Books, Essays, and Current Writing
The Great Holocene Transformation
What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies
Why do the 99.9% of humanity live in large-scale societies organized as states? During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), human societies have been transformed utterly: from small groups of nomadic foragers to our current interconnected world of large-scale societies organized as states. Population numbers, agricultural productivity, technological…
À New York, la victoire de Zohran Mamdani et des « précaires diplômés »
Le nouveau maire socialiste de la ville-monde porte aussi la colère des citoyens éduqués frustrés de ne pas accéder à l’élite.
War and Peace and War: Twenty Years After
And New Chinese and French Translations
End Times
Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a…
Zohran Mamdani y la revuelta del precariado cualificado
La victoria del candidato socialista en Nueva York se vio impulsada en gran medida por los precarios con titulación: jóvenes con título universitario o superior que ganan lo justo para sobrevivir. La principal noticia política de la semana es la victoria de Zohran Mamdani en las elecciones a la alcaldía de Nueva York.…
Demography of Polities II
France’s PolitiSequence
Figuring Out the Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History
Discover the world records that define our history and jump headfirst into the past using scientific data that reveals accurate and insightful answers to life’s biggest questions.
What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the plumbing like in medieval Byzantium? The average wage in the Mughal Empire? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ever ritual human sacrifice? We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world…
Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out.
An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times. Anti-establishment parties and politicians are surging in Western Europe and Japan. In the United States, the MAGA movement, led by President Donald Trump, has seized power.…
Demography of Polities I
Do States Age?
Ages of Discord
A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History
The real wage of a US worker today is less than it was 40 years ago—but there are four times as many multimillionaires. As inequality grows, the politics become more poisonous. Every year, more and more Americans go on shooting sprees, killing strangers and passers-by—and now, increasingly, representatives of the state. Troubling trends of this kind are…
Les révolutionnaires ne paient jamais les dettes, par Peter Turchin
Le cycle infernal de l’endettement s’est soldé à deux reprises dans l’Histoire par une révolution et une banqueroute, rappelle le penseur américain.
Artificial Scientists Are Not as Good as Human Scientists
Especially when humans work with machines