The question of how we can learn useful lessons from history, which would help us navigate the troubled waters ahead has been much on my mind. You can find some of my thoughts on this subject in my review of Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome. It’s also an important theme

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

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

I just came back from a trip to China, during which I and two friends traveled along the section of the Silk Route that passes through PRC. We started in Luoyang, then went to Xian, made three stops in the Gansu corridor, and finally reached Turpan and Urumqi in Xinjiang. Our main int

In the first part of my critique of The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith (BDM&S), I slammed the theoretical foundations of their argument. The book also has a lot of empirical content, and in Part II

One of my long-term interests is in the dynamics of leader-followers systems. Large-scale societies and other large groupings of people (including corporations) cannot be purely egalitarian. As I’ve written in another post, humans are not ants. We must have leaders to organize large-s

Last week I wrote about Jack Goldstone’s article, which introduced the most recent issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jack’s book Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. In today’s post I wa

Intra-elite competition is one of the most important factors explaining massive waves of social and political instability, which periodically afflict complex, state-level societies. This idea was proposed by Jack Goldstone nearly 30 years ago. Goldstone tested it empirically by analyz

Dear friends, lovers of history, and those who care about the world we live in: Please join me in supporting an international project that seeks to understand how human societies evolve. I am donating $10,000 from my book revenues this year to Seshat: Global History Databank, and I ch

On my return trip from Europe I had a long layover in Lisbon, which I decided to spend in the Museu de Marinha in Belém. I have been lately thinking a lot about a bunch of topics that can be summarized under the rubric of Why Europe? – why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Europ