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Browsing All posts tagged under »structural-demographic«
More on Labor Supply (Why Real Wages Stopped Growing V)
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Canaries in a Coal Mine IV: Alternative Explanations
December 20, 2012 by Peter Turchin
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 of the pattern I […]
Bryan Vila: A Criminologist Comments on ‘Canaries in a Coal Mine’
December 18, 2012 by SEF Editor
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 rough: I. Theoretical construct: Opportunity/Routine Activity: Any type of criminal act will tend to increase […]
Canaries in a Coal Mine III. Is the Trend Real?
December 17, 2012 by Peter Turchin
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 of the terrorist is not to kill a specific person, but an […]
Canaries in a Coal Mine II. “We too are asking why”
December 16, 2012 by Peter Turchin
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 evidence. As I said yesterday, […]
Canaries in a Coal Mine
December 15, 2012 by Peter Turchin
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 them children. We may never find out what […]
Does History Cycle?
December 5, 2012 by Peter Turchin
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 of my readers know, was […]
Cliodynamics vs. the Mayan Calendar: Who Wins?
August 11, 2012 by Peter Turchin
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 sent me links). Partly its sheer […]
The Social Evolutionary Roles of Internal versus External Wars
August 9, 2012 by Peter Turchin
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 actually have a lot to do […]
A Feature Article in Nature on Cliodynamics
August 3, 2012 by Peter Turchin
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 discipline and explaining in easy-to-understand language some […]
History’s Lessons
July 31, 2012 by Peter Turchin
Those of you who’ve read my books know that in addition to my research on the evolution of large-scale human societies and the rise of centralized states and empires, I am also interested in the reverse process by which an empire loses cohesion and gradually crumbles into a ‘failed state’ (these two directions in my […]
April 21, 2013 by Peter Turchin
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