As I wrote at the beginning of 2025, the previous year turned out to be quite a challenge. It took me a while to recover and, then, to deal with the “stuff” that accumulated while I was recovering. But now my personal life seems to be under control (knock on … Read more
The year that has just ended was personally very difficult for me. First, in April my wife developed a very serious medical condition—it was really touch-and-go, and she ended up spending ten days in the hospital. Thankfully, we survived this challenge and now she is back to normal. Next came … Read more
In the previous post of the series, I promised to show how both the Economic Power and Casualties Rates hypotheses can be combined within the same computational model. Yesterday, the SocArxiv finally published my preprint describing this model (it took several weeks to resolve some bureaucratic issues), and I now … Read more
One thing I realized since I posted my blog series on the War in Ukraine (last one here) in July is that previously I explicitly addressed only one hypothesis (which predicts a win for Russia). But what I aim at is a scientific prediction (see Scientific Prediction ≠ Prophecy) and … Read more
The remarkable success of ChatGPT and other generative A.I. has inflamed the already roiling debate about how the rise of machines will affect workers, and ultimately shape our societies. Doomers predict that robots will replace people and, perhaps, even destroy the human civilization. Optimists argue that, after the inevitable growth … Read more
The last update on “What I am working on” was posted a year ago, and it is high time to do another. Last year was very intense. It started with preparing for the publication of my trade book, End Times, which came out on June 13 in the US and … Read more
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