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Most think that phenomena such as political instability should be understood by constructing detailed narratives of what actually happened — always looking for patterns and regularities, but never forgetting that each outbreak emerged from a particular time and place. “We're doing what can be done, as opposed to aspiring after what can't,” says Daniel Szechi, who studies early-modern history at the University of Manchester, UK. “We're just too ignorant” to identify meaningful cycles, he adds.

Goldstone has searched for cliodynamic patterns in past revolutions, and predicts that Egypt will face a few more years of struggle between radicals and moderates and 5–10 years of institution-building before it can regain stability. “It is possible but rare for revolutions to resolve rapidly,” he says. “Average time to build a new state is around a dozen years, and many take longer.”

it seems that indicators of corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of instability or violence is imminent.

they call the secular cycle, extends over two to three centuries. It starts with a relatively egalitarian society, in which supply and demand for labour roughly balance out. In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again.

What is different is the scale — Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact.

when it comes to predicting unique events such as the Industrial Revolution, or the biography of a specific individual such as Benjamin Franklin, he says, the conventional historian's approach of assembling a narrative based on evidence is still best.

“You certainly can't predict when a plane is going to crash, but engineers recover the black box. They study it carefully, they find out why the plane crashed, and that's why so many fewer planes crash today than used to.”

“We can tell you in great detail what the grain prices were in a few towns in southern England in the Middle Ages,” he says. “But we can't tell you how most ordinary people lived their lives.”

Turchin's approach by throwing light on the immediate triggers of political violence. He argues3, for example, that for such violence to happen, individuals must begin to identify strongly with a political group. One powerful way for groups to cement that identification is through rituals, especially frightening, painful or otherwise emotional ones that create a body of vivid, shared memories. “People form the impression that the most profound insights they have into their own personal history are shared by other people,”

Elites have been known to give power back to the majority, he says, but only under duress, to help restore order after a period of turmoil. “I'm not afraid of uprisings,” he says. “That's why we are where we are.”

When Pat gets old he can retire comfortably and leave his widow comfortable as well, again was this because of savings, no; Pat got a company pension (inflation adjusted) and health care for the rest of his life with right of survivorship. All of this sounds great, but it wasn’t real; it was all a result of America ability to overcharge the world for capital goods; the costs of all these benefits were passed on to the rest of the world in higher priced capital good and dollar inflation. These programs allowed people to live middle class lives they never earned and could never keep (absent the programs). In fact, by 1970 it cost an American producer more in labor cost per ton of steel than what he could get for it on the world market. The fantasy world America has built post-World War 2 has been falling apart since the 1980s and the last leg, the dollars reserve currency status, is about to go. The disappearance of the American Dream is simply America reverting back to where its populations core values and behavior patterns would naturally take it.

The American Dream is rapidly fading because it was never real or at least never genuinely earned by Americans. When I speak of the “Middle Class”, I don’t simply mean possessing a middle class income, but rather having middle class patterns of behavior and world views. To be middle class is to be future time preference oriented; to accept short term pain for long term gain; to always be looking to get ahead and to plan ahead. Simply put, to be middle class is to consume less than what you produce, reinvesting the excess to produce more in the future.

America was the only large industrial power left standing after World War 2 and because it could charge the rest of the world what it wanted for capital goods, it could extract “rents” to support the fantasy of the American Dream. Consider the 1950s, the beginning of universal White middle-classdom and take a typical Irish guy; Pat. Pat grew up in an ethnic Irish slum like his father and grandfather, but he now can afford to buy a house; is it because he diligently saved his money and stayed focused, no; it is because he can get a VA loan or an FHA loan with no money down and easy payments. Pat dropped out of school at 16 and is not too interested in expanding his skills, is he on the streets, no; because of unions he can get an assembly line job. Moreover, because the NLR act effectively unionized every major industrial company and industry, Pat can look forward to annual raises (regardless of productivity) for his entire working life. When his children are old enough, Pat can afford to send them to college, is it because he saved before each child was born and spaced his children accordingly, no; they can get government loans , grants, and go to a subsides state college. When Pats parents get old they are not a burden, is it because they learned middleclass values and started to save, no; his parents rely on social security and Medicare (after 1965).

Europe is on the verge of a complete and total economic collapse...why?...because for decades their government has used force to take money from those who work hard and then give that money to those who don't work hard.

The capitalist equivalent of a socialist revolution is a Great Depression that wipes out the value of the paper assets the wealthy had accumulated, leaving the government to reallocate the real assets more equally. We almost had this happen in 2008, but the 1 percent blackmailed the rest with fear of collateral damage.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

Reading about free software specifically and free culture in general causes a dangerous uptick in my idealism index. Idealism in the sense of hoping and even believing that we can all get along. (Somehow. Someday.) That we can help each other. I think I had a healthy share of idealism growing up but gradually over the years I’ve addressed this vulnerability by developing an outer shell of jaded cynicism. It’s much more comforting to have no hope than to have hopes that can be crushed. However, there is a good chance with this strategy that your heart will shrink a couple of sizes.

But then I read essays by Richard Stallman, listen to speeches by Eben Moglen, and read and listen to many other hopeful voices, and I start to see something better. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. Which of course is dangerous. You leave yourself open to ridicule if you believe. You might be dismissed as being naive. To which of course we should say, “So what?” I want to believe that we can do better.

The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? If you could make lamb chops in endless numbers by the mere pressing of a button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever, anywhere. I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion.

The answer is "tidal friction." Back in the day (as they say), the moon spun with respect to the Earth, so people (if there had been people around) could see all sides of the moon, if they looked long enough. But the Moon is not totally solid. It is a mass of dust, sand and rocks that can change shape, just like a pile of dust, sand and rocks can change shape on the Earth. The Earth's gravitational pull on the Moon actually makes the Moon bulge towards the Earth very slightly. The bulge is called a "tidal bulge." The overall effect is to make the Moon a kind of oval, with the long axis pointing towards the Earth. But the Moon rotated with respect to the Earth (you have to say "with respect to the Earth, because the Moon is, even now, rotating with respect to the Sun; rotation, like all motion, is relative), so as a new part of the Moon's surface rotated around to face the Earth, it would bulge, then settle back down as it rotated away from the Earth, kind of like a "wave" in a sports stadium. The overall effect was to knead the Moon like it was a ball of play-doh, raising its internal temperature slightly. But there is a lot of friction when rocks and dust rub against each other, so that would tend to slow down the rotation. Further, the bulge actually lagged a little bit. The materials making up the Moon don't respond instantly to gravity. So the bulge actually wasn't quite in line with the Earth, but was kind of running to catch up with it. The Earth pulled on that bulge more than on the non-bulging parts, so that further slowed down the Moon's rotation.  This mechanism was significant only early in the Moon's history, since the effect becomes smaller as the Moon's rotation slows. So over millennia, the Moon's rotation slowed down and stopped. The bulge stopped moving around the Moon's surface and settled in one spot, incidentally locking that spot in line with the Earth.