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

As readers of this blog know, structural-demographic theorists distinguish between two causes of revolutions and civil wars: structural trends, which build slowly and are quite predictable, and much less predictable, or even unpredictable, triggering events. In this view, a revolution

Matt Yglesias, responding to a tweet by Noah Smith today, wrote: Seen a lot of Turchin citations lately but I think the bar for buying into cyclical views of history should be *really* high. There were other, similar comments on Twitter. I respond on my blog, because it can be hard to

Quite a number of people, here and on Twitter, asked me about how I came up with my forecast for 2020. Here’s the story. By the early 2000s I had already delved into structural-demographic theory and its implications for historical societies. These results went into Historical D

America is burning. Dozens of cities across the United States remain under curfews at a level not seen since riots following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Most commentary is focusing on the immediate causes of this wave of violence that has already continued for six

After I published my last post on Coronavirus and Our Age of Discord, I’ve been looking through various lists of major epidemics in world history, both on resources such as Wikipedia and in academic articles. I know that there is a strong (although not perfect) association betwe

In recent days there was much discussion by historians on Twitter of the proper and improper uses of historical knowledge in testing social science theories. It was initially prompted by the publication of a Science article last week on historical Church exposure and global psychologi

Last week I visited Centre for Complex Systems Studies (CCSS) in Utrecht, where I gave a talk about my research results and plans for the Ages of Discord project. Several people on Twitter asked to see the slides, and so I am posting them on this blog. First, here’s an abstract

As the readers of this blog know, a big chunk of my research focuses on why complex societies go through cycles of alternating internally peaceful, or integrative, phases and turbulent, or disintegrative periods. In all past state-level societies, for which we have decent data, we fin

When I became interested in what eventually became Cliodynamics, initially I thought that I would just play with some mathematical models of historical processes, because I had read many times before that there is very little quantitative data in history. In fact, the opposite is true