Asimov introduced the concept of "psychohistory" in his Foundations series [1]. Psychohistory "combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people" [1]<p>Almost a decade ago I heard about a researcher who took up the gauntlet of developing psychohistory. His name is Peter Turchin. Because there was an established academic field already named psychohistory [2], he named his field of study "Cliodynamics" [3].<p>When I first heard about Dr. Turchin, he had recently made a prediction that we were likely to see political violence in the 2020s [4, 5].<p>In this current blog entry he talks about factors that are likely to influence whether there is or is not political violence in the next few years.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)</a>
[2]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory</a>
[3]: <a href="http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/" rel="nofollow">http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/</a>
[4]: <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/cliodynamics-a-science-for-predicting-the-future/#" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/article/cliodynamics-a-science-for-pred...</a>!
[5]: <a href="http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://peterturchin.com/PDF/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf</a>