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

Yesterday’s blog explained that the seemingly ‘senseless,’ ‘random’ nature of most shooting rampages is not senseless at all. Instead, the shooter is motivated by the logic of ‘social substitutability.’ In other words, random mass shootings are a variety of suicide terrorism. The aim

We now  know the identity of the killer in the Sandy Hook School Massacre but are still in the dark about why he did it. Police said that they had found “very good evidence” which would answer questions about the motives of the gunman, but they haven’t yet released this ev

This morning a horrible tragedy shook Newtown, a small town in Connecticut just 70 miles from where I live. An as yet unidentified gunman (there are conflicting reports of his identity) went on shooting rampage at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing nearly thirty people, most of

In the Economist’s World in 2013 issue there is an article, The Cycle of History (thanks to John McGonagle for bringing it to my attention). The author, Max Rodenbeck, discusses the recent events of the Arab Spring from the point of view of Ibn Khaldun’s theory. Ibn Khaldun, as many o

The publication of the Feature Article in Nature about my research on American political violence elicited a wave of comments on the Web. The expression ‘feeding frenzy’ comes to mind. I’ve had a lot of fun reading those comments that I came across (and thanks to various people who se

Joe Anoatubby raises a number of good points, with many of which I find myself in complete agreement. However, one thing I cannot emphasize too much is that generic violence is not a good conceptual category. We need to look at different sides of it separately, for reasons that actual

Today’s issue of Nature has a Feature Article by Laura Spinney on cliodynamics. Laura interviewed me when we both attended the Frankfurt Forum on Cultural Evolution (about which I wrote in an earlier blog). I think she did a great job capturing the excitement of our new fledgling disc