History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/12/history-as-a-giant-data-set-how-analysing-the-past-could-help-save-the-
Goldstone suggested ways of measuring mass mobilisation potential, elite competition and state solvency, and defined something he called the political stress indicator (psi or Ψ), which was the product of all three. He showed that Ψ spiked prior to the French Revolution, the English civil war and two other major 17th-century conflicts – the Ottoman crisis in Asia Minor, and the Ming-Qing transition in China. In each case, however, there had been one more factor in the mix: chance. Some tiny rupture – a harvest failure, say, or a foreign aggression – that in other circumstances might have been absorbed easily, against a backdrop of rising Ψ caused conflict to erupt. Although you could not predict the trigger – meaning you could not know precisely when the crisis would occur – you could measure the structural pressures and hence, the risk of such a crisis.
#histoire #modélisation #révolution — merci @alaingresh pour la recommandation :)