Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6179/second-us-civil-war... Notes: The Harvard December 2021 youth poll participants gave as 35% chance in their lifetime: https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/fall-2021-harvard-youth-p... Rasmussen 2018 poll: 33% likely, 10% very likely before 2023 https://www.newsweek.com/second-civil-war-likely-one-third-a... Does anyone have a graph of this probabilty over time from a consistent source like rasmussen? https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/que...

program to produce the prediction, is illustrative of the methodological shortfall. Moreover, Turchin's original prediction was much vaguer than he or current media around him presents it: "The next decade (i.e, the years around 2020) is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe, which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe in the Opinion collection of '2020 visions' " (source: https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a) To call "growing instability" a vague prediction is an understatement. It could refer to civil war, democratic decline, crime rates, bad days at work, productivity drops, or any number of other things one could imagine. In this case, it refers primarily to protests against racism (the violent parts of which are comparatively rare and perpetrated mostly by a small number of opportunists) and secondarily to a long-running trend of political polarization, neither of which are particularly unheard of in recent memory. In both cases, these movements are overwhelmingly a problem in the US, with Europe looking calm in comparison. It is therefore somewhat likely that Turchin is not as much a Hari Seldman, or even a poor imitation thereof, as much as a John Edward: that is, he is a cold reader.