Peter Turchin is a professor, a scholar and a prolific author, and I just heard about him by chance.
End Times is a book in which he presents his research on Cliodynamics without the mathematical formulae. The book, Foundation, by Isaac Asimov, is based on the same theory.
Cliodynamics treats history as a science and uses mathematical modelling to predict cyclical patterns that repeat themselves over and over. This does not mean that the future is set and society is doomed; it just means that one can make meaningful predictions by looking at what has happened and what is currently happening.
The dumbed-down version is that there are always the elite class and the working class in society. There are instances in history where the elite class has allowed wealth to percolate into the working class and not tried to hoard all the wealth for themselves. The author describes this as the wealth pump.
As recently as the 1960s, the richest people in the USA paid 90% in taxes. This was normal, and it is also the last time there was equity in the US. Since the 1980s, the elites in the system have been hoarding up more and more of the wealth and pumping the wealth pump harder.
This has resulted in greater inequity.
Often, when the wealth pump is primed, it results in elite overproduction. There is a fixed number of industries/political offices that the elites can control. As the number of elites grows, there have to be losers who do not get to control anything.
As Amitabh Ghosh writes in The Nutmeg’s Curse, revolutions don’t start on the streets; they start in the courtyard of palaces.
The priming of the wealth pump produces extreme poverty, and there is a discontented populace waiting to explode. The presence of an elite who is willing to go against the system is the match that the powder keg requires.
Peter Turchin wrote in 2012 that the system would explode by 2020.
While it seems a bit like voodoo since the book does not plunge deep into the maths, it is nevertheless a very compelling read.