Tag Archives: worthreading

People worth reading: Peter Turchin and modeling the cycles of history

This week brings another in my series on people whose blogs and other writings are worth reading. (The first post was on the libertarian economist Arnold Kling.) I try to highlight people who aren’t household names but have something worth saying, enough so that I keep track of what they’re up to ib regular. This week’s person, the Russian ecologist turned American historian Peter Turchin, was name-checked in a Paul Krugman column recently, and he’s attracting more attention. However there’s still time to get in on the ground floor (as it were) by following his blogging at the Social Evolution Forum (a group blog, but Turchin does most of the posts).

Turchin’s big topic is cliodynamics, “the new transdisciplinary area of research at the intersection of historical macrosociology, economic history/cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases”. The idea that human history moves in cycles is a very old one; what is new about the approach of Turchin and other like-minded researchers is their attempt to mathematically model these cycles, using techniques similar to those used for modeling the dynamics of biological ecosystems. Given the lack of good data about historical trends this can be a challenge, but the results are interesting enough for me to look forward to seeing where the discipline goes from here.
turchin-double-helix-infograph
One area where Turchin has some interesting things to say is American history, specifically his idea that demographics and other factors have driven what he calls the “double helix of inequality and well-being”. The general idea, outlined in an Aeon Magazine article and accompanying blog post, is that “general well-being (that is, of the overwhelming majority of population) tends to move in the opposite direction from inequality: when inequality grows, well-being declines, and vice versa”. Here Turchin measures well-being using an index of four variables (one being age at marriage, on the theory that pessimistic people tend to marry later) and inequality using the ratio of the wealth of the richest Americans to the median wealth (i.e., 50% of Americans have more wealth, 50% less).

Turchin notes that these indices move opposite to each other (i.e., times of low inequality are times of higher well-bring, and vice versa), not necessarily because one directly causes the other but (in Turchin’s view) because both reflect an underlying dynamical system driven by several factors: the supply of labor, returns to business owners and managers, political competition among the economic elites (due to what Turchin calls “elite overproduction”), changes in social norms, and so on.1 Turchin is working on a book, A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, to explain and justify his theory in more detail; although the book hasn’t been published yet, he’s made a draft available online if you want to check it out.2

No scientific theory worthy of the name is complete without making some predictions (or, as Turchin calls it in this case, a projection). Turchin went out on a limb and made a major one three years ago in a letter [PDF] published in the magazine Nature:

In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. … Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming
political instability. … In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020.

For a quick overview of why Turchin thinks 2020 is the likely timeframe, see the 2013 Aeon article referenced above, the slides [PPT] for a presentation he gave in 2011, or (if you have a bit more time) his 2012 paper “Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780–2010” [PDF].

Even if Turchin’s theory is valid, it’s not going to be so precise as to be able to make predictions down to the exact year. The theory is also silent on exactly how such an “instability spike” might manifest itself. But it is intriguing to think about what might be happening in the U.S. around the time President Clinton or President Christie runs for re-election, if present trends continue.

1. In one of Turchin’s most interesting series of blog posts, he considered the legal minimum wage not as something that has or had any major economic impact, but rather as an indicator of changing social norms—roughly speaking, a measure of society’s general opinion as to what the least skilled workers deserve for their labor.

2. Turchin is a strong supporter of scientists publishing in open access journals, and makes a lot of his work available online. This includes his earlier book Secular Cycles as well as complete issues of the journal he founded, Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History.

People worth reading: Arnold Kling and the three languages of politics

I subscribe to almost two hundred blogs, covering a wide range of topics. I thought it would be fun to highlight some of the more interesting ones, in case anyone else finds any of them interesting and also to provide some insight into the particular things I tend to blog about. First up is Arnold Kling and his “Askblog”, the tagline of which is “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”.1

It was the attitude expressed in Kling’s tagline that actually led to my subscribing to his blog. Kling is an economist of generally libertarian views, part of a group that includes Bryan Caplan, Art Carden, Tyler Cowen, and others (many formally or informally associated with George Mason University). Economists of any political persuasion can be dogmatic and dismissive of those holding opposing views, as can libertarians whether they’re economists or not. It’s a fairly common conceit among some that they arrived at their own views by a process of disinterested reasoning, and that by implication those who disagree with them are stupid or malicious or both.

So when Kling stopped blogging at Econlog and moved to his personal blog it was a pleasant surprise to read his philosophy of blogging:

I want to model a very particular style of discourse, as indicated by the tag line “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree.” … I will try to keep the posts here free of put-downs, snark, cheap shots, straw-man arguments, and taking the least charitable interpretation of what others say. So, if what you most enjoyed about my past blogging efforts were the put-downs, be prepared for disappointment with this incarnation.

That was enough to put Kling on my list of blogs to read regularly. In reading him since then I’ve found he’s generally kept to that stance, with only a few occasions where he’s become exasperated with what he thinks are others’ shoddy and self-serving arguments.

One of the most interesting features of Kling’s blog posts is his analysis of what he calls the “three-axis model” of politics:

My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.

This is in some respects Kling’s own adaptation of the ideas of Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, who’ve argued that people are predisposed to view moral issues according one or more of several “moral foundations”. (I blogged about this previously in the context of possible genetic influences on political views. Kling has also written an excellent essay discussing Haidt’s ideas.) Thus, for example, the “civilization/barbarism” axis roughly corresponds to a combination of the “loyalty/disloyalty”, “authority/subversion”, “sanctity/degradation”, and (to some extent) “fairness/cheating” moral foundations hypothesized by Haidt et.al.

Kling has expanded on the three-axis model in a book, The Three Languages of Politics. It’s well worth reading, and you can’t beat the price. Kling has also further discussed and applied the three-axis model in a number of blog posts.

Kling frequently takes his own advice (in the essay on Haidt linked to above) to “call your own fouls”, that is, to “expose intellectual error on our own side” and “search as hard for holes in our allies’ arguments as if they were opponents’ arguments”. This often leads him to espouse what I might call (in imitation of Andrew Sullivan) a “libertarianism of doubt”. For example, in an essay on libertarianism and group norms he points out that libertarians’ emphasis on individualism leads them to denigrate the tendency people have to conform to group norms, a tendency that arguably makes modern liberal (in the classical sense) and democratic societies possible. I think on balance this willingness to “think it possible that you may be mistaken” makes Kling a more effective advocate for libertarianism than the many others who are more certain and more strident.

1. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I had a little bit of professional interaction with Arnold Kling many years ago when I worked at Netscape and he was starting up an Internet venture. He had the unfortunate experience of trying to use Netscape’s web server product at the time when Netscape was in its manic hyper-growth phase and its products’ quality often reflected that. (Dr. Kling, if you happen to read this, my apologies for the problems you had, and for any part I might have played in your going down that road. But do note that I was not and never have been a “salesman”; I’m an SE.)