A Chronicle of Revolution

The Inaugural Post

I was “lucky” to live through two revolutions. The first one came as a complete surprise. When in 1977 I left the USSR, that state, one of two global superpowers, looked completely monolithic and impregnable. All internal dissent had been suppressed, seemingly, for good (my father’s exile was part of this crack-down). The other superpower, the United States, looked to be in trouble—experiencing the aftershocks of defeat in Vietnam, the energy crisis, and the bear market of the 1970s. Yet a mere fourteen years later it was the USSR that was no more.

During the 1980s the USA regained its footing and, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it experienced a period of global hegemony that was unprecedented in human history. But when, in the early 2000s, I started studying state breakdown in past societies, it began to dawn on me that, despite outward appearances, America had already advanced quite a distance on the road to crisis.

In 2010, when the scientific journal Nature asked several scientists about their forecasts for the coming decade, I wrote that “the next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.” During the following years I gave many academic talks and quite a number of interviews, in which I explained where this forecast came from—from the new transdisciplinary science of history that my colleagues and I called Cliodynamics. Both academics and science reporters seemed interested—by that point I’d accumulated quite a serious body of models and data—but I sensed a palpable feeling of disbelief from them.

That was fine. I myself wasn’t at all certain that this prediction would be accurate. After all, the forecast came from a scientific theory, and we all know that even beautiful theories can be wrong. I considered (and still consider) my forecast, made in 2010, as not a prophecy about what would necessarily happen in 2020, but as a scientific prediction, whose goal was to empirically test the theory (rather than predict the future). I explained this in a 2013 blog post, Scientific Prediction ≠ Prophecy.

And yet, as years advanced, I saw how various indicators, which in the past served as reliable precursors of crisis, continued to trend in increasingly alarming ways. I also kept discovering new kinds of data that supported and enriched the theory. Early enough I found the work of Edward N. Wolff, whose data on household wealth showed that the numbers of decamillionaires (households with 10 million or more inflation adjusted dollars) increased ten-fold over the past four decades. Elite overproduction in spades!

Another shocker was the research by Anne Case and Angus Deaton on “Deaths of Despair.” Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised that as the rich were growing richer, the poor were increasingly immiserating.

Then came 2016. Unlike Asimov’s Psychohistory, Cliodynamics doesn’t attempt to make predictions about individuals. It’s all about structural trends, slowly developing under the surface of day-to-day contentious politics, just like great currents move deep in the ocean. (Read more on Psychohistory in my 2012 blog post). Thus, when I published my forecast in 2010, I of course had no idea who Donald Trump was, and what role he was going to play. But what happened in 2016, a counter-elite gaining power by channeling discontent of immiserated population, is, in structural terms, what always happens in major revolutions.

When 2020 dawned, it was time to do a retrospective assessment on how well my 2010 forecast fared. I teamed up with my Russian colleague, Andrey Korotayev, to look at the dynamics of such measures of sociopolitical instability as antigovernmental demonstrations and violent riots. We looked at such data for several major Western states: USA, UK, France, Germany, Spain, etc. We found that prior to 2010 (when the forecast was made) the incidence of such instability events had been declining (from peaks in the 1960s and 1970s, depending on the country). Thus, the 2010 forecast was not simply a linear extrapolation of the current trends. On the contrary, it predicted a trend reversal. And this was precisely what data showed (see the graphs in the article).

We submitted this article to PlosOne in early 2020. And then history accelerated. By the time the article was accepted, America was slammed by the pandemic, George Floyd, and a long summer of discontent. The published version of our article needed to include a lengthy Postscript reflecting these developments.

Image Credit: Nicolas Ortega

Another turn came later in 2020 when the ruling elites mobilized and succeeded in ousting Donald Trump. While the “storming of the Capitol” on January 6, 2021, shocked the nation and the world, many commentators hastily concluded that things would now go back to normal. I disagreed.

Writing in my book End Times (which came out in 2023, but the final draft was completed in 2022), I pointed out that the structural drivers for instability—the wealth pump, popular immiseration, and elite overproduction/conflict—were still running hot. America was in a “revolutionary situation,” which could be resolved by either developing into a full-blown revolution, or by being defused by skillful actions of the governing elites. Well, now we know which way it went.

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This is the inaugural post for my blog Cliodynamica on this new platform. In the coming weeks I’ll try to make sense of the chaotic times that we are living through, using insights from a cliodynamic analysis of such periods in the past. I will also write about other topics. For those new to my blog, take a look at the blog archive of pre-2025 posts to get an idea of issues that interest me. Also, there is additional information under the About tab.