I Am NOT a Number - I Am a Free Vole

[With apologies to "The Prisoner"]
The idea that we can "read" the market is not particularly controversial, in fact the whole concept of stock market trading depends on the belief that markets demonstrate emergent properties that may be different from the specific actions of their investors. We hear that the market is "buoyant", it "struggles", it is "depressed" etc, this aggregation of individual actions has a personality that is independent of its constituents.

Market analysis goes even further, positing properties that are independent even of the particulars or fundamentals of the businesses that constitute the market. We gather that market behaviour can be predicted from the momentum and direction of its net trading activity. We hear about "head and shoulders" forms, long and short cycles, Kondratieff waves that are embodied in the laws of economics and can predict directions and outcomes, even if not actual precise timings.

OK, I accept that the "laws of economics" are mostly BS, but they are surely second order effects of perfectly normal human characteristics such as fear, greed, panic and herd behaviour. So you'd think that when an ecologist applies analogous concepts to human history it would be equally uncontroversial. Apparently not when Peter Turchin unleashes his latest called War and Peace and War in September.

In September, ecologist Peter Turchin, of the University of Connecticut, publishes War and Peace and War, a book in which he explains much of pre-industrial world history with his bold and controversial theory of the rise and fall of empires, using the same kind of mathematics that Turchin has used to study ecosystems.

Turchin believes history can be a science, with laws as inexorable as the law of gravity. He claims to have found the general mechanisms that cause empires to wax and wane - laws as true today as they were during the Roman Empire. So the world order is in a state of perpetual change and the global powers today will inevitably be replaced.
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Turchin's theory is anathema to some historians. Some regarded his assumptions about human behaviour as simplistic. "Social theory is a minefield, even for those experienced in it," said Joseph Tainter, a United States historian who has studied the collapse of civilisations. Others are opposed to the idea that history has rules analogous to those in science, and that the historian's aim is to discover them. "History is our interpretation of past thoughts that happened to be written down or otherwise preserved," says historian Niall Ferguson.
[...]
Turchin knows he is entering a battleground. But his experience in the mathematical modelling of animal populations, such as voles, has given him confidence that the complex processes of human interactions can be captured by such methods too.

When it comes to us, exceptionalism has always been the first refuge but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that if its good enough for the stock market, its good enough for history.

And there are plenty of interesting precursors, this is the kind of model that Jared Diamond has used in analysing he development and the ends of civilsations in Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse, watching the concatenation of events and incompetence, venality and greed that contributed to the Coming of the Third Reich in Germany prior to WW2, it is very tempting to believe that our actions are conditioned by factors beyond our immediate control, in the same way as an ecosystem determines the range of possible actions of the creatures that live within it.

Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters is another useful preview of this idea as well. I'll be interested to get a copy and see what he has to say about the most important part of this theory, what happens next.