In 2010 a Researcher Predicted Mayhem in U.S. in 2020, Now Says Civil War Possible
June 18th, 2020Via: Time:
Not everyone took Peter Turchin seriously a decade ago when he said widespread civil unrest would sweep through the U.S. in 2020.
“They had no reason to believe I wasn’t crazy,” says Turchin, a 63-year-old researcher who teaches cultural evolution at the University of Connecticut.
In 2010, after analyzing historical cycles of instability, Turchin made a prediction that was published at the time in the journal Nature: America will suffer a period of major social upheaval beginning around 2020.
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After spending the last 20 years studying crises in America and the structural defects that helped cause them, Turchin says many signs showed the U.S. was spiraling toward upheaval in this decade.
The nation, he says, has experienced stretches of turmoil about every 50 years between 1870, during heightened tensions of the Reconstruction Era, and 1970, in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination when women and many minority groups were fighting for equality amid protests against the ongoing Vietnam War.
Turchin looked at data analyzing peaceful and violent anti-government demonstrations that involved at least 100 people between 1780 and 2010. Using a computer model, he also factored in economic patterns—including declining wages, wealth inequality, exploding national debt and other social pressures that affect national stability—from the same time period. The model showed social and economic turmoil in the U.S. would come to a boiling point in the years around 2020, Turchin wrote in his 2010 paper.
Worse conditions could still be coming.
