Dear Mr. Rawles,
Most of your readership is likely convinced that the coming decades (or years or months) will yield considerable social instability. The hard question is always what form it will take and when it is likely to happen. I found an article about ecological models that seem to describe past historical patterns with some degree of accuracy. From these models, their author is predicting another spike of instability around 2020.
From the article:
“To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals starting with the U.S. Civil War is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator-prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history.”
Just as with climate change, I am skeptical of the ability of any model to accurately predict such a complex system. However, just as with climate change, there’s likely some truth to these models if they capture the essence of important system dynamics. Whether these predictions turn out to be accurate, only time will tell.
Best, – Mike X.