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Browsing Archives of Author »Peter Turchin«
Why Become a Farmer?
The previous blog discussed Göbekli Tepe, which achieved a surprisingly high level of social complexity before the adoption of agriculture. In the language of philosophy of science, Göbekli Tepe is an anomaly for the reigning paradigm in theoretical archaeology, which posits that the adoption of agriculture was the pre-condition for, or even the cause of, […]
Complex Societies before Agriculture: Göbekli Tepe
May 17, 2013
A week or two ago I was sitting in a doctor’s office, when I realized that I forgot to bring any readings with me. As I was idly rifling through the usual stack, my roving eye was suddenly arrested by a cover of a two-year old National Geographic, which proclaimed THE BIRTH OF RELIGION: The […]
Keeping Science and Ideology Apart
May 11, 2013
Our stated policy at the Social Evolution Forum is that we focus on science. Ideological or partisan posts and comments, on the other hand, are discouraged (so far I only needed to remove two such comments; usually, simply asking commenters to refrain from straying into politics is sufficient). There are good practical reasons for banning […]
Breadfruit Instead of Bread: How to Bring Wealth and Health to the Global South
May 9, 2013
Every year the humanity consumes an enormous amount of wheat. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around 700 million tons of wheat are produced every year, and most of it is eaten as bread and pasta* (with the rest fed to livestock). That’s 100 kg per person per year! I was unable to […]
Breadfruit!
May 4, 2013
As I was growing up in boreal Russia, I remember reading many children books about travel and adventures in exotic countries. One book was about a tropical island where bread grew on trees… it all sounded like a fairy tale. But later I learned it was true! There is a real plant that is called […]
How to Become a Cliodynamicist
May 1, 2013
Every once in a while I get an e-mail from students interested in a career in cliodynamics. What kind of courses does one need to take, and what is the possible career path that could lead to cliodynamics research? Let’s start by acknowledging that there are no departments of cliodynamics – and it is quite […]
When Real Men Wore High Heels
April 25, 2013
High-heel, over-the-knee boots seem to be back in fashion. But you are highly unlikely to see a man wearing them – that is, unless you go to the new Broadway musical, Kinky Boots. Kinky Boots: Billy Porter as Lola, a drag performer, in this musical at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times […]
More on Labor Supply (Why Real Wages Stopped Growing V)
April 21, 2013
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. Furthermore, the model predicts the real wage five years […]
How to Overthrow an Empire – and Replace It with Your Own
April 17, 2013
Imagine … You are an heir of a Noble House. Your enemies, who include the emperor and a powerful noble, have assassinated your father and destroyed your House. You have escaped, but you have no loyal retainers, no troops, no allies, and no money. You want revenge! But you also want to rebuild your […]
Putting It All Together (Why Real Wages Stopped Growing IV)
April 15, 2013
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, if any, of the three factors. What I will do now is […]
Scientific Prediction ≠ Prophecy
April 12, 2013
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 come up with titles) couldn’t resist injecting […]
A Proxy for Non-Market Forces (Why Real Wages Stopped Growing III)
April 11, 2013
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. Non-market forces potentially affecting real wages include a […]
Cutting through the Thicket of Economic Forces (Why Real Wages Stopped Growing II)
April 7, 2013
In the previous blog I asked why real wages stopped growing in the 1970s. A host of explanations has been discussed by economists and political commentators (although they tend to focus on the related issues of income and income inequality). David Leonhard, for example, listed 14 possible causes for the income slump during the last […]
The End of Prosperity: Why Did Real Wages Stop Growing in the 1970s?
April 4, 2013
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 manufacturing workers, expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars, increased 4-fold. Then […]
Science on Screen: DUNE
March 28, 2013
Frank Herbert’s DUNE is probably the most popular science fiction novel ever (over 12 million of copies sold). It has everything – a complex and dynamic main hero, great villains, neat ecology (planetology!), philosophical and religious insights, and (what is particularly fascinating to me) a well-structured social world. I have written before on this topic […]
Starving the Enemy
March 10, 2013
I recently finished reading Perfect Health Diet: Four Steps to Renewed Health, Youthful Vitality, and Long Life by Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminets. It’s a great book and I recommend it to all, who are not afraid of delving into the rather technical issues of health and diet. What I particularly liked about the book is […]
The Cliodynamics of Cliodynamics
March 3, 2013
Marc Parry, the author of the Chronicle article on Cliodynamics, reposted the Google Ngram graphs from my last blog on The Percolator. There are about a dozen replies there. One says, “Interesting article sort of but the comments are even more amusing.” These comments remind me of an encounter I had at a Columbia University […]
The Rise and Fall of Cliometrics, and the Coming Rise of Cliodynamics
February 26, 2013
The latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has two related articles, one on Ian Morris and another on cliodynamics. One interesting theme in the second article is the relationship between cliodynamics and cliometrics. Initially ‘cliometrics’ was a faintly derogatory term used by the detractors of the new economic history that arose in the […]
What Happened in Prehistory
February 22, 2013
I just finished reading the book by Peter Peregrine, What Happened in Prehistory? Peregrine is an anthropologist at the Lawrence University in Wisconsin. I have known him primarily because he spearheaded the construction of the Atlas of Cultural Evolution database and was co-editor of the nine-volume Encyclopedia of Prehistory. (I am interested in these works […]
May 20, 2013
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