Cliodynamics measures the patterns history repeats. One researcher used it to forecast America's 2020 crisis.

Historical psychology reads the minds of people centuries dead, revealing how the modern mind was made.

Together, they give us our first real tools for forecasting the future of human societies.

Around fifteen years ago, a major science journal asked leading researchers to picture the coming decade. Most answers were sober—emissions paths, growth curves, demographic projections. One was strange. Peter Turchin, who had begun his career as a theoretical biologist before turning his quantitative tools on history, told them the U.S. was moving toward a serious internal crisis around 2020. Polarization would harden. Trust in shared institutions would crack. Political violence would surface in ways most Americans alive had never seen (Turchin, 2010).

By the end of the decade, the forecast was hard to chalk up to luck.

What Turchin practices has a name now: cliodynamics. The premise is unromantic but powerful. History is not just a parade of singular accidents. It is a system, and like other systems, it has pressures that recur. When wages stall for decades while costs climb, when too many ambitious people are competing for too few elite positions, and when the institutions designed to absorb conflict start losing their grip, the chance of disorder rises. The model never predicts the spark. It predicts that some spark, somewhere, will catch.

Late-Republican Rome, the Bourbon endgame in France, and the interwar 1930s all sit, perhaps uncomfortably, inside the same family of curves.

A quieter movement was taking shape on the psychology side of the academy in roughly the same years. It extended Turchin's logic from structure to mind. Societies........

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