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Peter Turchin, one of the world\u2019s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know.
But he had to leave his office sometime. (\u201cOne way you know I am Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,\u201d he told me. \u201cI have to go for a walk.\u201d) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. \u201cA week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,\u201d Turchin said. Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk, groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight.
The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging\u2014\u00ad\u00adto a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (\u201cNot all of human history,\u201d he corrected me once. \u201cJust the last 10,000 years.\u201d) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an \u201cage of discord,\u201d civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn\u2019t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early \u201970s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can\u2019t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they\u2019ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of \u201cmegahistories,\u201d such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had once found Turchin\u2019s historical model\u00ading unpersuasive, but 2020 made him a believer: \u201cAt this point,\u201d Douthat recently admitted on a podcast, \u201cI feel like you have to pay a little more attention to him.\u201d
Diamond and Harari aimed to describe the history of humanity. Turchin looks into a distant, science-fiction future for peers. In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the \u201cmaverick mathematician\u201d of Isaac Asimov\u2019s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years\u2019 worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.
The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. \u201cIt\u2019s too late,\u201d he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn\u2019s website describes as a favorite place for students to \u201cread, relax, or ride on the wooden swing.\u201d The problems are deep and structural\u2014not the type that the tedious process of demo\u00adcratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: \u201cIf you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.\u201d The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear\u2014steel twisting, rivets popping\u2014\u00ad\u00adis the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.
\u201cWe are almost guaranteed\u201d five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. \u201cYou are ruling class,\u201d he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily \u201celite overproduction\u201d\u2014\u00adthe tendency of a society\u2019s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically\u2014think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites over\u00adproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don\u2019t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don\u2019t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn\u2019t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. \u201cYou reach hundreds of thousands.\u201d) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. \u201cYou have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,\u201d Turchin said.
Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners\u2019 living standards slip\u2014not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before\u2014they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners\u2019 lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in\u00adsecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies\u2014and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
Turchin\u2019s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as the Seer of Storrs foretold 10 years ago. If the next 10 years are as seismic as he says they will be, his insights will have to be accounted for by historians and social scientists\u2014assuming, of course, that there are still universities left to employ such people.
Turchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, a city built by the Soviet state as a kind of nerd heaven, where scientists could collaborate and live together. His father, Valen\u00adtin, was a physicist and political dissident, and his mother, Tatiana, had trained as a geologist. They moved to Moscow when he was 7 and in 1978 fled to New York as political refugees. There they quickly found a community that spoke the household language, which was science. Valen\u00adtin taught at the City University of New York, and Peter studied biology at NYU and earned a zoology doctorate from Duke.
Turchin wrote a dissertation on the Mexican bean beetle, a cute, ladybug\u00adlike pest that feasts on legumes in areas between the United States and Guatemala. When Turchin began his research, in the early 1980s, ecology was evolving in a way that some fields already had. The old way to study bugs was to collect them and describe them: count their legs, measure their bellies, and pin them to pieces of particle\u00adboard for future reference. (Go to the Natural History Museum in London, and in the old storerooms you can still see the shelves of bell jars and cases of specimens.) In the \u201970s, the Australian physicist Robert May had turned his attention to ecology and helped transform it into a mathematical science whose tools included supercomputers along with butterfly nets and bottle traps. Yet in the early days of his career, Turchin told me, \u201cthe majority of ecologists were still quite math-phobic.\u201d
Turchin did, in fact, do fieldwork, but he contributed to ecology primarily by collecting and using data to model the dynamics of populations\u2014for example, determining why a pine-beetle population might take over a forest, or why that same population might decline. (He also worked on moths, voles, and lemmings.)
In the late \u201990s, disaster struck: Turchin realized that he knew everything he ever wanted to know about beetles. He compares himself to Thomasina Coverly, the girl genius in the Tom Stoppard play Arcadia, who obsessed about the life cycles of grouse and other creatures around her Derbyshire country house. Stoppard\u2019s character had the disadvantage of living a century and a half before the development of chaos theory. \u201cShe gave up because it was just too complicated,\u201d Turchin said. \u201cI gave up because I solved the problem.\u201d
Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical\u2009\/\u2009Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field, although he would continue to draw a salary as a tenured professor in their department. (He no longer gets raises, but he told me he was already \u201cat a comfortable level, and, you know, you don\u2019t need so much money.\u201d) \u201cUsually a midlife crisis means you divorce your old wife and marry a graduate student,\u201d Turchin said. \u201cI divorced an old science and married a new one.\u201d
Turchin\u2019s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if they weren\u2019t playing out now, roughly as he foretold 10 years ago.
