The Real Hari Seldon

The real-life Hari Seldon is Peter Turchin, a man who aims to find the patterns in history.  One of the requirements for Seldon's psychohistory was that the populations under observation didn't know of the predictions; in the same vein, can we apply patterns from the pre-industrial age to the modern world, or are all bets now off?  Full article here at my socioeconomic blog The Late Enlightenment.