"Cliodynamics"(a mathematical theory of historical human societies, as special cases of nonlinear dynamical systems)
Posted by gberliner@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 40 comments
I made a comment to another post about this, but I believe more people should check out some of the interviews that journalist Aaron Bastani has done recently for Novaramedia (a UK left media franchise), and particularly his show, "Downstream".
A couple great ones he has done recently are:
Historians John Rapley and Peter Heather about their book, "Why Empires Fall" (2023), and Peter Turchin, "Endtimes" (2023).
It might or might not be any consolation, but at least it's probably worth considering that there are some greatly underappreciated transhistorical dynamics that overdetermine certain outcomes in human societies.
I think it is worth learning about this, to better understand both our capacities and limitations, when it comes to how our free will and human choices affect historical outcomes.
In Turchin's case, for example, he emphasizes that even social elites tend to mechanically play out roles in a disastrous script, one made predictable by modern nonlinear dynamic systems analysis applied to large historical datasets, all the while believing sincerely that they are world historical "movers and shakers", and often fantasizing that they are on missions to "save civilization from 'barbarism' [or 'communism', or 'socialism', or 'primitive savagery', or 'DEI/wokism', or any of their latest fill-in-the-blank-bogiemen-du-jour"].
Low_Complex_9841@reddit
Does this enable us to root-cause and change anything ?
Shoddy-Childhood-511@reddit
Probably. We could already predict and theoretically change lots using history and anthropology though. In practice, you need political power to enact changes though. A mathematical model cannot help you gain that political power.
I suppose mathematical models or game theory could prove useful whenever the power in power foresees themselves not always holding power, and wishes to reinforce their idology, so then you can tell them "Yes, you want to do nice things, but they way you propose looks unstable, and this other way is more stable."
An example in healthcare: If you have seperate fully socialized and fully private health care systems like in the UK then the powerful would trash the socialized system. If otoh you have a largely private system with flat reimbursements for everyone like France then even upper classes benefit from the socialized reimbursement component, so the whole system holds up somewhat better, although certianly not immune.
demon_dopesmokr@reddit
Yep, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. Solutions have already been on the table for decades but you can't force people to adopt them or trust them to implement them properly. People will still continue to go against their own interest, those in power will still continue to gatekeep.
gberliner@reddit (OP)
Great points! And ever since Louis XVI, the famously contentious French continue to do a better job than most citizens elsewhere of reminding their leaders that, "uneasy rests the head that wears the crown"! So there's that.
demon_dopesmokr@reddit
Yes in theory, no in practice. Understanding a problem doesn't necessarily help you to solve it. Especially where social systems are concerned. Solutions have been on the table ready to go for decades, but you can't force people to adopt them. You can lead a horse to water, etc.
gberliner@reddit (OP)
Basically, one of the key takeaways is that we should favor interventions to counteract what he calls "wealth pumps" (economic and political arrangements that siphon wealth to the top of the social hierarchy). So antitrust enforcement, "codetermination", worker ownership initiatives, etc.
new2bay@reddit
No shit, huh? That’s not a very insightful insight.
gberliner@reddit (OP)
Sure, in the sense that you probably don't need a lot of sophisticated maths to tell you that. But the point of the theory is, you can potentially predict really dire consequences in advance, with uncanny accuracy, if you don't take timely countermeasures.
That has a lot of polemical and political value. Just like you don't need the National Weather Service to tell you that building in a flood plain is maybe a bad idea, but if you do so, you should maybe plan an escape path from fast rising waters. But the NWS can give you detailed and timely warnings, the urgency of which might spell the difference between life and death.
new2bay@reddit
That’s exactly why it’s a bad theory. If I can predict the same things independently, with a simpler theory, then Occam’s razor’s kicks in. You’re peddling epicycles here.
gberliner@reddit (OP)
It might help to cite a specific policy, so consider antitrust enforcement.
The legal doctrine around antitrust shifted radically after Reagan. Under the influence of Robert Bork, former Nixon staffer, federal judge, and Reagan's failed Supreme Court nominee, the rightwing Federalist Society adopted their official line that "monopolies are only bad if they hurt consumers" (ie, collude to drive up prices).
But with a quantifiable theory of social crisis, that allows you to draw a clear line between concrete measures of wealth concentration and social instability warning signs, you have a powerful new argument against the pro-oligarch faction. So it's quite possible, under not that line reasoning, that private monopolies or oligopolies are causing grave harm to society even without any detectable effects on prices, or even if the relevant prices are going DOWN.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
Tell that to at least a 3rd of the population...
