Forecaster Peter Turchin: ‘The US is in a much more perilous state than Russia’

In 2010, the journal Nature asked experts to predict their fields a decade in the future. Google’s director of research ventured that, by 2020, most search queries would be spoken, not typed. A Harvard geneticist said nano-memory devices would harness bacteria’s ability to navigate the Earth’s magnetic field.

Then Peter Turchin came forward. Originally an ecologist, he made perhaps the boldest prediction: the next decade was “likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe”. His models showed instability could spike “around 2020”.