The Storming of the U.S. Capitol
January 07, 2021
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On one level, that of macrosocial dynamics, what happened yesterday, January 6, 2021, is not surprising. After all, my own model indicates that structural pressures for instability in the United States continue to build up. On a more immediate micro-level, watching hundreds of demonst
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History by Numbers
November 17, 2020
The story behind Figuring Out the Past by Peter Turchin and Daniel Hoyer Four years ago we got an interesting proposal from Ed Lake, the book acquisition editor at Profile Books. Profile has been publishing The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures series, an annually reissued statistic
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“The Mad Prophet of Connecticut”
November 12, 2020
Graeme Wood penned a “long read” about cliodynamics, me, and the Age of Discord in which we are currently find ourselves. Graeme is a very intelligent journalist and his explanations of cliodynamics and structural-demographic mechanisms that bring about state breakdown are
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America in November 2020: a Structural-Demographic View from Alpha Centauri
November 01, 2020
As readers of this blog know, structural-demographic theorists distinguish between two causes of revolutions and civil wars: structural trends, which build slowly and are quite predictable, and much less predictable, or even unpredictable, triggering events. In this view, a revolution
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Question: Which Preindustrial Society was the Most Energy-Rich?
September 27, 2020
Some years ago I had a discussion with Ian Morris about the approach he took to quantify the social development of East versus West in his book, The Measure of Civilization. So I asked him: Which pre-industrial society was the richest in terms of energy use per capita? I have an answe
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Cliodynamics is Not “Cyclical History”
September 18, 2020
Matt Yglesias, responding to a tweet by Noah Smith today, wrote: Seen a lot of Turchin citations lately but I think the bar for buying into cyclical views of history should be *really* high. There were other, similar comments on Twitter. I respond on my blog, because it can be hard to
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The Left Case against Open Borders
July 09, 2020
As the readers of my blog know, the opinions I express here are strictly non-partisan and non-ideological. My main interest is to go where science leads. Ideological thinking is different from science in that in science data triumphs over theories. Ideologues, on the other hand, can i
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The Science behind My Forecast for 2020
June 15, 2020
Quite a number of people, here and on Twitter, asked me about how I came up with my forecast for 2020. Here’s the story. By the early 2000s I had already delved into structural-demographic theory and its implications for historical societies. These results went into Historical D
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2020
June 01, 2020
America is burning. Dozens of cities across the United States remain under curfews at a level not seen since riots following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Most commentary is focusing on the immediate causes of this wave of violence that has already continued for six
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