Last week Tyler Cowen published an essay in Politico, No, Fascism Can’t Happen Here. He argues: My argument is pretty simple: American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy. It is simply too hard for the fascists, or for that matter oth

Last week I wrote about Jack Goldstone’s article, which introduced the most recent issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jack’s book Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. In today’s post I wa

The new issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution celebrates the Demographic Structural Theory (DST), one of the great success stories in Cliodynamics. DST was conceived by Jack Goldstone when he was a graduate student at Harvard during the late

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’

Over the past few years many people, including readers of this blog, asked me to comment on the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory (SHGT). The “notoriety” of this theory has been recently given a boost by reports that it inspired the worldview of Steve Bannon, who was until recently Don

Forty years ago this day my family (and I with them) left the Soviet Union on our way to America. Our first stop was in Vienna, where, by a curious coincidence, I am today (visiting at the Complexity Science Hub). From the cliodynamic point of view, four decades is not a lot of time.

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

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

Today is the second and final round of presidential elections in France. The two contenders are Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Macron is the candidate of the established elites. You cannot get more elite in France: he earned a master’s of public affairs at Sciences Po, and h

During my brief stop-over in Moscow earlier this month, I was asked to give a lecture at the Institute for Economic Strategies about the recent political turmoil in the US as viewed through the lens of Cliodynamics. I’ve given lectures there before—last time was actually in 2009, when