The first exact-likelihood, held-out test of cross-domain crisis entanglement

Abstract

The polycrisis field's founding empirical claim is that crises are causally entangled across domains — that wars, disasters, outbreaks, defaults and coups make each other more likely. The claim has been argued conceptually and illustrated with co-occurrence plots, but never written down as a quantity that could be shown to be false. This paper supplies that object for the timing of crisis onset and then tests it: crisis streams are modelled as a multivariate point process, cross-domain coupling is estimated by exact likelihood against a shared-latent-regime rival, held out of sample, and referred to a circular-shift null that destroys cross-domain alignment while preserving each domain's own autocorrelation. Every verdict is gated on a decidability atlas computed on known-truth simulation before the data were read.

The result is a negative that is informative because its power is mapped. On the field's own corpus the cross-domain excess is absent; on a finer country-month rebuild it survives the raw nulls and dies under a declared family of reporting baselines. Onset-time entanglement, as the field states it, does not survive an exact-likelihood test with a declared artifact channel.