The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010-2020 decade: A retrospective assessment

PLoS One. 2020 Aug 17;15(8):e0237458. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237458. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010-2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe Turchin P. 2018. This prediction was based on a computational model that quantified in the USA such structural-demographic forces for instability as popular immiseration, intraelite competition, and state weakness prior to 2010. Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected forward in time the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability. Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom. 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. We find that such measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010-2020 decade in all of these countries.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Demography / trends*
  • Europe
  • Humans
  • Politics*
  • Retrospective Studies
  • Riots / statistics & numerical data
  • Riots / trends
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

Grants and funding

Higher School of Economics Moscow has provided funding for purchasing CNTS data. We thank Complexity Science Hub Vienna for supporting PT and AK in Vienna to work on this project.