End Times

Reviews / Votes

The book that most opinion formers will be forming opinions about * The Times and Sunday Times, Best Books for Summer * From the man who predicted the rise of Trump - or someone very like him - a remarkably clear, data-driven explanation of why societies fall into crisis, and how to engineer a soft landing * Guardian Summer Reading * Game of Thrones-style intra-elite conflict meets big data -- David Goodhart * TLS * A compelling analysis of why societies fail. . . Turchin's theory represents the most persuasive analysis of the historical forces assailing society in the present -- James Marriott * The Times * Surveying the rise and fall of empires and parliaments through global history, Turchin argues that civic upheavals become due when "popular immiseration" (eg, the stagnancy of real wages) is combined with "elite overproduction" -- Steven Poole * Guardian, Best Books of the Year * A pre-eminent digital-age seer. . . Turchin set out to discover statistical patterns in the great flood of historical data that might predict future instabilities in societies. . . a great collected narrative of human hope and human failure -- Tim Adams * Observer * A lucid and elegant theory that is stable across time and place in the manner of natural laws and scientific findings * Wall Street Journal * The future-gazing guru I find the most intriguing is a former biologist called Peter Turchin who calls this decade 'the turbulent twenties'. . . He is a complexity scientist who has many fans among rich and powerful people -- Helen Lewis * BBC Radio 4 * Has any book published this year had a more appropriate title? Everything is going wrong. You don't have to buy Peter Turchin's eccentric theory that history moves in 50-year cycles to find his analysis of the chaos of our present moment compelling. He argues that extreme wealth inequality and "elite overproduction" are plunging society into disorder and violence -- James Marriott * The Times, Best Books of the Year * Extraordinary. . . Turchin is a practitioner of "cliodynamics," an ambitious attempt to apply complexity theory and much else to human history. End Times is the culmination of many years of highly original and innovative work -- Niall Ferguson * Bloomberg * Peter Turchin is among the most important writers for explaining why everything seems so unstable now. It's the end of a cycle. . . Essential reading -- Jonathan Haidt Why is the world gripped by revolutions and civil wars? This provocative book blames the elites - we just have too many of them now * Sunday Times * It would be foolish for US leaders to ignore Turchin. If nothing else, the concept of elite overproduction is a good way to explain why elite education is now so costly, competitive and damaging for would-be elite kids and adults alike -- Gillian Tett * Financial Times * Across the west, popular misery and 'elite overproduction' are fuelling crisis, argues data-driven historian Peter Turchin. . . he provides a clear theory about how we got into this mess, and how to get out of it -- David Shariatmadari * Guardian * Mr Turchin is something of a celebrity in certain circles and has piqued economists' interest in the discipline of "cliodynamics", which uses maths to model historical change * Economist * Drawing on big data for societies across time and space, Peter Turchin shows that periods of political instability are inevitable. . . Turchin's model suggests that the 2020s are unavoidably set to be a period of disintegration. . . but that we can avoid another, perhaps deeper, period of social breakdown later in the century -- Richard Reeves * Literary Review * "History is hopelessly complex and unpredictable": so say most historians. If they were right, we would all be in deep trouble, helpless against a myriad of looming disasters. But Peter Turchin has pioneered a new science of making history predictable - by applying methods that had already succeeded in other complex fields. You'll want to know what he sees lying ahead, and what we can do about it -- Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel Peter Turchin brings science to history. Some like it and some prefer their history plain. But everyone needs to pay attention to the well-informed, convincing and terrifying analysis in this book -- Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Turchin is the academic of the moment -- Janan Ganesh * Financial Times * Scintillating. . . Turchin's elegantly written treatment looks beneath partisan jousting to class interests that cycle over generations, but also yields timely policy insights. It's a stimulating analysis of antagonisms past and present, and the crack-up they may be leading to * Publishers Weekly * A pioneering social scientist examines the roots of social problems and sees dark days looming ... a well-informed, disturbing assessment of where we are now * Kirkus *