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Jason welcomes Peter Turchin, a complexity scientist specializing in cliodynamics, accurately predicted in 2010 that the US would face social disintegration around 2020. Cliodynamics combines cultural evolution, economic history, and mathematical modeling to analyze historical processes and predict future trends.…
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Jason welcomes Peter Turchin, a complexity scientist specializing in cliodynamics, accurately predicted in 2010 that the US would face social disintegration around 2020. Cliodynamics combines cultural evolution, economic history, and mathematical modeling to analyze historical processes and predict future trends. Turchin's models identified elite overproduction—too many elites vying for limited power—as a key factor in societal breakdowns. The resulting competition among elites destabilizes political systems, leading to increased social unrest. Turchin's insights into the dynamics of wealth and power in societies provide a scientific approach to understanding and potentially mitigating future crises.
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What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies
Why do the 99.9% of humanity live in large-scale societies organized as states? During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), human societies have been transformed utterly: from small groups of nomadic foragers to our current interconnected world of large-scale societies organized as states. Population numbers, agricultural productivity, technological…
Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration
From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a…
Discover the world records that define our history and jump headfirst into the past using scientific data that reveals accurate and insightful answers to life’s biggest questions.
What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the plumbing like in medieval Byzantium? The average wage in the Mughal Empire? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ever ritual human sacrifice? We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world…
A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History
The real wage of a US worker today is less than it was 40 years ago—but there are four times as many multimillionaires. As inequality grows, the politics become more poisonous. Every year, more and more Americans go on shooting sprees, killing strangers and passers-by—and now, increasingly, representatives of the state. Troubling trends of this kind are…
Cooperation is powerful
We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature’s greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep climb to the top of the rankings—overtaking wasps, bees, termites and ants—in the last 10,000 years. Genetic…
Empires rise and fall, populations and economies boom and bust, world religions spread or wither…
In War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to offer a bold new theory about the course of world history. Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society’s capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off…