8/14/2023 0 Comments Clearent data guardian![]() ![]() Now, when I’d moved to the United States in 1977, the was really at the brink of several trends beginning to point downwards,” he says, tracing the path of a rollercoaster with his right hand. “I went back for the first time since leaving in 1992, and I experienced a failed state. That background makes him less sanguine than others might be about the prospect of societal upheaval – even state collapse. He emigrated with his dissident parents in 1977, when he was 20. “You know, my wife has a garden, it’s very comfortable.” A bit like a dacha, he observes – a reminder, alongside his strong accent, that he was born in the USSR – “a country that doesn’t exist any more”. “We have a house in the woods,” he tells me, and praises the area’s “low population density” in a way that makes me wonder if he’s prepping for the apocalypse. He speaks to me over Zoom from the sofa in his modest living room in Storrs, Connecticut, essentially a village with a huge university campus attached. There are some familiar concepts here – falling living standards leading to mass discontent – but others, “elite overproduction” in particular, are much less widely recognised, and genuinely eye-opening.įor a global prophet of doom, Turchin cuts a surprisingly ordinary figure. Now Turchin is having another go at explaining those cycles of disruption and what it might take to emerge unscathed (though he tells me that, unlike in 2010, it’s past time to avoid the consequences entirely: “We are in crisis – but it’s not too late to take a less bloody exit.”) His book’s title, End Times, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but it does provide a clear theory about how we got into this mess, and how to get out of it. In the 70s I saw the end of the Golden Age, from the common people’s perspective – and it’s been downhill since then ![]() The following January saw the storming of the Capitol, and images of insurrection that seemed like a throwback to an earlier revolutionary era. Right on cue, 2020 delivered a pandemic, economic chaos and a president who refused to concede defeat at the polls. Frustration at the established order threw up Brexit in Britain and Trump in the US. The response to the financial crisis wasn’t a New Deal-style rescue package as he’d recommended, but austerity and a widening of the gap between rich and poor. Normally scientists enjoy being proved right, but for Turchin, the way the following decade panned out must have seemed a bit too on-the-nose. “All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.” There was still time to change course, though: with measures to improve wellbeing and reduce economic inequality, “records show that societies can avert disaster”. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he wrote, “which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe.” He pointed to waves of disruption that tend to recur every 50 years. He was responding to their “2020 visions” issue – an upbeat dawn-of-the-decade exercise that collected predictions of progress from across science and politics. Ukrainian officials have said the deluge will leave hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water, swamp tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and turn at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation into “deserts”.I n February 2010, Peter Turchin, a relatively obscure researcher at the University of Connecticut, wrote a letter to the distinguished journal Nature. On the Russian side, the worst-affected town is Nova Kakhovka, where Russian authorities have imposed a state of emergency and said they would start pumping out water on Thursday. “It is a bit premature to talk about going back,” he said, advising people to wait in centres for the displaced. “So far, more than 4,000 people have been evacuated”, in the part of the Kherson region occupied by Russia, the Moscow-installed head of the region, Vladimir Saldo, said on Telegram. “Our rescuers, police and volunteers have already evacuated 1,894 citizens,” Ukraine’s interior minister, Oleg Klymenko, said, adding that 30 settlements had been flooded, 10 of which were under Russian control. Photograph: Libkos/APĪlmost 6,000 people have been evacuated on both sides of the Dnipro River, officials said.
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