Earlier this month I gave a talk at an international conference in Vienna, Austria, The Haves and the Have Nots: Exploring the Global History of Wealth and Income Inequality. The keynote lecture was given by Branko Milanovic, the author of a book, not coincidentally titled The Haves a

Two weeks ago I went to a studio in Amherst, MA, to participate in a BBC Forum on Hierarchy. It was broadcasted last week, and you can listen to it here. I arrived at the studio in plenty of time, but there were inevitable SNAFUs. First, I couldn’t get into the building (not sure why

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

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

As I wrote in a previous blog, the first five weeks of this semester I spent away in Europe. During the first part of the trip I ran five Seshat workshops in Oxford, and then I went to Toulouse. What makes Toulouse and Oxford similar is that they are both homes to some of the earliest

Yesterday we published a guest blog by Joe Brewer, A World without Poverty. It triggered quite an intense discussion, which is a good thing (this is what this Forum is about). However, and somewhat disappointingly to me, most critique focused on ‘poverty,’ instead of ‘a world without.

Imagine a world without poverty.  What would it look like?  Is it even possible?  How do we get there?  When people working at foundations, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies dive into this topic, they typically do so with the assumption that poverty is just a natural pa

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

In my previous blog I came to the conclusion that during its post-Soviet history Ukraine has become a Kevin Philips nightmare. No matter who gets elected there, they are either oligarchs, or oligarch stooges. It appears that the oligarchs not only control the parties that compete agai