Home › Authors › Peter Turchin
Peter Turchin Quotes
born 1957 United States
Peter Valentinovich Turchin (born 22 May 1957) is a Russian-American complexity scientist, specializing in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics—mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies. He is currently Editor-in-Chief at Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution.
United States Academics Biologists Historians Non-fiction authors Random Peter Turchin quote
48 quotes
It really is a very coherent understanding of these problems.
Human environment across time (2023)
Can we model and forecast the dynamics of social resilience and its opposite, social breakdown?
How resilient are our societies to internal and external shocks?
SDT is a general theory that guides our understanding of political violence dynamics and social breakdown in all large-scale state-level societies.
In the late 1970s there was a definite phase transition.
Human environment across time (2023)
Quantitative historical analysis reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent—and predictable—waves of political instability...
Structural-demographic theory was proposed 30 years ago.
Elite numbers, as a result... grow and so does their consumption levels.
Human environment across time (2023)
Since the days of Malthus this... force has been much in discussion.
Human environment across time (2023)
Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and several major Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions.
Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom.
So this is how elite overproduction drives intraelite competition, intraelite conflicts, rise of the counter-elites and then sociopolitical instability.
Human environment across time (2023)
Many triggering events... are ultimately caused by pent-up social pressures ...[i.e.,] the structural factors.
The main focus of SDT... is on the structural pressures undermining social resilience.
All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.
Historical data indicate that periods of enhanced instability and internal warfare usually extend for many years, with the median length... 10–15 years range.
The theory represents complex human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with socio-political instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks.
[C]omplex human societies at base and at some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles.
End Times (2023)
It was not... a prophecy, it was a scientific prediction because there is a specific mechanism on which it was based.
Human environment across time (2023)
The focus [is] on only these four structural components... [E]ach component has a number of attributes that change dynamically in response to... [the] other... variables.
Topics Peter Turchin is quoted on
Works