don't make enough money to be worth taxing...
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Long answer : back in 1942 there was such things as an official war against germany. No matter how your governement , there is no such a things as a recognized war against a *word* (war agaisnt drug, war agaisnt terrorism) just like the made up "illegal fighter". The simple truth is that terrorism is a judicial problem (aka non military) but your governement saw the occasion to use new toy in real theater instead of training zone/firing range.
So we are speaking of assassination(the correct word in absence of due process) of citizen from your (or other) country.
*Shrug* . I don't expect that to change any time soon. Your military right now is probably creaming in their pants just as the amount of data they got about their toy used and potential advance.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Here's the basic story of the Great Depression, which is very similar to the story of the more recent financial crisis.
1. Times were good in the 1920's on Wall St. People could and did make good money trading stocks.
2. A bubble began to form, with financial companies willing to extend credit in order to buy stocks. For instance, you could buy a $1 stock for 10 cents and owe your banker for the other 90 cents. They were willing to do this because the stocks were constantly going up, so this was a good investment.
3. Of course, the stocks were going up because people were entering the market with only 10% of the value of the stock in hand, which meant they could pay 10 times what they previously could.
4. Eventually, somebody discovered that the underlying assets were worth, at most, 10% of what they were priced at in the market. When this became public knowledge, everyone tried to get out at the same time.
5. End result: Crash. And when one business crashes, their stock, which was considered good, is now worthless, so businesses holding their stock also crash, so it cascades through the system leaving things worse than if the Crimson Permanent Assurance had hit them.
Replace "stocks" with "mortgage backed securities", fast forward 70 years or so, and the same thing happened. It happens any time that a con man can successfully make worthless pieces of paper look like representations of valuable property. And yes, it could conceivably happen that the pieces of paper that say "One Dollar" on them will also become worthless - if it does, you want to have land and a team of people who will help you defend it.
I am officially gone from
I think it's interesting how Obama has attempted to follow FDR's efforts but with much less legislative success. Due to the uncertainty, the bad law, and just the nasty anti-business attitude coming from the White House, businesses have been putting off investment and hiring for quite some time. But I imagine that will improve greatly in 2013, if Obama should be voted out.
Ridiculous! Businesses are putting off hiring because there is no demand. If these businesses had demand they'd be hiring, uncertainty, law, and the White House's attitude be damned. Your assertion to the contrary is clearly politically motivated.
The US populace is majority christian nation and they caused hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilizans, and their president said "God told me to invade Iraq". Truly a bloody religion.
Of course, my assertion is. But why isn't all that stimulus that the US and the rest of the world burned, doing much? That's supposedly a huge spur to demand, but it's fallen pretty flat.
There are two things to keep in mind here. First of all, there wasn't that much stimulus happening in the first place. All those huge sounding numbers that the Fed throws around with various QE activities does almost exactly zero to stimulate the demand, and economists who focus on how the financial sector works have been able to predict that quite accurately.
Second, the Obama stimulus has in fact helped soften the recession according to most simulations, including those of the CBO. The stimulus simply wasn't very big compared to the overall size of the problem. (Yes, the problem was that huge.)
As for the whole uncertainty thing, look: Of course this is largely a chicken-and-egg problem. You are of course right that uncertainty leads to individuals spending less. But then this reduction in demand causes uncertainty in the first place. So the non-partisan question here is how to best break that cycle. It is obvious that if you inject more demand into the system, this eliminates many reasons for uncertainty for individual spending decisions.
Outside of neoclassical economic models, expectations follow reality more than the other way around.
You're oversimplifying slightly. Non-Muslims are often better off under westernist (muslim) governments, but they're often so much better off that you can see why islamists hate them. I think of Islamists as equivalent to the uneducated racist masses who support nationalist parties in the west - they see foreigners as the source of their problems. Islamists have much more justification for thinking this, though, and not just because of the carpet bombing and military occupation a lot of them have been subjected to, but because most of these West friendly governments were instated by the West (US) and are working against the interests of either half their own people or all of them. "Muslims" are not all the same, either. In the mid East there are Sunnis and Shias, two main tribes who hate each other, and when regimes change, generally it's not just non-Muslims up against the wall, the Shia government and population get it in the neck too. I'm not condoning any of it, but don't portray all Muslims /Islamists as unreasonable savages just because you can't be bothered to learn the nuances of their history and politics.
Your theory (Muslims cannot be blamed because they were oppressed previously and naturally are going to be violent) breaks down on several grounds. First of all there are great examples of people being oppressed and not seeking revenge. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela spring to mind - the latter's "truth and reconciliation" showing the extent to which forgiveness can go. I expect you will argue that Muslims are culturally inferior to all of these - follow their own reasoning that they cannot be held to the same standards as the rest of humanity: "they made us do it by burning the Quran", or "she made us kill her by marrying a non Muslim", or "they wore a non-Muslim religious symbol in the open". Personally I don't think appeasing their lack of control will improve it in any way.
Secondly you totally ignore the facts that Muslims oppress the minorities in countries where they have not been ruled by others - and have done so historically. Look at Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. The latter was ruled by Britain before, but this was a brief window on non-Oppression for Hindus in Pakistan, which occurred before and still does today. Maybe again you might feel that we cannot expect Muslims to "get over" British rule in the same way that India, South Africa, and many other countries have without lashing out at others. My feeling is that since they oppress elsewhere and have done s through history, they would still be ding so in India now if they were not overthrown by the British, or someone else.
Name one place where Muslims have the upper hand where they don't oppress or restrict non-Muslims.
Even in a do nothing scenario, eventually the uncertainty goes away.
You're missing the point.
To paint an obviously exaggerated picture, if a prolonged global depression causes so much social unrest that the global supply chain disintegrates, then what good does it do if uncertainty goes away afterwards? When living standards declined after the fall of Rome, do you really think people thought that was just fine, since after all, uncertainty eventually went away?
Now of course nobody expects anything quite so stark, except perhaps limited to countries like Greece and Spain. But the point still stands: prolonged recessions can decrease the long-term trajectory of an economy. It's called hysteresis.
Will the feds be trying to block expansion of my business after I already have spent the money for expansion? Who knows? But Obama has already blocked a lot of such things (particularly, fossil fuel related industries and infrastructure) and is likely to continue that practice should he get reelected.
Frankly, you're letting your politics cloud sound judgement (bringing suspicions about future behaviour of one specific politician into the discussion is a sure sign of that). It is a pity that I cannot find the link right now, but a survey among small businesses around 2010-2011 clearly indicated that what they were most worried about was finding customers for their products and services.
Regulation can be troublesome, I give you that, but individual pieces of regulation are mostly confined to a very narrow segment of the economy, and the problem we're talking about here is obviously at a macro level.