Issue #52

Abstract: This review article analyzes the rationale behind the predictive model in Peter Turchin’s book, “End Times.” Turchin’s model, built within the scientific discipline of cliodynamics, predicts the political collapse of a country using the United States as an example. The quality of any predictive model is determined by a number of parameters: the researcher’s theoretical assumptions, the choice of variables, their operationalization in the model, the quality of the data fed into it, and the logic of the transition from forecast to recommendations. Turchin and his colleagues identified a set of parameters common to different historical eras, which they use to describe social crises and state collapses in the past. This article aims to examine the extent to which the set of factor variables in the model is the result of a direct transfer from the past to the future, and to what extent it is the result of an analysis of the situation in today’s America; whether the content and relevance of these factors are preserved after their interpretation and operationalization in modern conditions; and whether the set of parameters in Turchin’s model is necessary and sufficient for predicting a social crisis, let alone the political collapse of the United States.