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

  Part II in the series (Part I here) The Greek crisis is the clearest expression of the failure of European asabiya. Yes, the Greeks bear a lot of responsibility for getting themselves in a mess. They have been profligate and they racked up a huge debt. They elected corrupt and

  The overall trend of social evolution during the last 10,000 years has been from small- to large-scale societies. If the typical scale of human societies was initially in the hundreds, it is now in the hundreds of millions. War has been the chief evolutionary force in this astr

As I said in my previous blog, the Catholic areas in Belfast tend to be symbolically demarcated primarily with murals, while the Protestant ones are festooned with flags. The distinction is not absolute, and you can see the Irish Tricolor (green-white-orange) in two photographs in the

Two weeks ago, after we were done with various Cliodynamics activities in Dublin, we went on a field trip to study the post-conflict landscape in Belfast. Our guide on this trip was Kevin Feeney. Exploring Belfast is best done with someone who knows which neighborhoods are safe, and w

I continue my anthropological observations on the culture and the inhabitants of this distant and exotic land, in which it has been my privilege to reside during the last several months. In previous blogs I have already raised the question, which we can call the mystery of the Nordic

Paul Krugman has written two blogs about Ibn Khaldun this weekend (and also said some kind words about my research). Readers of this blog know that I hold Ibn Khaldun in great esteem (see this blog, for example). Ibn Khaldun’s greatest contribution is the development of a theory of co

Both the Sci Foo Camp at the GooglePlex and the symposium at the Evolution meeting in Snowbird were extremely productive and enjoyable experiences. I’ll write about some of the sessions I went to at the Sci Foo later. BTW, my own session on the strange decline of cooperation in Americ

Imagine …   You are an heir of a Noble House. Your enemies, who include the emperor and a powerful noble, have assassinated your father and destroyed your House. You have escaped, but you have no loyal retainers, no troops, no allies, and no money. You want revenge! But you also want

Frank Herbert’s DUNE is probably the most popular science fiction novel ever (over 12 million of copies sold). It has everything – a complex and dynamic main hero, great villains, neat ecology (planetology!), philosophical and religious insights, and (what is particularly