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Short comparison:

Professor Jiang Xueqin's Predictive History

Background: Jiang Xueqin is a Beijing-based historian and educator with a Yale degree in English Literature and research positions at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. He has served as Deputy Principal at prestigious Chinese schools, including Tsinghua University High School and Peking University High School.

Core Methodology: Jiang's "predictive history" approach is explicitly borrowed from Isaac Asimov's fictional concept of "psychohistory"—a science that uses history, sociology, and mathematics to predict the behavior of large populations. His framework combines:

1. Historical Pattern Recognition: He uses historical precedents like the Sicilian Expedition by ancient Athens, the Vietnam War, and ongoing conflicts to identify recurring patterns
2. Game Theory: Jiang analyzes key players' incentives and concludes how different actors might provoke conflict based on their divergent endgames
3. Historical Analogy: Rather than pure quantitative modeling, he draws parallels between past empires and current geopolitical situations

Key Ideas:

• Jiang predicts a coming era of spiritual exhaustion and religious revival, arguing that "the appeal of money and materialism is dying" and people are "exhausted, disillusioned, and frustrated"
• He sees civilizational collapse as linked to spiritual vacuum and elite failure, not just economic factors
• His analysis emphasizes how major powers overestimate their capabilities, underestimate local resistance, and misjudge strategic costs

Notable Predictions: Jiang gained viral attention for his May 2024 lecture predicting Trump's return to the presidency and a U.S.-Iran war driven by Israel lobby pressure, Saudi interests, and America's reliance on global hegemony.

Cliodynamics (Peter Turchin)

Background: Peter Turchin is a theoretical biologist with no formal history degrees who founded cliodynamics, a transdisciplinary field integrating cultural evolution, economic history, macrosociology, and mathematical modeling.

Core Methodology: Cliodynamics treats history as science—practitioners develop theories that explain dynamical processes like the rise and fall of empires, then translate these theories into mathematical models and test predictions against data. Key elements include:

1. Mathematical Modeling: Turchin employs equations like the predator-prey (Lotka-Volterra) model to analyze the dynamics of medieval agrarian states as oscillatory systems
2. Big Data: Building massive databases like the Seshat Global History Databank to systematically collect data on political and social organization across human societies
3. Structural-Demographic Theory: Focuses on measurable variables including real wage stagnation, elite overproduction (growing demand for educational credentials, exploding MBAs and JDs), and state fiscal health

Key Concepts:

• Elite overproduction is identified as the most critical driver of social instability, alongside popular immiseration and declining state fiscal health
• Turchin's theory of secular cycles explains how population and warfare variables oscillate with the same period but shifted in phase
• Emphasizes that theories must be translated into mathematical models with precise predictions tested on empirical material

Notable Predictions: Turchin predicted in 2010 that U.S. political instability would peak in the 2020s based on 50-year cycle patterns (spikes around 1870, 1920, 1970).

Key Comparisons

Similarities:

• Both seek to make history predictive and scientific
• Both reference Asimov's psychohistory concept as inspiration
• Both identify patterns and cycles in historical processes
• Both focus on predicting major social/political instability

Major Differences:

Philosophical Differences:

• Jiang emphasizes that "powerful people are influenced by beliefs and warp reality to fit their beliefs—it's a self-fulfilling prophecy", suggesting agency and ideology matter greatly
• Turchin insists that "in science, data triumph over theories" and seeks laws independent of individual agency

Flexibility: Jiang acknowledges, "If my prediction is wrong, I re-work my model," suggesting an iterative, less dogmatic approach, whereas cliodynamics claims to be testing falsifiable hypotheses with the scientific method.

Both approaches face skepticism from traditional historians who argue that complex social formations cannot and should not be reduced to quantifiable points, as this overlooks each society's particular circumstances. However, they represent essential attempts to find patterns in history that might help us navigate contemporary crises.