Peter Turchin

"Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom."

"Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability..."

"All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020."

"Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected... the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability."

"The theory represents complex human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks."

"How resilient are our societies to internal and external shocks?"

"So far so good. But the problem is, as in many dynamical systems, there are some delayed effects of such dynamics. ...Here are some numbers on the relative distribution of wealth in the American population. You have good data from 1983 to 2019... when we look at the percentage of households with [inflation adjusted in 1995 US dollars] net worth exceeding... Millionaires, roughly 10% of the population (7% now) increased from 3% to 7% but then growth in... classes such as decamillionaires was even more remarkable... more than fivefold, sixfold increase in the proportion of households that have 10 million dollars wealth, or more."

"Many triggering events... are ultimately caused by pent-up social pressures ...[i.e.,] the structural factors."

"Can we model and forecast the dynamics of social resilience and its opposite, social breakdown?"

"(SDT) offers a... wholistic framework for investigating such... forces that... lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of socio-political instability."

"We need to find ways to ameliorate the negative effects of globalization... Economic inequality, accompanied by burgeoning public debt, can be addressed by making tax rates more progressive."

"[S]uch measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010–2020 decade in all of these countries."