YottaEngineer@reddit
People rediscovering and renaming historical materialism is fun.
gberliner@reddit (OP)
"Rediscovering and renaming" of principles that have already been established is a big part of scientific progress. Lagrange's integral formulation of Newtonian mechanics was a kind of "rediscovery and renaming" of Newton's earlier differential formulation. Likewise Fourier transforms. Etc.
Needsupgrade@reddit
What were Fourier transforms before ?
gberliner@reddit (OP)
Time domain functions
fantom_1x@reddit
Historical materialism is probably also a rediscovery and renaming of something more ancient.
whydidyoureadthis17@reddit
Ibn Khaldun is one of the first known scholars to come up with a cyclic theory of history in the 1300s.
fantom_1x@reddit
Yeah I'm fascinated by Khaldun's ideas, though the Chinese already had a cyclic theory way before. Scholars like Sima Qian in the 2nd century had laid the foundations for the Dynastic Cycle Theory of subsequent Chinese historians. Though it's more Chinese history focused you can probably abstract the idea to other histories.
Coastie456@reddit
Peter Turchin does alot in this field.
Dudeogenes@reddit
"In Turchin's case, for example, he emphasizes that even social elites tend to mechanically play out roles in a disastrous script, one made predictable by modern nonlinear dynamical systems analysis applied to large historical datasets, all the while believing sincerely that they are world historical "movers and shakers", and often fantasizing that they are on missions to "save civilization from 'barbarism' [or 'communism', or 'socialism', or 'primitive savagery', or 'DEI/wokism', or any of their latest fill-in-the-blank-bogiemen-du-jour"]."
demon_dopesmokr@reddit
I recently read Peter Turchin's book 'End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration' and I highly recommend it. Thought it was excellent and now have several of his other books that I'm planning to read.
For those interested in Peter Turchin's cliodynamics, he summarises the 4 main drivers of political instability thus..
Turchin is not a social scientist primarily, he is a complexity scientist who studied population dynamics in ecosystems and was a theoretical biologist. For those with a basic grasp of systems theory should be able to pick up his ideas easily, for those not versed in complex systems I highly recommend Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (the lead author of Limits to Growth who helped pioneer systems theory and created the World3 system to model the global system back in the 70s).
Turchin made the career switch from modelling insect populations to studying the dynamics of human population systems and founded the Seshat Global History Databank in 2011 where his team compiled historical information on hundreds of past civilisations and uses Structural Demographic Theory to identify common trends and build a model that could predict the path of societies.
Professor who predicted 2020s unrest sees US sliding deeper into crisis
This Researcher Predicted 2020 Would Be Mayhem. Here’s What He Says May Come Next
https://peterturchin.com/the-science-behind-my-forecast-for-2020/
This paper titled "Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability in the United Kingdom after 1960: A Demographic Structural Analysis" provides a good introduction to Structural Demographic Theory.
The basic formula used in the above paper to predict political violence and instability works like this: Political Stress Indicator (PSI) = Mass Mobilization Potential (MMP) x Elite Mobilization Potential (EMP) x State Fiscal Distress (SFD)
Social, economic and political indicators are used to calculate the MMP, EMP, and SFD, and these are multiplied to provide the Political Stress Indicator.
demon_dopesmokr@reddit
What does this look like in more practical terms?
Once the wealth pump starts up it accelerates until it destabilizes a society, a process which takes roughly 50 years according to Turchin's models based on hundreds of past societies going back thousands of years.
Accelerating inequality eventually decimates the population creating popular immiseration (falling living standards and conditions for the majority). This collapsing social and economic conditions as a result of political disenfranchisement and inequality leads to anger and resentment and social tensions to build up in society which results in the aforementioned "mass mobilisation potential". Mass movements can quickly emerge.
At the same time the wealth pump also leads to the aforementioned "elite overproduction" which means too many elites vying for elite positions. This heightened competition for power at the top results in many elite aspirants who are unable to secure elite positions, or failed elites that get pushed out of elite positions, who then become can go on to become counter-elites that oppose the current system. And this build up of Counter-elites can then more easily mobilise the masses in order to change the system for their own power. Some of these counter elites might be liberal professionals (lawyers, politicians etc) who want to transform the system for the benefit of the many, some may be Conservative/Far-Right people like Trump (or Farage in the UK) who merely try to harness popular discontent for their own political power.
