In his book, The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson repeated three questions originally posed by Paul Gauguin: Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? A question Gauguin did not ask, but which is implied by the other three, is in the title of this post. Where are w

When 15 years ago I started working within the scientific discipline that eventually became Cliodynamics, my initial plan was to concentrate entirely on past societies. Of course, history doesn’t end in, say, 1800. But there are dangers in pushing a historical analysis all the way to

Every once in a while I get an e-mail from students interested in a career in cliodynamics. What kind of courses does one need to take, and what is the possible career path that could lead to cliodynamics research? Let’s start by acknowledging that there are no departments of cliodyna

In the previous blog I asked why real wages stopped growing in the 1970s. A host of explanations has been discussed by economists and political commentators (although they tend to focus on the related issues of income and income inequality). David Leonhard, for example, listed 14 poss

The Fourth International Conference on Cliodynamics: Mathematical Modeling of Historical and Socioeconomic Processes will be held  in Vladivostok (Russian Federation) on May 20-22, 2013 (please note the change of dates from the previous announcement). The Conference will be hosted and

In the Economist’s World in 2013 issue there is an article, The Cycle of History (thanks to John McGonagle for bringing it to my attention). The author, Max Rodenbeck, discusses the recent events of the Arab Spring from the point of view of Ibn Khaldun’s theory. Ibn Khaldun, as many o

I am often asked by people who first encounter Cliodynamics whether I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, and what is the relationship between Asimov’s Psychohistory and Cliodynamics. I read Foundation some 35 years ago, and it left quite an impression. I actually begin my popular book Wa

Today’s issue of Nature has a Feature Article by Laura Spinney on cliodynamics. Laura interviewed me when we both attended the Frankfurt Forum on Cultural Evolution (about which I wrote in an earlier blog). I think she did a great job capturing the excitement of our new fledgling disc