One of the most important ideas that I am trying to inject into the debate about the consequences of growing inequality on American society is ‘elite overproduction’. I use the sociological definition of elites: it’s the small proportion of the population (typically 1-2 pe

The latest news from Washington is that there is a compromise in the making that would allow the government to raise the debt limit. But even if an eleventh hour agreement is reached tonight, it is clear to everybody that there will be more budget battles to fight in the months to com

The previous blog in this series showed that a simple three-factorial model can reproduce very faithfully the long-term dynamics of real wages. The model not only explains why the real wages stopped growing in the late 1970s, but also (surprisingly) the ups and downs since 1980. Furth

Previous installments in this series posed the question and examined potential components of an answer: first, long-term trend in GDP and labor demand and supply curves, next, cultural influences. It is time to put it all together and analyze quantitatively the relative contributions,

Yesterday Wired published an article by Klint Finley, Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past. Apart from a couple of minor details Klint does a good job explaining the goals and the methods of Cliodynamics. However, he (or his editor; it is almost always editors who

Previous blogs in this series asked why real wages stopped growing in the 1970s and whether long-term trend in labor demand and supply can help us answer this question. In this blog I turn to ‘extra-economic’ (non-market) factors, which are even harder to quantify than economic ones.

Something happened in the 1970s. Take a look at this graphic: During most of the 20th century—until the 1970s—wages of American workers grew much faster than inflation. In the half-century after 1927 real wages of unskilled labor increased by a factor of 3.5, while wages of manufactur

The on-line magazine Aeon today published an article of mine on why economic inequality tends to wax and wane in very long (‘secular’) cycles, and what consequences it has for the society. One of the central ideas in the article was that general well-being (that is, of the overwhelmin

This is the fourth and last installment in this series. To tell the truth, I will be glad to be done with it because shooting rampages is an inherently depressing subject, in more ways than one. However, it is also an important one. Today I need to review the alternative explanations

Hello Peter, I’ve read the blog post and think it’s an interesting and well-presented idea. But before the evolutionary-ecologist/criminologist/historian in me could accept this as plausible, I’d want to account for three sets of causal forces. Here they are, in roug