By examining history through complex mathematics, the ‘collapsologist’ aims to show – somewhat persuasively – that there are cyclical trends in the narratives of human hope and failure
or as long as complex human societies have existed there have been people predicting their imminent collapse. In recent years, the apocalypse business has become far more scientific; animal entrails and planetary portents have given way to big data.is a pre-eminent digital-age seer or, as he suggests, a collapsologist. He trained in biology, using statistical models to examine networks of relationships between predators and prey.
In response, many historians, wedded to the idea that their discipline is an art rather than a science, have tended to disparage the notion that their life’s work might be better understood through a series of complex equations: there are, they argue, simply too many variables to explain crises, revolutions, wars, even everyday political shifts in society. This book is Turchin’s latest, somewhat persuasive, attempt to challenge that consensus.
This trend has coincided with the second major destabilising factor, what Turchin defines as the “overproduction of elites”, in which an ever greater number of people compete over a finite and increasingly corrupt structure of privilege and power. He offers four factions between which this competition for status is perennially played out: militaristic, financial, bureaucratic and ideological. As societies decline the balanced equation of these factions falls wildly out of balance.
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