Last year I had an interesting conversation with someone I’ll call the Washington Insider. She asked me why my structural-demographic model predicted rising instability in the USA, probably peaking with a major outbreak of political violence in the 2020s. I started giving the explanat

It will soon be two years since the US presidential elections of 2016, which should have made it clear to everybody that our society is in deep crisis. The technical term in the structural-demographic theory (SDT) for it is a revolutionary situation: when the established elites are st

For me the greatest eye-opener in The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley by Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt was a realization that starting your own innovative company is a deeply irrational decision. Considering the amount of effort (and often your own money) t

One of the chief reasons I became an advocate of the Cultural Multilevel Selection (CMLS) theory is that it wonderfully clarifies the relationship between competition and cooperation. Competition between groups (up to whole societies) fosters within-group cooperation. Competition with

I have traveled extensively in southern Africa over the past 25 years—South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and now Namibia. But in all my previous trips I was lucky to see a black rhino only once (in South Africa’s Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park). The problem, of course, is

As a boy growing up in Russia I read a bunch of adventure stories about intrepid explorers traveling to far-off places. In one book a band of adventurers voyaged to the Skeleton Coast to search for diamonds. So one might say that it’s been a long time that I dreamed of visiting this r

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

The last installment in this series (first one here) adopts a more critical stance towards the article by McConnell et al., Lead pollution recorded in Greenland ice indicates European emissions tracked plagues, wars, and imperial expansion during antiquity. As I said in the second pos