A Blog about the Evolution of Civilizations
Announcing a New Book
July 28, 2016
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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 Engla
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Visualizing Values Mismatch in the European Union
July 20, 2016
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 (in this blog an
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Why Statistics Are Not “Damned Lies”. The effect of Mariel boatlift on Miami wages
July 15, 2016
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 the method you u
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Brexit as Destructive Creation
July 01, 2016
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 the “Brexit” ref
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Will the European Union Survive its 60th Anniversary?
June 23, 2016
Last year I wrote a series of gloomy posts about Europe: Is this the Beginning of the End for the European Union? and The Deep Historical Roots of the European Crisis. Unfortunately, the European crisis has only deepened since then. Tomorrow the Brits vote for, or against the “Brexit”
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Garbage In? How We Can Improve the Quality of Historical Data
June 17, 2016
A week ago the urban archaeologist Mike Smith wrote a scathing post about a new article in Nature.com’s journal Scientific Data. In the article, Meredith Reba and coworkers report on how they “spatialized” the dataset on urban settlements, based on previous publications by Tertius Cha
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Why Europe? Musings in the Museu de Marinha on English Exceptionalism
June 08, 2016
On my return trip from Europe I had a long layover in Lisbon, which I decided to spend in the Museu de Marinha in Belém. I have been lately thinking a lot about a bunch of topics that can be summarized under the rubric of Why Europe? – why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Europ
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Reconstructing the Past: the "Prince of the Lilies" and the "Minoan Peace"
May 20, 2016
Over the previous weekend the Seshat project ran a workshop on Cretan history and archaeology. We met in Villa Ariadne that the first excavator of Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans, built for himself right next to the Knossos Palace. Several times during the workshop the discussion among the
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Why Did Europe Conquer the World?
May 12, 2016
I recently finished reading Why Did Europe Conquer the World? by Philip T. Hoffman. Hoffman proposes a new explanation for the perennial question, Why Europe? Why did that cultural and technological backwater, Western Europe, suddenly embarked on the path to global domination. By 1914
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Pax Sinica: AD 1368–1841
April 28, 2016
I’ve just finished David Kang’s East Asia before the West. It’s a very interesting argument, but I cannot whole-heartedly recommend the book. Columbia University Press could have done a much better job of editing. The text is very repetitive, with some ideas repeated over and over aga
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Popular Immiseration in America, c.1980–c.2020(?)
April 24, 2016
A comment on my previous post said, “Sorry, but not only can I argue against this alleged decline [of the well-being of Americans], I can convincingly argue that Americans have never had it better. Not even close.” That perhaps is correct for the Americans in the top 10 percent of the
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Donald Trump and Mass Mobilization Potential
April 21, 2016
In the previous post I talked about how elite overproduction contributes to political instability. Too many elite aspirants vying for a fixed number of power positions means that an increasingly large number of them are frustrated in their quest for status and power. Some percentage o
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Donald Trump as an Elite Aspirant
April 19, 2016
Yesterday Ned Resnikoff published an article What Ancient History Has To Say About Near-Future Doom, based on interviewing me last week. It’s very well done, but several things I said didn’t make it into his text, and I thought I would expand on them in my blog. All of this is based o
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Is Human Sacrifice Functional at the Society Level?
