As readers of this blog know, structural-demographic theorists distinguish between two causes of revolutions and civil wars: structural trends, which build slowly and are quite predictable, and much less predictable, or even unpredictable, triggering events. In this view, a revolution

Last week I visited Centre for Complex Systems Studies (CCSS) in Utrecht, where I gave a talk about my research results and plans for the Ages of Discord project. Several people on Twitter asked to see the slides, and so I am posting them on this blog. First, here’s an abstract

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’

It is strange to actually live in a society experiencing a structural-demographic crisis, after studying many examples of such crises in the past. Unfortunately the crisis is developing largely according to the classical pattern. The degree of political polarization is at its highest

I’ve finished reading Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, following a tip from David Hines. It’s an excellent detailed history of the American radical underground during “the long 1970s”. The details that Burrough provide will be interesting to anybody who does research on the mechanisms a

“I believe Peter Turchin is deeply mistaken about elite competition in modern societies” writes Pseudoerasmus in a comment on my previous post. So let’s strip the argument down to its most basic form. In my post I explicitly use the political (administrative) elites

Judging by the tone of discussions in the mass media and the social media, most people are heartily sick of this “Election from Hell” and can’t wait until it’s over. Well, folks, I have bad news for you (and yes, I know what happens to a bearer of bad news): It Ain’t Over. Whoever get

This is the most bizarre presidential election that I’ve seen since coming to this country in 1978 and probably the most bizarre in anybody’s living memory. Evidence for declining wellbeing of the American population has been piling up for years (as I exhaustively review in the just-p

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”

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