I went to Africa for the first time more than 30 years ago, and I was immediately hooked. Now I try to get there every year for a mind-clearing vacation — no work, just enjoying the countryside and the animals. This year I linked with two old friends of mine … Read more
In this installment I will use the ideas discussed in previous posts to make projections. A projection is different from a forecast (and, certainly, from a prophecy) in that it is not an attempt to predict what will happen. Rather, it is a description of what would happen given certain … Read more
Sixteen months into the war the final outcome of this conflict is still uncertain. Public statements from both sides continue to express unbounded confidence in their eventual victory (see, for example, Russia’s Strategic Failure and Ukraine’s Secure Future). But which way has the advantage swung, is known only to the … Read more
The first part of this series gave an introduction to the Osipov-Lanchester (OL) model and illustrated the ideas with the example of the American Civil War. In this second part, my aim to extract a prediction from the OL model for the War in Ukraine. A few general points/reminders: In … Read more
Probably the most consequential currently unfolding geopolitical event is the war in Ukraine. When I wrote about Ukraine in End Times the latest phase of this conflict had just started (I turned the completed text to the publisher in August 2022). During the year since then, many people have asked … Read more
The first “mega-empire” in history, which broke through the 3 mln sq. km territory threshold, is now known as the Achaemenid Empire. It preceded the rise of other early mega-empires: the Mauryans, the Han Dynasty, and the Romans. Unlike these later empires, the origins of the Achaemenids are rather murky. … Read more
As readers of End Times (published last week) know, the theoretical foundations of my explanation of why we in America are in crisis is provided by the structural-demographic theory (SDT). The essentials of this theory were proposed by Jack Goldstone in a 1991 book (be sure to read about his … Read more
The Database of Religious History (DRH) team has recently published the first (and only, as far as I know) analytic article based on the DRH data, Religion and Ecology: A pilot study employing the database of religious history. Their results were quite disappointing. As they write in the Abstract: However, … Read more
End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration To be published on June 13, 2023 by Penguin Random House “History is not just one damn thing after another,” British historian Arnold Toynbee once quipped in response to a critic. For a long time, Toynbee’s opinion was in the … Read more
There were quite a lot of questions about (and some disagreements with) my tweet about the four sources of social power. As Twitter is not a great platform for thoughtful commentary, I thought that I would expand on it in this blog. What follows is a somewhat modified version of … Read more
When we launched Seshat: Global History Databank more than a decade ago, we intended it to be a multi-purpose tool. But the central question that motivated this gargantuan undertaking was to test the multitude of theories proposed by thinkers of the past and social scientists of today to explain what … Read more
The publisher of the Japanese translation of Ages of Discord (about to be published) requested a foreword, which presented me with a welcome opportunity to review how this book has fared, and to place it within my overall—long-term—research program attempting to understand the causes of recurrent waves of social and political … Read more
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 features of complex human societies. Moralizing religion is different. I recently finished writing a … Read more
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 industry and there is a whole new science called collapsology. … Read more
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 Pump: … Read more