What If We Slid Back Into the Middle Ages?
May 17, 2026 Katya Ungerman writes in the NY Times that We Are Sliding Back Into the Middle Ages . People are giving up on Science, embracing the existence of the Supernatural and worrying about demonic possession. My first thought was "what was driving society in the Middle Ages (500-1500) and what similar drivers can we see in the present (a hard question to answer)"? My second thought was "what does Systems Theory have to say about the Social System in the Middle Ages compared to the present (an easier question)"? The Middle Ages were a period of "muddling through" ( Random Walk ) trying to find an attractor path for the Industrial Revolution. The British found it first (see the Boiler Plate ). The W_MA Model was estimated from the Maddison Project data set. Three versions of the model are available in R-code on my Google site ( here ): A Business-As-Usual ( BAU ) model, A Random Walk ( RW ) Model and a Stabilized BAU Model (instructions i...