History & Mathematics. Trends and Cycles
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Universita Degli Studi Di Milano [email protected] World
Population Dynamics and World-Systems Analysis Daniela Danna Universita degli Studi di Milano [email protected] Abstract World-systems analysis has given scant attention to population dynamics. Overlooked are large scale macrohistorical population trends and their microhistorical foundation on procreative decisions-decisions which are taken by a historically changing subject of procreation: local elders or other authorities, head(s) of the household, couples, and women. The discipline of demography is also not as helpful as it could be, given its basis in modernization theory, which fails to recognize intentionality in reproduction in pre-capitalist societies. It assumes a model of "demographic transition" from a state of "natural fertility" to a state of conscious family planning, while also treating mortality as independent of fertility Marxism recognized the importance of population as a source of labor for profit and capital accumulation. With its tools Sydney Coontz developed a demand for labor theory explaining in particular the decrease in the birth rate in England and the United States at the turn of the century This theory was f urther developed by anthropologists of the "mode of product ion and population pat terns " who, with other authors, offer useful theories and insights to advance world-historical research on population. This article explores connections between population dy namics and world-systems analysis . I explore six key questions at different levels of analysis , including : 1) A re there world-systems ' -
Dynamical Effects of Plant Quality and Parasitism on Population Cycles of Larch Budmoth
UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works Title Dynamical effects of plant quality and parasitism on population cycles of larch budmoth Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3q39z2cn Journal Ecology, 84(5) Authors Turchin, Peter Wood, Simon N Ellner, Stephen Paul et al. Publication Date 2003 DOI 10.1890/0012-9658(2003)084[1207:DEOPQA]2.0.CO;2 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Ecology, 84(5), 2003, pp. 1207±1214 q 2003 by the Ecological Society of America DYNAMICAL EFFECTS OF PLANT QUALITY AND PARASITISM ON POPULATION CYCLES OF LARCH BUDMOTH PETER TURCHIN,1 SIMON N. WOOD,2 STEPHEN P. E LLNER,3 BRUCE E. KENDALL,4 WILLIAM W. M URDOCH,5 ANDREAS FISCHLIN,6 JEÃ ROME CASAS,7 EDWARD MCCAULEY,8 AND CHERYL J. BRIGGS9 1Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269 USA 2Mathematical Institute, North Haugh, St. Andrews Fife, KY16 9SS, UK 3Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Corson Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 USA 4School for Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106 USA 5Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106 USA 6Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich ETHZ, CH-8952 Schlieren/Zurich, Switzerland 7University of Tours, IRBI-CNRS UPRESA 6035, F-37200 Tours, France 8Ecology Division, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada T2N 1N4 9Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720 USA Abstract. Population cycles have been remarkably resistant to explanation, in part because crucial experiments are rarely possible on appropriate spatial and temporal scales. -
Curriculum Vitae
Turchin CV, Page 1 June 2017 Curriculum Vitae Peter Turchin Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-3043 tel: 860-486-3603; fax: 860-486-6364 e-mail: [email protected] Web site: http://PeterTurchin.com Education: 1985 Ph.D. Duke University Zoology (minor: mathematics) 1980 B.A. New York University Biology (cum laude) 1975–7 Moscow State University Biology Professional Positions: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut 2002– Professor 1997–02 Associate Professor 1994–97 Assistant Professor School of Anthropology, University of Oxford 2013– Research Associate The Evolution Institute 2010– Founding Member of the Board of Directors; Vice-President (2010–2017) Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse 2015 Visiting Fellow Religion, Cognition, and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark 2013–4 Distingushed Fellow and Visiting Professor Santa Fe Institute 2007–8 Visiting Professor Southern Forest Experiment Station, Forest Service Research 1990–94 Supervisory Ecologist 1988–90 Ecologist Department of Zoology, University of Washington 1988 Lecturer 1985–88 Postdoctoral Research Associate Department of Zoology, Duke University 1983–85 Teaching Assistant Professional Activities: Symposia, workshops, and working groups organized 2017 Explaining Institutional Change in History. June 2017, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France (with Mohamed Saleh) 2016 Examining Social Complexity, Religion and Prosociality with Seshat: Global History Databank. August 2016; Complexity Institute, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore (with Daniel Mullins) 2016 Seshat Workshop on North China: Social Complexity, Warfare, and Ritual. January 2016; Tampa, Florida (with Daniel Hoyer) 2015 Strüngmann Forum on Evolutionary Economics. February 2015, Frankfurt, Germany (with David S. Wilson, Ulrich Witt, Alan Kirman, and Eric Beinhocker) 2013 Evolution of Institutions. -