One of his last papers appeared in the journal Oikos. \u201cDoes population ecology have general laws?\u201d Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different. Pine beetles reproduce, run amok, and ravage a forest for pine-beetle reasons, but that does not mean mosquito or tick populations will rise and fall according to the same rhythms. Turchin suggested that \u201cthere are several very general law-like propositions\u201d that could be applied to ecology. After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws\u2014and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. \u201cEcologists know these laws and should call them laws,\u201d he said. Turchin proposed, for example, that populations of organisms grow or decline exponentially, not linearly. This is why if you buy two guinea pigs, you will soon have not just a few more guinea pigs but a home\u2014and then a neighborhood\u2014full of the damn things (as long as you keep feeding them). This law is simple enough to be understood by a high-school math student, and it describes the fortunes of everything from ticks to starlings to camels. The laws Turchin applied to ecology\u2014and his insistence on calling them laws\u2014\u00adgenerated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.
Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings. He\u2019d long had a hobby\u00adist\u2019s interest in history. But he also had a predator\u2019s instinct to survey the savanna of human knowledge and pounce on the weakest prey. \u201cAll sciences go through this transition to mathematization,\u201d Turchin told me. \u201cWhen I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.\u201d
Historians read books, letters, and other texts. Occasionally, if they are archaeologically inclined, they dig up potsherds and coins. But to Turchin, relying solely on these methods was the equivalent of studying bugs by pinning them to particleboard and counting their antennae. If the historians weren\u2019t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.
\u201cThere is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,\u201d he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). \u201cA basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.\u201d Turchin founded a journal, Cliodynamics, dedicated to \u201cthe search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.\u201d (The term is his coinage; Clio is the muse of history.) He had already announced the discipline\u2019s arrival in an article in Nature, where he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology \u201cwho care most for the private life of warblers.\u201d \u201cLet history continue to focus on the particular,\u201d he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science. While historians dusted bell jars in the basement of the university, Turchin and his followers would be upstairs, answering the big questions.
To seed the journal\u2019s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data. The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.) But once the data are entered, after vetting by Turchin and specialists in the historical period under review, they offer quick and powerful suggestions about historical phenomena.
Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods\u2014especially \u201cmoralizing gods,\u201d the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (\u201crecords from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality\u201d) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before. As the database expands, it will attempt to remove more questions from the realm of humanistic speculation and sock them away in a drawer marked answered.
One of Turchin\u2019s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. \u201cNo one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do\u201d\u2014rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art\u2014\u201cbecause of an ugly thing like war,\u201d he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie\u00adties because they kill off simpler ones. The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present, Turchin said. \u201cThere is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.\u201d
Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents\u2014riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person\u2014from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle. Turchin excludes the ultimate violent incident, the Civil War, as a \u201csui generis event.\u201d The exclusion may seem suspicious, but to a statistician, \u201ctrimming outliers\u201d is standard practice. Historians and journalists, by contrast, tend to focus on outliers\u2014\u00adbecause they are interesting\u2014and sometimes miss grander trends.
Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians. (The most famous of these was the assassination of James A. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, by a lawyer who had demanded but not received a political appointment.) It wasn\u2019t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.
This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite over\u00adproduction as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin\u2019s 2020 prediction. In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.
Turchin\u2019s prescriptions are, as a whole, vague and unclassifiable. Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren\u2014tax the elites until there are fewer of them\u2014while others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism. Other policies are simply heretical. He opposes credential-\u00adoriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-\u00adproducing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are \u201ccreating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.\u201d A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.
How to do that? Turchin says he doesn\u2019t really know, and it isn\u2019t his job to know. \u201cI don\u2019t really think in terms of specific policy,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don\u2019t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?\u201d He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects. He recalled a story he\u2019d heard back when he was still an ecologist: The Forest Service had once implemented a plan to reduce the population of bark beetles with pesticide\u2014only to find that the pesticide killed off the beetles\u2019 predators even more effectively than it killed the beetles. The intervention resulted in more beetles than before. The lesson, he said, was to practice \u201cadaptive management,\u201d changing and modulating your approach as you go.
Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre\u00adordained disaster. He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.
Historians have not, as a whole, accepted Turchin\u2019s terms of surrender graciously. Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones. (As Jo Guldi, a historian at Southern Methodist University, put it to me, \u201cSome historians regard Turchin the way astronomers regard Nostradamus.\u201d) Instead, each historical event must be lovingly described, and its idiosyncrasies understood to be limited in relevance to other events. The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.
