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How to Overthrow an Empire – and Replace It with Your Own
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 […]
Posted in: Blogs
Putting It All Together (Why Real Wages Stopped Growing IV)
April 15, 2013
by Peter Turchin
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 […]
Posted in: Blogs
Scientific Prediction ≠ Prophecy
April 12, 2013
by Peter Turchin
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 […]
Posted in: Blogs
A Proxy for Non-Market Forces (Why Real Wages Stopped Growing III)
April 11, 2013
by Peter Turchin
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 […]
Posted in: Blogs
Cutting through the Thicket of Economic Forces (Why Real Wages Stopped Growing II)
April 7, 2013
by Peter Turchin
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 […]
Posted in: Blogs
The End of Prosperity: Why Did Real Wages Stop Growing in the 1970s?
April 4, 2013
by Peter Turchin
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 […]
Posted in: Blogs
Science on Screen: DUNE
March 28, 2013
by Peter Turchin
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 […]
Posted in: Blogs
April 17, 2013
by Peter Turchin
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