Post by Dave on Aug 29, 2012 22:43:21 GMT -5
Calculated violence: Numbers that predict revolutions
New Scientist, Magazine issue 2878, 23 August 2012, by Bob Holmes
The mathematics underpinning the rise and fall of empires suggest that the US faces imminent and bloody unrest. How worried should we be?
PETER TURCHIN thinks he can see the future. Unlike the fortune teller you might find at a seaside carnival, he needs no crystal ball. Instead, the tools of his trade are mathematics and testable theories. Armed with these, his goal is nothing less than to revolutionise the study of history, turning it from a mass of anecdotes into a rigorous, predictive science.
Turchin calls his new discipline cliodynamics, after Clio, the classical Greek muse of history, and so far its biggest focus has been the fate of empires. Now Turchin is using patterns he has found underlying their rise and fall to make predictions of political changes to come. His forecast is alarming. If his calculations are correct, the US faces major civil unrest and political violence sometime around the end of this decade. ...
A professor at the University of Connecticut, he is a respected mathematical ecologist with a lengthy list of influential papers on animal movements and populations behind him. "It was a midlife crisis," he recalls. "I turned 40, and I had achieved tenure and some notoriety in population dynamics. At some point I thought, 'Where is the challenge?'" So he started looking for a new field where he could put his formidable mathematical chops to work. "It turns out that the only science that didn't have that already was history. The field was wide open." So Turchin rolled up his sleeves and began the familiar process of forming hypotheses and testing them. ....
That was 15 years ago. Since then he has used his analytical approach to address all sorts of historical questions, including how religions spread, why empires tend to arise where steppe meets farmland, and why empires collapse. "The goal is to make history an explanatory science, which means rejecting some theories in favour of others," he says. There are more than 200 explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, because historians keep coming up with new ideas but never cull the old ones, he says. Cliodynamics, by contrast, aims to work out which theories best fit the evidence. ....
A few disciplines traditionally buck this trend for subjectivity, such as economic history, which is intrinsically quantifiable. And the explosion in computing power means that, increasingly, data analysis is being used to address diverse historical questions. Fred Gibbs and Dan Cohen at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, for example, plundered the online library Google Books to test the long-held belief that religious faith declined in England during Victorian times. Tracking the use of religiously charged words in the title of every book published in the UK during the 19th century, they charted a sharp fall in the use of "God" and "Christ" after about 1850, while the more neutral "Jesus", which can refer to the historical person without the religious baggage, held relatively constant (Victorian Studies, DOI: 10.1353/vic.2011.0146). But Turchin's approach goes beyond the analysis of trends such as these to try to pick out repeating patterns in history.
Reasoning that the fate of an empire rests ultimately on social cohesion, he has used historical records to track the prevalence of what he calls collective violence - deaths due to political assassinations, riots and civil wars, but not international wars or ordinary crimes - in three major civilisations, the Roman Republic, medieval Europe and Tsarist Russia. Applying mathematical tools borrowed from population biology, he has found that in each case deaths from collective violence follow two superimposed cycles, one spanning two to three centuries and the other about 50 years (Secular Cycles, Princeton University Press, 2009). What's more, he thinks his data provide enough leverage to understand what drives the longer cycle.
The likeliest explanation, he says, is an idea known as demographic-structural theory, proposed two decades ago by Jack Goldstone at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. This argues that in a prosperous culture, population growth or advancing technology eventually leads to an oversupply of labour. That is good news for an expanding upper class who can more easily exploit an increasingly desperate labour force. Eventually, though, the society becomes so top-heavy that even some members of the elite can no longer afford the good life. Factionalism sets in as the upper classes fight among themselves, social cohesion declines, and the state begins to lose control of its citizens. Then, and only then, does widespread violence break out. Anarchy reigns until enough people fall out of the elite classes, at which point growth and prosperity can return.
New Scientist, Magazine issue 2878, 23 August 2012, by Bob Holmes
The mathematics underpinning the rise and fall of empires suggest that the US faces imminent and bloody unrest. How worried should we be?
PETER TURCHIN thinks he can see the future. Unlike the fortune teller you might find at a seaside carnival, he needs no crystal ball. Instead, the tools of his trade are mathematics and testable theories. Armed with these, his goal is nothing less than to revolutionise the study of history, turning it from a mass of anecdotes into a rigorous, predictive science.
Turchin calls his new discipline cliodynamics, after Clio, the classical Greek muse of history, and so far its biggest focus has been the fate of empires. Now Turchin is using patterns he has found underlying their rise and fall to make predictions of political changes to come. His forecast is alarming. If his calculations are correct, the US faces major civil unrest and political violence sometime around the end of this decade. ...
A professor at the University of Connecticut, he is a respected mathematical ecologist with a lengthy list of influential papers on animal movements and populations behind him. "It was a midlife crisis," he recalls. "I turned 40, and I had achieved tenure and some notoriety in population dynamics. At some point I thought, 'Where is the challenge?'" So he started looking for a new field where he could put his formidable mathematical chops to work. "It turns out that the only science that didn't have that already was history. The field was wide open." So Turchin rolled up his sleeves and began the familiar process of forming hypotheses and testing them. ....
That was 15 years ago. Since then he has used his analytical approach to address all sorts of historical questions, including how religions spread, why empires tend to arise where steppe meets farmland, and why empires collapse. "The goal is to make history an explanatory science, which means rejecting some theories in favour of others," he says. There are more than 200 explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, because historians keep coming up with new ideas but never cull the old ones, he says. Cliodynamics, by contrast, aims to work out which theories best fit the evidence. ....
A few disciplines traditionally buck this trend for subjectivity, such as economic history, which is intrinsically quantifiable. And the explosion in computing power means that, increasingly, data analysis is being used to address diverse historical questions. Fred Gibbs and Dan Cohen at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, for example, plundered the online library Google Books to test the long-held belief that religious faith declined in England during Victorian times. Tracking the use of religiously charged words in the title of every book published in the UK during the 19th century, they charted a sharp fall in the use of "God" and "Christ" after about 1850, while the more neutral "Jesus", which can refer to the historical person without the religious baggage, held relatively constant (Victorian Studies, DOI: 10.1353/vic.2011.0146). But Turchin's approach goes beyond the analysis of trends such as these to try to pick out repeating patterns in history.
Reasoning that the fate of an empire rests ultimately on social cohesion, he has used historical records to track the prevalence of what he calls collective violence - deaths due to political assassinations, riots and civil wars, but not international wars or ordinary crimes - in three major civilisations, the Roman Republic, medieval Europe and Tsarist Russia. Applying mathematical tools borrowed from population biology, he has found that in each case deaths from collective violence follow two superimposed cycles, one spanning two to three centuries and the other about 50 years (Secular Cycles, Princeton University Press, 2009). What's more, he thinks his data provide enough leverage to understand what drives the longer cycle.
The likeliest explanation, he says, is an idea known as demographic-structural theory, proposed two decades ago by Jack Goldstone at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. This argues that in a prosperous culture, population growth or advancing technology eventually leads to an oversupply of labour. That is good news for an expanding upper class who can more easily exploit an increasingly desperate labour force. Eventually, though, the society becomes so top-heavy that even some members of the elite can no longer afford the good life. Factionalism sets in as the upper classes fight among themselves, social cohesion declines, and the state begins to lose control of its citizens. Then, and only then, does widespread violence break out. Anarchy reigns until enough people fall out of the elite classes, at which point growth and prosperity can return.