Matt Yglesias, responding to a tweet by Noah Smith today, wrote: Seen a lot of Turchin citations lately but I think the bar for buying into cyclical views of history should be *really* high. There were other, similar comments on Twitter. I respond on my blog, because it can be hard to

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