Bret Devereaux

"[Peter Turchin's theories] have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari." - From The Atlantic 'Megahistories' - Definition: Pop historical works that sound great unless you actually know enough history to assess them.

...that idea, presented as somehow Turchin's genius goes back to - and I am not kidding - Heraclitus of Ephesus (d. 475 BC) and was put into modern scholarly form no later than L. Keeley's War Before Civilization (1997). But sure, tell me more about how you can math the history.

The idea that he can accurately and mathematically track "a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions" with any precision over 10,000 years...

...is just plain laughable. The direction and extent of those changes is a point of real argument among actual experts (of which Turchin is not) for the Roman Empire, which is both 1) only 2,000 years ago and 2) without question the best attested society that old.

And the idea that Turchin is " filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians" is just evidence that Graeme Wood doesn't know much about what historians are doing. There are lots of wide-angle histories of all sorts of things...