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
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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, others accepted … Read more
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 and War (WPW). … Read more
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 … Read more
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 the English version. … Read more
Today the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed. Top officials, from president Ashraf Ghani down, have run away. The army partly melted away, partly defected to Taliban. There are reports of looting in Kabul, as cops have deserted their posts. This is a classical state collapse, although it is clear that … Read more
There is a remarkably biased and deceptive piece in Foreign Policy with a critique of Cliodynamics, among other things. The Past Doesn’t Tell Easy Stories About the West The author writes, “Peter Turchin and his collaborators have championed a new approach in which history as a discipline will be … Read more
Penguin Random House, which published my book War and Peace and War (henceforward, WPW) in 2005 decided that now is a good time to promote it. For a short time, the e-book version, sold on all different platforms, is priced at $1.99. If you haven’t read it, get it now … Read more
Nine years ago I made one of the most consequential decisions of my life—I switched to the so-called Paleo Diet (“paleo” is a bit misleading, as I explain in the post). Had I not done so, I would certainly have contributed to the rising obesity statistics for the United States. … Read more
On one level, that of macrosocial dynamics, what happened yesterday, January 6, 2021, is not surprising. After all, my own model indicates that structural pressures for instability in the United States continue to build up. On a more immediate micro-level, watching hundreds of demonstrators break into the Capitol building and … Read more
The story behind Figuring Out the Past by Peter Turchin and Daniel Hoyer Four years ago we got an interesting proposal from Ed Lake, the book acquisition editor at Profile Books. Profile has been publishing The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures series, an annually reissued statistical snapshot of the globe. Ed knew about … Read more
Graeme Wood penned a “long read” about cliodynamics, me, and the Age of Discord in which we are currently find ourselves. Graeme is a very intelligent journalist and his explanations of cliodynamics and structural-demographic mechanisms that bring about state breakdown are quite good. The Atlantic went through a thorough fact-checking … Read more