I remember when cliodynamics was called psychohistory.

I'd have more hope about articles like this if they didn't equate Democrats with the Left and talk about "the centre".

A better read on this can probably be found in a book I've mentioned here a couple times before called The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel which, rather than getting caught up in obfuscation about animal behaviors, just flat out looks at the gini coefficient (mathematically derived measure of economic inequality) of societies in the build up to their collapse and discusses which of the four most popular meaures were most effective at leveling inequality. Spoilers: it's mass organized violence.