Ultrasociety How Cultural Evolution Helps Us Understand the Rise of Complex Societies in Human History
Ultrasociety How Cultural Evolution Helps Us Understand the Rise of Complex Societies in Human History Peter Turchin University of Connecticut and Evolution Institute Clio Seshat International Space Station • Built by Roscosmos, NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA • Cost: $150 bln • 3 mln people-years • >1 bln citizens in participating countries Humans are capable of cooperating in huge groups of strangers Empire State Building, 1930 Amiens Cathedral 1220 Great Pyramid of Giza, 2540 BC Göbekli Tepe, 9th millennium BC A Social Scale Social scale Polity Time (people) Types (kya) 10s Foraging bands 200 100s Farming villages 10 1,000s Simple chiefdoms 7.5 10,000s Complex chiefdoms 7 100,000s Archaic states 5 1,000,000s Macrostates 4.5 10,000,000s Mega-empires 2.5 100,000,000s Large nation-states 0.2 Social scale of a leaf cutter ant colony: 1,000,000s A Social Scale Social scale Polity Time (people) Types (kya) 10s Foraging bands 200 100s Farming villages 10 1,000s Simple chiefdoms 7.5 10,000s Complex chiefdoms 7 100,000s Archaic states 5 1,000,000s Macrostates 4.5 10,000,000s Mega-empires 2.5 100,000,000s Large nation-states 0.2 Humans are champion cooperators – an “ultrasocial species” The Puzzle of Ultrasociality • Ultrasociality: extensive cooperation among very large numbers of genetically unrelated individuals • Ultrasociality was a key glue holding together historical mega-empires • But cooperation is fragile and is easily destroyed by “free-riding” • How did it evolve? • This is one of the unresolved Grand Questions of social science Achaemenid -
UC Riverside Cliodynamics
UC Riverside Cliodynamics Title Involvement of a Capitalist Crisis in the 1900-30 Inequality Trend Reversal Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42p5m46m Journal Cliodynamics, 8(1) Author Alexander, Michael Allen Publication Date 2017 DOI 10.21237/C7clio8133347 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42p5m46m#supplemental License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution Involvement of a Capitalist Crisis in the 1900–30 Inequality Trend Reversal Michael Allen Alexander Abstract This paper proposes a supplemental secular cycle formulation for a modern capitalist society that employs financial, economic, and political metrics in place of population and sociopolitical violence. It makes use of Thomas Piketty’s (2014) hypothesis that excess investment return relative to economic growth causes inequality. In a capitalist society, the investing class can be considered as a proxy for elites. Inequality as measured by the ratio of financial to wage gains over time agrees with other economic measures. Rising inequality led to a reduction in capital productivity (output per person per unit of capital). This created instability in financial markets that generated the 1929 stock market crash. Application of a simplified version of the demographic structural theory to inequality trends shows political stress peaking in 1929. The depression that began with the stock market crash in that year resulted in a devastating political defeat for the ruling party in 1932 which brought in the political coalition that engineered the inequality trend reversal. This series of events can be considered as a modern version of the state collapse and reconstitution that was typically a key feature of premodern secular cycles. -
THE SPARK of CIVILISATION 3 × 53 Min
and archaeologist Abigail Levine. Here, Turchin believes that war sparked civilisa- they investigate the ruins of villages that tion, and that he can prove this theory on show signs of becoming states. They a global scale. evolved in different places around the HISTORY globe at different times as the precursers Judith Burkhart, an anthropologist at the to civilisation. These scientists say that war University of Zurich, believes humans have triggered the transformation from state a unique form of cooperation, unlike any to civilisation. Without war, there would other living creature, and it was this trait be no complex societies. that lead us on the path to civilisation. Episode 2 closes with a conundrum. War, She sets out to prove it through experi- says Levine, is actually a form of human ments where the behavior of children is cooperation. compared to our closest primate relatives. EP03: A CHANGE OF MIND Why do we say that some cultures are In this episode, the war-and-coopera- civilised and others are not? tion-theory is put to the test using a futuristic scientific method. And scientists Which leads us to Filipe Fernandez- think they’ve found the spark of civilisa- Armesto’s all encompassing new theory of tion inside our minds! civilisation. The hunter-gatherers that some of us were, and some of us still are, Historian Filipe Fernandez-Armesto leaves the societies with different belief systems, us with a theory that could blow the in all environments across the globe all meaning of civilisation out of the water. have one thing in common. -
The Problem of Moral Statements in Historical Writing
