Cliodynamica by Peter Turchin

War and Peace and War (WPW) was my first “trade” (popular and non-technical) book.

In Part I, I argued that we can fruitfully represent political dynamics of states as a sequence of integrative/disintegrative cycles.

The idea that states and empires are “organism-like” in that they are born, grow, age, become senile and then die, has very long historical roots, going back at least to the Antiquity (for example, in the work of Polybius).

Last month (September 2026) I was struck by two similar news.

I read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens soon after its publication.

Sophomore Lynnfield High School, MA, USA The rebellion of Túpac Amaru II, occurring in 1780–1783 in the southern Cusco region and the Real Audiencia of Charcas in the Viceroyalty of Peru, present-day Peru and Bolivia and stretching into Ecuador and Argent…

Long-time readers of this blog (and its precursor) know that I write about warfare a lot.

We live in interesting times.

Part I analyzed wage dynamics in Britain during the pre-industrial period.

The main focus of my research group, currently, is gathering data on various structural-demographic (SD) variables for dozens of past societies.

My good friend Michael Rose recently wrote an interesting piece on his Substack, Amplified Mental Arms Races Foster Free Will.

I recently wrote a commentary on an interesting book, Modeling Religion: Simulating the Transformation of Worldviews, Lifeways, and Civilizations, by Wesley J.

In the last two issues of Global Macro Update, Ed d’Agostino has been exploring the question of why the cost of higher education has outpaced the rate of inflation — by a lot (see Why Is College So Expensive?

Somebody asked me recently, why do I devote so much space on this Substack to the War in Ukraine?

After publishing preliminary results of my analysis of the Mediazona data, I sent an email to the Mediazona team, asking to comment on it.

In the previous post in this series, Is Ukraine-Russia War Entering the End Game?

This is the third post in this series.

Today the United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary.

The weather forecast for my area predicts 38 degrees C (over 100 Fahrenheit) on Thursday.

The structural-demographic (SD) theory pays a lot of attention to demographic dynamics (as is implied by the theory’s name).

There were a lot of good questions for me at the business and investment conference in Boston last week.

Last week I participated in a meeting of businessmen and investors in Boston.

Last year, I reviewed the data on well-being proxies as part of my series on the American structural-demographic variables.

In the previous post, I argued that China is likely to weather the 2026 Oil Shock in a reasonably effective manner.

Arthur Berman, commenting on my generally positive review of China’s well-being variables, wrote I believe China’s more positive trajectory is founded on cheap, imported oil and natural gas supply.

In my previous blog, Well-being and Immiseration in Contemporary China, I reviewed a spectrum of quantitative proxies for well-being (and it’s opposite, immiseration), including economic, biological, and psychological variables.

Now that we have a better understanding of how social power operates and is reproduced in PRC (Stairway to Heaven I and Stairway to Heaven II), it’s time to dive into various quantitative proxies for the main Structural-Demographic mechanisms.