One might even say that what defines history as a humanistic enterprise is the belief that it is not governed by scientific laws\u2014that the working parts of human societies are not like billiard balls, which, if arranged at certain angles and struck with a certain amount of force, will invariably crack just so and roll toward a corner pocket of war, or a side pocket of peace. Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity. Consider, he says, the concept of temperature\u2014\u00adsomething so obviously quantifiable now that we laugh at the idea that it\u2019s too vague to measure. \u201cBack before people knew what temperature was, the best thing you could do is to say you\u2019re hot or cold,\u201d Turchin told me. The concept depended on many factors: wind, humidity, ordinary human differences in perception. Now we have thermometers. Turchin wants to invent a thermometer for human societies that will measure when they are likely to boil over into war.
Eventually, Turchin hopes, no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically preordained disaster. One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is\u2014incredibly\u2014\u00adalso a former mathematical ecologist. (He earned a doctorate modeling carrot-weevil population dynamics before earning a second doctorate in Chinese political sociology.) \u201cI came from a natural-science background,\u201d Zhao told me, \u201cand in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.\u201d
Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs. \u201cBiological species don\u2019t strategize in a very flexible way,\u201d he told me. After millennia of evolutionary R&D, a woodpecker will come up with ingenious ways to stick its beak into a tree in search of food. It might even have social characteristics\u2014an alpha woodpecker might strong-wing beta woodpeckers into giving it first dibs on the tastiest termites. But humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it \u201cwill not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.\u201d Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand \u201cthe decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,\u201d a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. \u201cI made that change,\u201d Zhao told me, \u201cand Peter Turchin has not.\u201d
Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past. He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians. Few would dare to write a history of the United States, let alone one of human civilization. Turchin\u2019s approach is also Russian, or post-Soviet, in its rejection of the Marxist theory of historical progress that had been the official ideology of the Soviet state. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, so too did the requirement that historical writing acknowledge international communism as the condition toward which the arc of history was bending. Turchin dropped ideology altogether, he says: Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-\u00adending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.
Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. \u201cIf you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it\u2019s not actual historians,\u201d Walter Scheidel, an actual historian at Stanford, told me. (Scheidel, whose books span millennia, takes Turchin\u2019s work seriously and has even co-written a paper with him.) Instead they come from scientific fields where these taboos do not dominate. The genre\u2019s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world\u2019s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall\u00adbladder. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment. Most historians I asked about these men\u2014and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit\u2014used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.
Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention \u201cdisciplinary carpet\u00adbaggers\u201d like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods. He is skeptical of Turchin\u2019s claims about historical cycles, but he believes in data-driven historical inquiry. \u201cGiven the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it\u2019s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one\u2019s narrative,\u201d he says. The only answer is to use large data sets. Pinker thanks traditional historians for their work collating these data sets; he told me in an email that they \u201cdeserve extraordinary admiration for their original research (\u2018brushing the mouse shit off moldy court records in the basement of town halls,\u2019 as one historian put it to me).\u201d He calls not for surrender but for a truce. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason that traditional history and data science can\u2019t merge into a cooperative enterprise,\u201d Pinker wrote. \u201cKnowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.\u201d
Guldi, the Southern Methodist University professor, is one scholar who has embraced tools previously scorned by historians. She is a pioneer of data-driven history that considers timescales beyond a human lifetime. Her primary technique is the mining of texts\u2014for example, sifting through the millions and millions of words captured in parliamentary debate in order to understand the history of land use in the final century of the British empire. Guldi may seem a potential recruit to cliodynamics, but her approach to data sets is grounded in the traditional methods of the humanities. She counts the frequency of words, rather than trying to find ways to compare big, fuzzy categories among civilizations. Turchin\u2019s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society\u2019s elites\u2014then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans\u2014will meet with skepticism from traditional historians, who deny that the subject to which they have devoted their lives can be expressed in Excel format. Turchin\u2019s data are also limited to big-\u00adpicture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.
Yet 200 lifetimes is at least more ambitious than the average historical purview of only one. And the reward for that ambition\u2014\u00ad\u00adin addition to the bragging rights for having potentially explained everything that has ever happened to human beings\u2014includes something every writer wants: an audience. Thinking small rarely gets you quoted in The New York Times. Turchin has not yet attracted the mass audiences of a Diamond, Pinker, or Harari. But he has lured connoisseurs of political catastrophe, journalists and pundits looking for big answers to pressing questions, and true believers in the power of science to conquer uncertainty and improve the world. He has certainly outsold most beetle experts.
If he is right, it is hard to see how history will avoid assimilating his insights\u2014if it can avoid being abolished by them. Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Clio\u00addynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit. Turchin\u2019s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions\u2014\u00adrevealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus. For my own sake, there are few thinkers whom I am more eager to see proved wrong.
Excerpted from https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2020\/12\/can-history-predict-future\/616993\/<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"