In the Boston Globe, Samuel Arbesman’s uses cliodynamics, which applies math to history, to predict if America will flourish or fall. An excerpt: from “How Long Will America Last?”:

“This data set is expansive, including everything from the Babylonian Empire of ancient Mesopotomia — known for such contributions as Hammurabi’s Code — to the Byzantine Empire, which has provided us with the eponymous word for red tape. Some of the world’s empires lasted an exceptionally long time: The ancient, and now little known, Elam empire located in present-day Iran lasted a thousand years. Others were short-lived, for all their power: The Phrygian and Lydian empires were around for only about six decades each. (The data set, based on earlier research in empires, ends at 600 A.D.)

If you crunch these all together, the first thing you discover is that the average lifetime of these powers is 215 years.

If you’re playing at home, this number is pessimistically eerie: It’s been 223 years since the ratification of the US Constitution. And that should perhaps give us some pause. To make this explicit, the United States has now outlasted the majority of the empires in my historical data set, and is now crossing the threshold into hoary old age.

But there is a more interesting way to look at it than simply taking an average. By putting all the life spans together, we can see a pattern that statisticians call a distribution — the underlying shape of the ‘density’ of the life spans. Distributions give us a much better sense than the average because, just as with incomes, life spans needn’t be distributed like a bell-shaped curve. They can be skewed towards one end or the other.”