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Futurology Needs to Focus on Measurable Variables, Causality and Social Structural Models and Learn from Past Mistakes: A Response to “A History of Possible Futures: Multipath Forecasting of Social Breakdown, Recovery, and Resilience.”
Abstract
Cliodynamics researchers are now reaching out to social science in a way that opens the door to productive collaboration to advance a predictive, applied and ethical science of social breakdown, social violence and social change. This commentary, from an interdisciplinary social anthropologist working on these questions for some 40 years, reviews the advances in these areas in the social sciences over the past 100+ years, highlights where cliodynamics can learn from these advances to avoid replicating earlier mistakes, and analyzes cliodynamics researchers’ current efforts with suggestions for improvement and collaboration to unify and promote this area of study.