The brilliant atomic physicist Enrico Fermi was notorious for unnerving PhD candidates during their oral examinations by asking ‘How many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago?’ The point of the question, besides the psychological effect, was to gauge how well the candidate could estimate (and justify!) an … Read more
A guest post by Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter Francois This is an interesting moment in the development of history as an academic discipline. We stand on the brink of a sea change, not necessarily in the way historical evidence is gathered and documented, but in the way the resulting data … Read more
A Guest Post by David Hines At the start of 2017, America looks to be in for a stretch of serious political turmoil. Accordingly, it makes sense to look at previous such period to see what lessons can be learned. One invaluable resource is Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, which … Read more
This is from a Reuters article yesterday: “Only half of Republicans would accept Clinton, the Democratic nominee, as their president. And if she wins, nearly 70 percent said it would be because of illegal voting or vote rigging, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday.” “I’ve never seen an … Read more
This is the most bizarre presidential election that I’ve seen since coming to this country in 1978 and probably the most bizarre in anybody’s living memory. Evidence for declining wellbeing of the American population has been piling up for years (as I exhaustively review in the just-published Ages of Discord) … Read more
Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (AoD) was published on September 30 and is available for purchase through Amazon.com. AoD is a scholarly book – in fact, it’s a work of cliodynamics. This means that there are lots of equations, 25 data tables, and 74 (!) figures. … Read more
Apparently my blog posts on the historical roots of European dysfunction (see for example the last one, Visualizing Values Mismatch in the European Union) were noticed. I was approached by people who run Euromind and asked to contribute a short article to the edited volume they are putting together, titled … Read more
“I think that quantifying things that don’t have units is rarely fruitful” wrote on Twitter @UnlearningEcon (this was in the context of our discussion of Dani Rodrik’s Economics Rules). The following exchange went like this: @Peter_Turchin: “But where do units come from? It’s not a linear process.” @UnlearningEcon “I’m not … Read more
As readers of this blog will remember, a month ago I announced the publication of my new book, Ages of Discord (see this post). Things got a little delayed because, as I was traveling in central Java, my computer suddenly died on me. On the plus side, I appreciated a … Read more
I was going to title this post “Living in Singapore” but that wouldn’t be right. Apart from three ventures out to downtown and a nearby residential area, I’ve spent all my time on the Nanyang Technological University campus. Incidentally, “Nanyang” in Chinese means “South Seas” and refers to the maritime … Read more
As many of you know, currently the Seshat Databank project is focused on collecting data for all polities (states, empires, chiefdoms, archaeologically known cultures, etc) that intersected 30 geographic points (NGAs, standing for Natural Geographic Areas) depicted here: So far I have visited about a third of these locations, and … Read more
When I decided to switch from population dynamics to historical dynamics — Cliodynamics — my main interest was to understand the past. But every time I gave a talk about secular cycles and structural-demographic dynamics in such societies as medieval and early modern England, France, and Russia, someone in the … Read more
In my July 1 post, Brexit as Destructive Creation, I argued that one significant cause for the European dysfunction was the choice made by the European elites to expand the union too fast too far. Why do I think this was a mistake? As I have said on numerous occasions … Read more
We all have heard the phrase: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” (for its origin, see the entry in Wikipedia). This phrase is a damned lie. You cannot lie with statistics if they are properly done; that is, if you show both the data and … Read more
A year ago, as the “Greek Tragedy” was unfolding, I posted on my blog, Is this the Beginning of the End for the European Union? The outcome of the EU membership referendum in UK suggests that the break-up process is gathering steam. I didn’t predict a vote of “yes” in … Read more