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

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

Last weekend my wife and I were in Barcelona. It was our fist visit to the lovely capital of Catalonia, and it certainly lived up to its reputation as one of the Grand Cities of Europe. Source: Wikimedia But a visit to Barcelona also makes one think about the European Union, especiall

Gary Feinman’s proposal that trends in economic inequality have a strong effect on who benefits from the technological innovations has resulted in a very lively discussion. Most comments seem to agree that there is definitely something to it, but question the details. In particular, w

Last week I was in Berlin where I gave a talk in the conference on Contextualising Technical Innovations in Prehistory. The declared focus of the conference was on the evolution of technology in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, but many of the presentations ranged much more widely, and a

In my previous post I wrote about how the majority of Egyptologists (with a few important exceptions) have avoided using their knowledge to help us figure out how and why early states evolved. While eventually we will remedy this situation with the help of Seshat, and in a very rigoro

Dr. Craig Spencer of New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center went to Guinea in September to help combat the Ebola epidemic. He returned to New York City on Oct. 17. He rode on the subway, went bowling, and basically led normal life until his temperature went up to 100

At the end of my second blog on democracy and oligarchy in Ukraine, I came to a gloomy conclusion that there would be no real effort to curb the power of the oligarchs, and that it will be the common Ukrainians who will have to bear the costs of reforms. All this came to pass even fas

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

In a previous blog, I have already commented on the poor quality of coverage of the Crimean crisis in the Western press. Most news articles about the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula show no understanding of the real motives of Putin or Russia. This is scary. Folks, Russia