Montclair State University Montclair State University Digital Commons Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects 5-2012 The rP oblem of Moral Statements in Historical Writing Alexandra Katherine Perry Montclair State University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd Part of the Education Commons, and the History Commons Recommended Citation Perry, Alexandra Katherine, "The rP oblem of Moral Statements in Historical Writing" (2012). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 20. https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/20 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Montclair State University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects by an authorized administrator of Montclair State University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PROBLEM OF MORAL STATEMENTS IN HISTORICAL WRITING A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Montclair State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education by ALEXANDRA KATHERINE PERRY Montclair State University Upper Montclair, NJ 2012 Dissertation Chair: Dr. Jaime Grinberg Copyright © 2012 by Alexandra Katherine Perry. All rights reserved. ABSTRACT THE PROBLEM OF MORAL STATEMENTS IN HISTORICAL WRITING by Alexandra Katherine Perry Bernard Williams (1985) begins his skeptical look at the history of ethical theory with a reminder of where it began, with Socrates’ question, "how should one live?" (pg. 1). This question is relevant to historians, who ask a similar question, “how did people live?” in their own work, To wonder “how one should live” or to make statements about the ways in which people have lived is to rely on the work of historians. -
A New Era in the Study of Global History Is Born but It Needs to Be Nurtured
[JCH 5.1-2 (2018–19)] JCH (print) ISSN 2051-9672 https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.39422 JCH (online) ISSN 2051-9680 A New Era in the Study of Global History is Born but It Needs to be Nurtured Harvey Whitehouse1 University of Oxford, UK Email: [email protected] (corresponding author) Peter Turchin2 University of Connecticut Email: [email protected] (corresponding author) Pieter François3, Patrick E. Savage4, Thomas E. Currie5, Kevin C. Feeney6, Enrico Cioni7, Rosalind Purcell8, Robert M. Ross9, Jennifer Larson10, John Baines11, Barend ter Haar12, R. Alan Covey13 Abstract: Thisa rticle is a response to Slingerland e t al. who criticize the quality of the data from Seshat: Global History Databank utilized in our Nature paper entitled “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History”. Their cri- tique centres around the roles played by research assistants and experts in procuring and curating data, periodization structure, and so-called “data pasting” and “data fill- ing”. We show that these criticisms are based on misunderstandings or misrepresenta- tions of the methods used by Seshat researchers. Overall, Slingerland et al.’s critique (which is crosslinked online here) does not call into question any of our main findings, but it does highlight various shortcomings of Slingerland et al.’s database project. Our collective efforts to code and quantify features of global history hold out the promise of a new era in the study of global history but only if critique can be conducted con- structively in good faith and both the benefitsa nd the pitfalls of open science fully recognized. -
Long-Term Population Cycles in Human Societies
THE YEAR IN ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION BIOLOGY, 2009 Long-Term Population Cycles in Human Societies Peter Turchin Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA Human population dynamics are usually conceptualized as either boundless growth or growth to an equilibrium. The implicit assumption underlying these paradigms is that any feedback processes regulating population density, if they exist, operate on a fast-time-scale, and therefore we do not expect to observe population oscillations in human population numbers. This review asks, are population processes in historical and prehistorical human populations characterized by second-order feedback loops, that is, regulation involving lags? If yes, then the implications for forecasting future population change are obvious—what may appear as inexplicable, exogenously driven reverses in population trends may actually be a result of feedbacks operating with substantial time lags. This survey of a variety of historical and archeological data indicates that slow oscillations in population numbers, with periods of roughly two to three centuries, are observed in a number of world regions and historical periods. Next, a potential explanation for this pattern, the demographic-structural theory, is discussed. Finally, the implications of these results for global population forecasts is discussed. Key words: human; population; cycles; history; dynamics; global Introduction would be as pronounced in Western Europe, except for a masking effect of immigration), -
Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability Peter Turchin University of Connecticut
