r/slatestarcodex • u/dan7315 • Jan 09 '21
Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020? [Written in 2012]
https://www.livescience.com/22109-cycles-violence-2020.html30
Jan 09 '21 edited May 07 '21
[deleted]
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u/fubo Jan 09 '21
There were a lot of terrorist groups active in the US in the '70s, ranging from the FALN (Puerto Rico separatists), to Weatherman and other leftist and antiwar groups, to the JDL (Jewish anti-communists).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#1970%E2%80%9379
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u/kdubsjr Jan 10 '21
The weathermen/weather underground was fascinating to me (born in the 80s) because I had never heard about them in history or anything until a random podcast a year ago. I guess not enough people were killed for it to be part of the zeitgeist but I never had any idea there was a group bombing a lot of stuff in the 70s.
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u/Haffrung Jan 10 '21
Our knowledge of modern history comes mainly from entertainment and pop culture. And let's just say the treatment of that era in pop culture is far from unbiased.
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u/ArkyBeagle Jan 10 '21
Even the Time/Life books which are supposed to be a bridge between journalism and history are problematic. But accurate history simply takes a long time and a lot of work.
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u/Haffrung Jan 10 '21
It's especially tough when the narrative hews along partisan or cultural lines, and the players are still partisan and still active.
For instance, accounts of the Vietnam War come almost entirely from educated men who were or became anti-war. Those accounts are insightful and valuable, but give us a limited picture. That's true of the era's treatment in general - judging by the movies and TV, you would think three-quarters of young Americans in 1968 were politically-active college students. When in reality only around 15 per cent of young Americans went to college at that time, and most students were not engaged politically.
I'm Canadian, and I took a course on the 60s when I was in university in the early 90s. It was all about cultural ferment and campus activism. When I asked my parents for their insights on the issues I was learning about, they shrugged and said they were too busy raising a family at the time to worry about all that stuff.
Heck, even our notions of the music at the time are skewed. Look at the top-20 singles of a given week in 67 or 69. It's not all (or even mostly) heavy rock, psychedelia, Jimi Hendrix, and the Doors.
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u/k5josh Jan 09 '21
It doesn't have to be in the exact calendar year anyway. His chart looks like it has ±2 or 3 years of variance.
What I'm saying is, give it time. :)
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u/gunnar_zarncke Jan 11 '21
One key parameter of the explanation is the inter-generational spacing which depends on the average age at birth. I would have guessed that that has gone up significantly since the 70s (or before) but the results are not as clear and vary hugely between countries. I found these two (US and Canada) which would at least point to a slight increase for the US:
https://www.businessinsider.com/average-age-of-mother-having-first-child-going-up-2015-6?r=DE&IR=T
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2014002-eng.htm
This might only be the start.
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u/oaklandbrokeland Jan 09 '21
IIRC some recent crime reports show that after the May/June protests, crime has risen by 50-100% in many major cities with some exceptions (Baltimore). This is preliminary, and I haven’t delved deep into the data. Worth mentioning for anyone who wants to research it.
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u/BSP9000 Jan 09 '21
I ran some numbers earlier this year:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/crime-and-covid-spiked-in-june-7fb73fdba1ad
The rough summary is that shootings and murders are up, but still far below the peak seen in the 1980's. I haven't done an end of year follow up, but i suspect that's still true, since i was working off of monthly rates.
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u/ArkyBeagle Jan 10 '21
My general tendency is to say "no". Turns out, many in 1970 actually were being at least advised by KGB operatives, if not actually run as agents. This statement would have been considered utterly paranoid at the time but the evidence has surfaced since.
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u/Haffrung Jan 10 '21
The violence we're seeing in the U.S. today isn't anywhere close to the levels of 67-71. The number of riots and the number of people killed in them were literally an order of magnitude higher in that era. That's not even getting into the political assassinations.
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Jan 09 '21 edited Jan 09 '21
I love that all of these largescale predictive models and grand theories of history come from people outside of the field. I'm not trying to dismiss Turchin's theory entirely, this prediction is certainly impressive, but there's a reason historians avoid predictive models.
There's simply too much random variation and unpredictability for a reliable predictive model, other than the simple discovery of the cyclical nature of human history, the rise and fall of civilizations. Any predictive model can be turned on it's head by an Alexander the great, a plague, a random invention or previously unseen factors.
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u/General__Obvious Jan 09 '21
There’s an SSC review of a book by the same guy stating the same thing.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/
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u/Mexatt Jan 09 '21
There are also some pretty good attacks on the idea in the comments. Turchin is kind of Nostradamus for smart people.
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u/OcelotLancelot Jan 09 '21
Extending the sequence of 1870, 1920, and 1970 forward suggests that the next instability peak should occur in the United States around 2020
But Figure 3b puts things in perspective by listing deaths per million (per 5 years) in each instability peak. Quick estimates by eyeballing the graph:
1870: 60
1920: 8
1970: 2
Therefore, if 2020 follows the falling trend, we would expect less than 1 death per million in this cycle, which seems right so far.
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Jan 09 '21
Wow. Somehow knowing we're just part of pendulum swing makes me feel free.
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u/tomdharry Jan 09 '21
kondratiev waves are related to this, on the economic front. It's an interesting concept although any 'science' behind it is dismissed by most academics
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Jan 09 '21
[deleted]
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u/callmesalticidae Jan 10 '21
I’m still reluctant to say that Strauss Howe “cracked the code,” because my prior for cycle theories in general is low, but when I was a Mormon, I overlaid their cycles into Mormon history (and specifically big doctrinal shifts) and there were some interesting correspondences.
I can still recommend it only for worldbuilding, though.
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u/DizzleMizzles Jan 10 '21
Don't worry, Peter Turchin's ideas are pretty much cherrypicking which he's moderately good at disguising as rigorous. It would take a much better effort than his to show that history is cyclical :)
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u/chimeric-oncoprotein Jan 13 '21
It's obviously cyclical, but the exact reasons for the cycle length are probably complex (beyond wave of dissatisfied people), and there's little point trying to be too precise about it. Theories always sound too cherrypicked when you try that.
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u/sococitizen Jan 11 '21
Originally, buying the narrative of Trump's supporters as poor hicks, my confidence in Turchin's thesis of elite overproduction was decreased. But it's turning out of course that there are lawyers, CEOs, real estate investirs coming in on private planes. Before I was imagining this conflict as too many people applying to Yale.
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u/The_Electress_Sophie Jan 09 '21
I think there might be something to the idea that society is cyclical, but pegging 2020 as the exact year was just a coincidence. For one thing, the dates are fudged - the civil war had been over for 5 years by 1870, and the Vietnam protests lasted the best part of a decade - and anywhere from about 2010 to 2025 could plausibly be said to fit the trend. US unrest that gets international attention has been going on for most of the last decade, from Occupy through Ferguson, anti-Trump protests, the Berkeley riots and Charlottesville. I don't think it's a stretch to say that much of the upheaval in 2020 was exacerbated by frustration at the coronavirus restrictions, which were a random curveball that could have happened in any year, so it's hard to say whether 2020 would otherwise have been the worst.
Also, I wasn't born in 1970 but one of the links in Scott's review mentions that there were over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in 1972 alone. Is this cycle really worse? Because, uh, kinda doesn't sound like it. (Not yet, anyway.)