What Are Our Chances, Doc?
What Are Our Chances, Doc? Crisis statistics for the End Times HARRISON KOEHLI I know the feeling, calculating cat. I loathed statistics in university. But I still love statistics—as long as they’re interesting. So the final chapter of Peter Turchin’s End Times was an extra treat. All the fun without any of the bore—if you can call epidemics, civil wars, and state collapse fun, that is. Over the years, the number of crisis periods studied by Turchin and his team has grown impressively. From Jack Goldstone’s original study of the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century and the Age of Revolutions, then Turchin and Sergey Nefedov’s study of eight cycles in the histories of England, France, Russia, and Rome, CrisisDB has expanded that number up to around 200 case studies, soon to be 300. Turchin has even put out a call for any academics interested in joining the fun . As he writes in his latest preprint : This chapter offers a road-map for resear...