Cliodynamics: the Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability Peter Turchin University of Connecticut Structural-demographic theory is a conceptual tool for understanding and explaining long-term social pressures that can lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of socio- political instability. This article develops a general modeling framework for quantifying such structural pressures toward instability. Following the basic premises of the structural- demographic theory, the approach adopted here decomposes pressures toward instability into three components, dealing with the general population, elites, and the state, respectively. Several feedback loops affecting the dynamics of these components are modeled explicitly, including the effect of labor oversupply on real wages and on elite overproduction. I apply the modeling framework to two empirical case studies: investigating structural- demographic dynamics during the nineteenth century (with a focus on the period preceding the American Civil War) and during the twentieth century (with a focus on the contemporary period). Introduction In Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World Jack Goldstone wrote that the causes of revolutions and major rebellions are in many ways similar to processes that cause earthquakes (Goldstone 1991: 35). In both revolutions and earthquakes it is useful to distinguish the structural conditions (pressures, which build up slowly) from triggers (sudden releasing events, which immediately precede a social or geological eruption). Specific triggers of political upheavals, such as the self-immolation of a fruit vendor, which triggered the Arabic Spring in Tunisia, are very hard, perhaps impossible, to predict. On the other hand, structural pressures build up slowly and predictably, and are amenable to analysis and forecasting. -
The Integration of Economic History Into Economics
Cliometrica https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-018-0170-8 ORIGINAL PAPER The integration of economic history into economics Robert A. Margo1 Received: 28 June 2017 / Accepted: 16 January 2018 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract In the USA today the academic field of economic history is much closer to economics than it is to history in terms of professional behavior, a stylized fact that I call the ‘‘integration of economic history into economics.’’ I document this using two types of evidence—use of econometric language in articles appearing in academic journals of economic history and economics; and publication histories of successive cohorts of Ph.D.s in the first decade since receiving the doctorate. Over time, economic history became more like economics in its use of econometrics and in the likelihood of scholars publishing in economics, as opposed to, say, economic history journals. But the pace of change was slower in economic history than in labor economics, another subfield of economics that underwent profound intellec- tual change in the 1950s and 1960s, and there was also a structural break evident for post-2000 Ph.D. cohorts. To account for these features of the data, I sketch a simple, overlapping generations model of the academic labor market in which junior scholars have to convince senior scholars of the merits of their work in order to gain tenure. I argue that the early cliometricians—most notably, Robert Fogel and Douglass North—conceived of a scholarly identity for economic history that kept the field distinct from economics proper in various ways, until after 2000 when their influence had waned. -
Launching the Journal Peter Turchin University of Connecticut
Cliodynamics: the Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History Editor’s Column: Launching the Journal Peter Turchin University of Connecticut Welcome to the inaugural issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History. ‘Cliodynamics’ is a transdisciplinary area of research integrating historical macrosociology, economic history and cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History will publish original articles advancing the state of theoretical knowledge in this discipline. This includes the search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies and construction of mathematical models embodying such principles. There is also empirical content that deals with discovering general empirical patterns, determining empirical adequacy of key assumptions made by models, and testing theoretical predictions with data from actual historical societies. A mature, or ‘developed theory,’ thus, integrates models with data. The articles published in the first issue of Cliodynamics illustrate different approaches to developing such an empirically grounded theory. Randall Collins builds a model of battle dynamics using verbal arguments and flow charts. Collins is well known for precise, crisp verbal formulations that can be readily translated into mathematical models (and we hope to publish such a translation in a future issue of the journal). Sergey Gavrilets and co-authors, on the other hand, approach the question of how complex societies evolved with a spatially explicit agent-based model. Finally, the main focus of William Thompson’s article is empirical, but it is motivated by a theoretical question: how can we contrast, and ultimately integrate, perspectives on global history associated with the secular cycle and leadership long cycle schools.