[S]uch measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010–2020 decade in all … - Peter Turchin

In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. These... social indicators are... related... dynamically. They... experienced turning points during the 1970s. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. ...50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020.

The SDT proposes that the causes of revolutions and major rebellions are... similar to processes that cause earthquakes. In both... it is useful to distinguish "pressures" (structural conditions, which build up slowly) from "triggers" (sudden releasing events, which immediately precede a social or geological eruption).

So the forecast seems to have been quite good. The question is "What was it based on?" It was not... a prophecy, it was a scientific prediction because there is a specific mechanism on which it was based. ...[T]he forecast was a scientific prediction in the sense that I wanted to stick my neck out [and] make an out-of-sample prediction to see whether the mechanisms that have been identified by our theory... actually are working in the way that we thought...