Psychohistory Predics Revolution In 2020
There was an article in New Scientist that caught my eye this morning of a guy who has developed something similar to psychohistory, which was part of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The author looked at past empires, when they rose and how they fell, and what factors seem to have contributed to them:
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.
Critics call Turchin's approach simplistic and naive, with some arguing that recorded history is too short to provide adequate evidence for his assertions. Turchin, meanwhile, is happy to have his theories tested - and hopes that he is wrong. If things are left to run their course, we should know quite soon. There is another option, however. We could head off any instability, Turchin says - but only if we take some unpalatable remedies now.
SNIP
Having (quietly for the most part) hung around DU since 2000, I have a keen sense of the growing inequality between rich and poor. It's often surprised me just how much people can take in terms of economic inequality. When the Occupy movement broke out, I expected it to gain more momentum than it did, but perhaps it's just the first instance of unrest. The parallel question is whether people in power realize it as well and are preparing for increasing unrest, possibly rising to violence or civil war.
Look at who is making a lot of money now: banks and investment corporations - not investors. A lot of this is due to high frequency trading (HFT). HFT doesn't do what investment used to do, allocate money to projects that have a high likelihood of success. It's a way to "skim the ripples" of the economy over very short periods of time. It's a way for these companies to take their cut of the money from people who do actual work, but the HFT companies provide nothing in return, not even "protection."
Getting into investment seems very risky, to me at least. I can't imagine trusting one of these companies to handle my money with my interests at heart. There have been too many stories of brokers buying stocks that they get kickbacks on but yield lower. In a way, it's almost like there aren't separate companies in competition but one big company, where all the parts collude for the interest of the whole meta-company. If that represents reality, then we most certainly do not have the benefits that capitalism could offer. And we definitely have the problems that capitalism comes with.
One political party is determined to not only keep things the way they are, but to speed our journey as a nation or a world to the situation that, in the past, has led to the destruction of empires. And the things that party says are incredible: give more money to the rich and it will help everybody, cut taxes and it will raise more revenue, cutting medical care increases freedom. The concocted logic to justify these statements would be laughable if so many people didn't buy into it. And then, there are people who don't buy into it but still support the people saying these things, because they don't care if they can't eat as long as gays can't marry. Unfortunately it's very easy to get people to vote against their own best interests by appealing to the worst of their qualities.
Back to phychohistory: many civilizations have fallen when inequality grows too wide. According to Turchin, we are headed toward that point and will reach it at the end of the decade. How many here have pointed out that, when people have nothing more to lose, they might as well rebel and try to take something back? When people have children to feed, what lengths will they go to do that? Taxing the rich would definitely help to bring some equality back, but the aforementioned political party will do everything it can to stop that from happening, so our march to civil war appears to be set.
Of course, there are differences between empires of old and this country. First, it isn't really about just this country since the world is so much more connected than it ever was before. Global aspects influence economies to a much greater extent than before, but this means the "empire," in effect, is the whole world. A "civil war," in this case, could be far larger than anything that happened in the past, with far greater consequences for all of civilization and the world.
Add to that global warming with the associated rising sea levels, extreme weather, dropping yield on corn and other crops, and the force toward violence could increase by an order of magnitude. It would not be pretty. Heading it off should be everyone's priority.
= new reply since forum marked as read
My mind is blown. If the right becomes fascists (they seem pretty darn close to me) I might become violent.
Asimov said violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, but I can't see it in this world. 
I noticed you have interesting subject lines. 
...that in 2020 the percentage of the electorate, here in America, which is composed of "whites" falls below 2/3.
It is at this point that I believe the Republican party will need to win such a large percentage of the white vote to win a national election that it becomes highly improbable if not impossible in any practical sense. The "nonwhite" vote favors us and this demographic shift will continue to favor our party every year for the foreseeable future and beyond.
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/aia2010031101/
^snip^
The increase in the nonwhite share of the electorate over the next decade will have major consequences for electoral competition. If the Democratic Party is able to maintain anything close to the overwhelming advantage among nonwhite voters that it enjoyed in 2008, Republican candidates will need to win a considerably larger share of the white vote than their party’s candidates did in 2008 or even 2004 in order to remain competitive in national elections. Under these circumstances, even a 60 percent share of the white vote would not be enough to give a Republican candidate a majority of the popular vote and the last Republican presidential candidate to win more than 60 percent of the white vote was Ronald Reagan in 1984.
An alternative path to victory for Republicans in future national elections would involve seeking to expand their Party’s support among nonwhite voters. By winning a larger share of the nonwhite vote, a Republican candidate could be elected with considerably less than 60 percent of the white vote. But this would require the GOP to move away from its conservative base and closer to the ideological center because nonwhite voters tend to be strong supporters of increased spending on social programs and activist government.
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Along the same lines, 65 percent of nonwhite voters, including 64 percent of African-American voters and 73 percent of Hispanic voters, supported the creation of a single-payer health care system in the United States compared with only 15 percent of Republican primary voters. And given a choice between more government services with higher taxes and fewer government services with lower taxes, 67 percent of nonwhite voters, including 67 percent of African-American voters and 68 percent of Hispanic voters, chose more government services with higher taxes compared with only 25 percent of GOP primary voters.
P.S. As an Asimov fan I must say that psychohistory is far to complex for any human brain to conceive of. Without a real life version of R. Daneel we have no hope of ever developing this.
