First, the post is irksome, with the arguments for there not being a collapse in the near future being admittedly very hand-wavy for reasons other commentators

First, the post is irksome, with the arguments for there not being a collapse in the near future being admittedly very hand-wavy for reasons other commentators here have described. Second, while the post is irksome, Turchin's methodology is extremely shoddy. The fact that climatologic models (modeling an arguably slower-moving and certainly better-understood system than humans alone or in aggregate) require the use of sophisticated mathematics and intensive computer usage, as opposed to Turchin looking at large collections of historical data, determining patterns seemingly by eyeball, and predicting maybe a decade in advance without so much as a mention of a computer 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 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.