April 08, 2016
An article published this week by Nature is generating a lot of press. Using a sample of 93 Austronesian cultures Watts et al. explore the possible relationship between human sacrifice (HS) and the evolution of hierarchical societies. Specifically, they test the “social control” hypot
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The New Caliphate: Part V. The Third Option
March 31, 2016
In Part IV of this series I considered two of the three possible options for dealing with ISIS: all-out war to destroy it and the middle route, to use the Western air force to contain and degrade the Islamic caliphate, with the view of eventually destroying it, especially if the local
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The New Caliphate: Part IV. Three Strategies that the West Can Follow
March 28, 2016
In Parts I, II, and III I discussed why it was possible to predict the rise of the Islamic State a decade ago. Can we use the theory of “metaethnic frontiers” — the basis for the 2005 prediction about the potential of ISIS — to peek into the future? Clearly wha
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Easter, Early Christians, and Cliodynamics
March 26, 2016
It’s Easter, and instead of continuing with my series on the New Caliphate, which is quite gloomy, I thought I would take a break from it and write something more appropriate for the holiday. I’ll post the next installment in the series after the holidays. Corpus Christi p
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The New Caliphate: Part III. The Microfoundations of the Islamic State
March 24, 2016
In the aftermath of the Brussels terror attack many will call for a military solution to the Islamic State problem. Yet the new science of Cliodynamics predicts that the long-term result of the military victory over ISIS will be the opposite of what is intended. In Part II of this ser
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The New Caliphate: What Should Be Done about the Islamic State? Part II
March 23, 2016
In the aftermath of the Brussels terror attack many will call for a military solution to the Islamic State problem. Yet the new science of Cliodynamics predicts that the long-term result of the military victory over ISIS will be the opposite of what is intended. A decade ago I made a
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The New Caliphate: What Should Be Done about the Islamic State? Part I
March 22, 2016
In the aftermath of the Brussels terror attack many will call for a military solution to the Islamic State problem. Yet the new science of Cliodynamics predicts that the long-term result of the military victory over ISIS will be the opposite of what is intended. I can’t think of any o
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The Anatomy of a Seshat Fact
March 12, 2016
This week I gave a talk at the workshop, organized by Chris Chase-Dunn and Hiroko Inoue at the University of California in Riverside. The talk was about the current status of Seshat: Global History Databank. As I was preparing the talk, I read an article in the Atlantic about digital
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Another Victim of Ayn Rand’s Corrosive Objectivism: Sears
February 27, 2016
Thanks to a very interesting article by Denise Cummins in Evonomics I learned another great story to add to my growing set of case studies showing how the “greed is good” ideology destroys companies. In Ultrasociety I mainly talked about Enron, and Jeff Skilling’s role in its fall. Bu
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President of the Australian Diabetes Society Doesn’t Understand Evolution
February 24, 2016
Diabetes expert warns paleo diet is dangerous and increases weight gain! proclaims the press release from University of Melbourne. It says: A new study has revealed following a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet for just eight weeks can lead to rapid weight gain and health complications.
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Why Monarchy Will Continue as an Enduring Form of State Organization
February 13, 2016
A couple of days ago I received the following query from a journalist: Why haven’t we seen any new monarchies created in the past several decades? Do you think we’ll see monarchies disappear entirely in the not-too-distant future? Why or why not? These are very interesting
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Pay Equality and Team Performance in Major League Baseball
February 12, 2016
In a recent post, Science versus Ideology: Readers Comment on Ultrasociety, I encouraged comments from readers, both good and bad. Here’s one response. In a blog post, titled rather alarmingly, Can we trust Peter Turchin?, Alex Guzey writes, This is a short-ish critique of his book Ul
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Ancient Choices, Modern Consequences
February 07, 2016
One thing I love about Cultural Evolution is how it makes us look at ordinary things we do every day from a completely new angle. As an example, if you think about it, wearing pants, especially in warmer climates, is a very strange thing. It turns that there is a surprising explanatio
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Science versus Ideology: Readers Comment on Ultrasociety
January 31, 2016
It’s amazing how the landscape of book publishing has been transformed in the last ten (or even five) years. Not only it’s now possible for authors to reach readers directly, as I did with Ultrasociety, without the intermediaries of literary agents, publishers, and printers, but the r
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War Over War, Again
January 25, 2016
Writing in Scientific American, John Horgan states, “10,000-Year-Old Massacre Does NOT Bolster Claim that War Is Innate. A new report on a massacre of hunter-gatherers in Africa is consistent with the claim that war, far from being an inborn trait that evolved millions of years ago, i
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Naked Self-Interest is a Recipe for Social Dissolution (a response to Branko Milanovic)
January 19, 2016
Dear Branko, Thank you for your comment stemming from reading Ultrasociety. It’s a very clear and coherent statement of what many (if not most) mainstream economists believe, although they don’t usually care to formulate it as well as you did. Naturally, I disagree with it—my whole bo
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Robert Frank: Ruthless self interest is not a good business strategy (a guest post)
January 18, 2016
Branko Milanovic is not alone in his skepticism about whether private morality has a useful role to play in the capitalist system (see The Iron Logic of Gordon Gekko). The logic of the competitive model does indeed seem to suggest that if people can gain by breaking the rules when no
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