Religion Is Different
January 08, 2023
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Social life of human beings was utterly transformed during the Holocene. Agriculture, large-scale organized warfare, elites, rulers, bureaucracies, writing, and monumental architecture evolved independently in many world regions at markedly different times. These are truly universal f
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The Collapse of Simple Societies
December 03, 2022
Why do large-scale complex societies, within which >99% of humanity now lives, recurrently experience periods of social and political breakdown? This question is morbidly fascinating, especially since after we’ve entered the “Turbulent Twenties.” Books on collapse are now a cottage
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What I am working on: Update
September 04, 2022
Six months ago I posted a “progress report”, What I am working on. Since then a lot of things happened. First, I finished writing my trade book, previously titled A History of the Near Future. As expected, the publisher didn’t like it, so the new title is The Wealth
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On Testing Theories in History
August 31, 2022
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Noah Smith wrote a post on his Substack, On the wisdom of historians, to which a historian Bret Devereaux wrote a rebuttal, On the wisdom of Noah Smith. Yesterday I wrote a Twitter thread on this debate, which turned out to be fairly long, so I decided that it’s worth posting a
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How We Can Learn from History
August 11, 2022
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
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Big Gods and Big Societies: A Closure
May 28, 2022
Eleven years ago we launched the Seshat project with the goal of collecting data that would enable us to test the many theories aiming to explain the evolution of large-scale complex human societies over the past 10,000 years. We now have a bunch of papers, some already published, oth
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War and Peace and War: Two Decades Later
April 13, 2022
Recently there has been a lot of interest in translating my books into non-English languages, a development that I heartily welcome (I touched upon it in my previous post and in this one). Earlier this month, Warsaw Enterprise Institute published a Polish translation of War and Peace
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What I am working on
March 14, 2022
Readers of this blog have, no doubt, noticed that over the past year, or more, my posts here have been few and far in between. I have also been turning down 99% of requests for interviews and public lectures. The reason is that I have taken on too many projects—more than I can deal wi
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Twenty Years of Cliodynamics
October 23, 2021
Almuzara is about to publish a Spanish translation of my book Historical Dynamics. When they asked for a foreword to the Spanish edition, I realized that it has already been 20 years since I wrote Historical Dynamics. So this foreword serves as a kind of retrospective. Here’s th
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