What follows is my report on the workshop Evolution of Social Complexity that I organized at Complexity Science Hub-Vienna, October 2–3, 2017. An Agenda for Research on the Evolution (and Devolution) of Social Complexity Over the past 10,000 years human societies evolved from “simple”

Yesterday Nick Hanauer published an important article on Politico, To My Fellow Plutocrats: You Can Cure Trumpism. I agree with pretty much everything he says there, and I also want to add a few of my thoughts. Nick writes: I find myself in deep disagreement with almost everyone I tal

Last week the Seshat project ran a workshop on “Testing the Axial Age” in Oxford, UK. The workshop brought together a small group of scholars from different fields – historians, religious studies experts, archaeologists, and anthropologists. The goal was to discuss what ex

This article was first published on Evonomics Cliodynamics is a new “transdisciplinary discipline” that treats history as just another science. Ten years ago I started applying its tools to the society I live in: the United States. What I discovered alarmed me. My research showed that

Last year I wrote a series of gloomy posts about Europe: Is this the Beginning of the End for the European Union? and The Deep Historical Roots of the European Crisis. Unfortunately, the European crisis has only deepened since then. Tomorrow the Brits vote for, or against the “Brexit”

An article published this week by Nature is generating a lot of press. Using a sample of 93 Austronesian cultures Watts et al. explore the possible relationship between human sacrifice (HS) and the evolution of hierarchical societies. Specifically, they test the “social control” hypot

In a recent post, Science versus Ideology: Readers Comment on Ultrasociety, I encouraged comments from readers, both good and bad. Here’s one response. In a blog post, titled rather alarmingly, Can we trust Peter Turchin?, Alex Guzey writes, This is a short-ish critique of his book Ul

My previous post was criticized in the comments on the grounds that I “confuse inequality with unfairness.” That’s actually not the case, and in the book I talk about different aspects of inequality (something I did not have a chance to develop in an 800-word blog post). But the point

One of the fundamental premises on which my argument in Ultrasociety is built is that structural inequality is detrimental to cooperative action. By structural inequality I mean large differentials in power. For example, between a slave and a slave-owner, or between a peasant and a lo

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