Last week Tyler Cowen published an essay in Politico, No, Fascism Can’t Happen Here. He argues: My argument is pretty simple: American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy. It is simply too hard for the fascists, or for that matter oth

The level of dysfunction characterizing our political elites has reached a new high yesterday when the Senate failed to agree to a House-passed bill to keep the United States government funded for another month. Although the Republicans have the majority in the Senate, they don’

A colleague of mine recently asked me to speculate about the various paths the European Union might follow over the next decade and which one(s) I think are more-or-less likely. I think this makes for a good post topic, especially in light of the very troubling developments in the Cat

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

In September I went to an international conference in Vienna, Austria, The Haves and the Have Nots: Exploring the Global History of Wealth and Income Inequality, about which I wrote in a previous post. One thing I learned at the conference is that, apparently, economists don’t really

The previous blog set the framework for a discussion of the evolution of the state in Egypt, and promised that I would next consider some of the theories proposed by Egyptologists. First, though, let’s put this theoretical discussion in a broader context. At a very broad level, most t

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

As I wrote in the first part, one factor underlying the success of the 2001 Egyptian Revolution was strong intraelite conflict. The second factor that lead to an unexpectedly fast success of the protestors was the formation of a wide opposition alliance, which united in a single coord

Our young Egyptian friends (a sort of “leftist liberal revolutionaries”) consider the post-July 3 events in their country [the ousting of president Morsi by the military] as “counterrevolution”. An example of a “counter-revolutionary”  broadsheet from the website of the Eg