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November 12 - November 24, 2023
History is not “just one damn thing after another,”1 British historian Arnold Toynbee once quipped in response to a critic.
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A science of history is not only possible but also useful: it helps us anticipate how the collective choices we make in the present can bring us a better future.
I began my academic career in the 1980s as an ecologist; I made my living studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer. This
I had never been allergic to mathematics, so I embraced the turn of the field to complexity science, which mixes computer modeling with Big Data analytics to answer such questions as, for example, why many animal populations go through boom-and-bust cycles.
By the late 1990s, however, I felt we’d answered most of the interesting questions I’d entered the field to work on. With some trepidation, I began to consider how the same complexity-science approach could be brought to the study of human societies, both in the past and today.
From the beginning, my colleagues and I in this new field focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse. This is the area where our field’s findings are arguably the most robust—and arguably the most disturbing.
What, then, is this model? To put it somewhat wonkily, when a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars), a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically.
Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to take an ominous turn in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.
Cliodynamics is different. It uses the methods of data science, treating the historical record, compiled by generations of historians, as Big Data. It employs mathematical models to trace the intricate web of interactions between the different “moving parts” of the complex social systems that are our societies.
While the numbers of superrich have multiplied, the income and wealth of the typical American family have actually declined.
The second problem is much subtler and less widely understood.7 When the social pyramid becomes top-heavy, this has dire consequences for the stability of our societies.
Before the 1960s, the relative wage increased robustly, but after that decade it began declining, and by 2010 it had nearly halved.10
wage stagnation and decline, it affected not only the economic measures of well-being but also biological and social ones. I’ll talk more about it in chapter 3, but for now it is sufficient to note that life expectancies of large swaths of the American population started to decline years before the COVID-19 pandemic. “Deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses spiked among the noncollege-educated from 2000 to 2016, while remaining at the same, much lower level among those with at least a college degree.11 This is what popular immiseration looks like.
Our human brains are wired in such a way that we see “agency” behind any development, especially one that affects us in a strong way.13
Trump won not because of Russian intervention at least not mainly.
But to understand the ascent of Trump—and more broadly, why America is in crisis—we need not a conspiracy theory but a scientific theory.
Between the 1820s and 1860s, the relative wage, the share of economic output paid out as worker wages, declined by nearly 50 percent
Average life expectancy at age ten decreased by eight years! And the heights of native-born Americans, who in the eighteenth century were the tallest people on earth, started shrinking.
History textbooks tell us that the American Civil War was fought over slavery, but this is not the whole story. A better way to characterize this conflict is to say that it was fought over “slavocracy.”
Nature of civil war in US.
as slavery provided the economic basis for Southern dominance, a political attack on the slaveholders could be strengthened by an ideological attack on slavery.
nature of civil war in US part 2
The victory of the North in the war resulted in the overthrow of the antebellum ruling class and its replacement by the new economic elite that has dominated the American state since then.
nature of civil war in US part 3
All complex human societies organized as states experience recurrent waves of political instability. The most common pattern is an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases lasting for roughly a century. Integrative phases are characterized by internal peace, social stability, and relatively cooperative elites. Disintegrative phases are the opposite: social instability, breakdown of cooperation among the elites, and persistent outbreaks of political violence, such as rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars.
Despite this variability, the time of troubles always comes. So far, we haven’t seen an exception to this rule.
Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors.
for large, powerful empires, geopolitical factors tend to be of reduced importance. Such states tend to be too big to be affected by what their neighbors do, and social breakdown within them is generated by internal forces. To borrow from Arnold Toynbee, great empires die not by murder but by suicide.2
After 1250, the number of nobles increased even faster than that of the general population, because their economic position was better than that of the commoners. In fact, popular immiseration benefited the elites, who profited from high land rents, low wages, and high food prices.
Whereas before 1300 the nobles enjoyed a favorable economic conjunction in which there were relatively few elites and cheap, plentiful labor, by the mid-fourteenth century the situation was completely reversed.
The elite overproduction game entered its final, violent phase, and intraelite conflicts popped up all over France.4 In the 1350s, the breakdown of internal order reached the heart of the kingdom.
Rural unemployment coupled with urban demand for labor (in crafts and trades but also as servants for the wealthy) generates a population flow toward the cities, which grow much faster than the general population during this period. The elite demand for luxury goods drives long-distance trade. These trends make the appearance of new diseases and the spread of existing ones more likely.
societies that are approaching a crisis are very likely to be hit by an epidemic. But the causality also flows in the opposite direction. A major epidemic undermines societal stability.
To extract truly useful lessons from history that can equip us with the knowledge needed to navigate the troubled waters ahead, we need to translate our verbal ideas about how societies work into mathematical models. Then we need to integrate our theories with data while avoiding the pitfalls of cherry-picked examples. This means that we have to construct and statistically analyze historical databases.
Idea of cliodynamics
In the eighteenth century, America had the tallest people in the world.13 The average height of US-born Americans continued to increase until the cohort born in 1830. During the next seventy years, it declined by more than four centimeters. After another turning point, in 1900, and for about seventy more years, the trend was again highly positive. During this period, the average height increased by a whopping nine centimeters. Then something happened. Beginning with children born in the 1960s, gains in height stopped. This trend change only affected the US.
Height
deaths of despair increased fourfold for less educated men, they hardly budged for more educated men.
Death's of despair
oversupply of labor in relation to demand for it put downward pressure on worker wages. As institutions protecting workers were becoming weaker, wages were unable to resist this downward pressure.
Syating in early 80ies...
The disagreements between the conservatives and the progressives within the ruling class focus almost entirely on cultural issues. The economic elites, who dominate the American polity, can tolerate a great diversity of views on such issues, as long as the consensus on promoting their collective economic interests (keeping their taxes and worker wages low) is strong.
the disagreements inside the US ruling class are on cultural issues only not on promoting wealth pump moving money from others to the rich
On the ideological front, left-wing dissidents get very different treatment depending on the content of their critiques. Cultural left issues—race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+, intersectionality—occupy large swaths of the corporate media. Populist economic issues and, especially, critique of American militarism, much less so.
Turns out we can make a lot of progress in quantifying the fighting spirit. More recently, my colleagues within the field of cultural evolution have been probing the psychology of readiness for extreme sacrifice, using such concepts as “devoted actors,” “sacred values,” and “identity fusion.”
See also Vesa Kanniainen study on intergenerational altruism
See Hammad Sheikh, Ángel Gómez, and Scott Atran, “Empirical Evidence for the Devoted Actor Model,” Current Anthropology 57, no. S13 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1086/686221; Nafees Hamid et al., “Neuroimaging ‘will to fight’ for sacred values: an empirical case study with supporters of an Al Qaeda associate,” Royal Society Open Science 6, no. 6 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181585; and Elaine Reese and Harvey Whitehouse, “The Development of Identity Fusion,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 16, no. 6 (2021): 1398–1411, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620968761