Eventually corruption and mismanagement and rising inequality also lead to the aforementioned "State Fiscal Distress". The declining fiscal health of the state results in many socio-economic problems, such as declining public services and ultimately weakens public trust in the government and state institutions.
All of these ingredients combined essentially create conditions ripe for political instability and social/political violence.
demon_dopesmokr@reddit
The "wealth pump" that Turchin frequently talks about is the process of accelerating inequality in a society due to positive feedback loops. In systems theory this type of positive feedback loop is called "Success to the successful". In ecological systems (and social systems) it results in the Competitive Exclusion Principle, in which even tiny disparities in the competitive advantage between competing species is amplified exponentially over time until one species takes over and all competitors are pushed out of that ecological niche or die out.
A positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing so it tends to accelerate exponentially over time unless or until Negative feedback loops impose limits on it's growth. For instance in a money-driven political system, the more wealth you have, the more you can invest in funding political campaigns of the parties, hiring teams of lobbyists to influence political decisions, buying direct access to politicians, or funding think tanks, etc. all to increase your political influence. And the more political influence you have, the more you can rig the economy to give yourself more advantages and thus secure more wealth. More political influence = more wealth, and more wealth = more political influence. Those with an advantage use that advantage to gain even greater advantage and so on.
This process also has other names like the Matthew Effect. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Another important factor is population growth because the more workers you have the less valuable those workers are, and thus surplus labour results in declining wages which also helps to funnel money upwards resulting in the concentration of wealth at the top.
Once this "wealth pump" starts up, Turchin explains, it takes roughly 50 years to produce some crisis and major instability. For us in the West (US, and UK especially) this process started in the 70s when relative wage went into decline and neoliberal economic theory started to become mainstream. Inequality is now reaching it's peak. In historical societies this process is what produces revolutions, uprisings or civil wars.
individual_328@reddit
For folks just discovering this stuff, the vast majority of historians, economists, sociologists, etc., consider cliodynamics to be pseudo-science bullshit.
Str0nkG0nk@reddit
The day I give a shit what economists of all people consider "pseudo-science bullshit," I will have a fuckin tag on my toe.
Defiant_Traffic_2863@reddit
Yup, the same people who believe that given enough hallucinated money, we can overcome any and all physical limits of reality.
SenatorCoffee@reddit
That has been not my impression at all, on the contrary.
You might think that, if you hear about it for the first time it sounds on its face like timecube-style grandiose crackpottery. Or Jordan Peterson or something. But in fact Turchin is a very grounded social scientist, delivers his theses in very clear prose, does his best to back it up with data.
As such from what i read academics absolutely consider him respectable. There is a lot of disagreement but its absolutely on the level of disagreement between academic peers. Not at all considered pseudo-science.
Shoddy-Childhood-511@reddit
Ain't too many athropologists or historians being published in Nature like Peter Turchin.
There are historians who dislike folks applying mathematical models to history, but so far I've never read anything really convincing by them.
There are also folks who apply mathematical models to history, but who dislike obsessing over cycles like Peter Turchin does. I'd wager these guys have an important point, but never really dug into their critisisms. The cycle parts maybe a useful simplification though.
SenatorCoffee@reddit
I think people who never read turchin also falsely imagine he is all gung-ho pushing his ultimate theory of everything.
But in fact a lot of his essays are kind of contained and modest. Its just "hey look at this here empire breaking down, lets look at the population dynamics, data, economy, etc..."
Thats why you can engage with him and take away things without even buying into his larger thesis. As said he seems just a very solid social scientist.
gberliner@reddit (OP)
At least he was bang-on about 2020! That alone is going to earn him a lot of attention from thousands of inquisitive laypeople.
individual_328@reddit
Lots of people have been predicting significant social unrest kicking off this decade, because there's lots of reasons to think that's likely. It's something else entirely to think human history is cyclical in a way that can be mathematically modeled to predict future events.
gberliner@reddit (OP)
Yeah, Turchin himself points out that "cyclical theories" of history have been the stock-in-trade of amateur crank historians forever and ever, and as such the very notion carries such an instant whiff of disrepute in the academic history community - and probably deservedly so - that he avoids that kind of terminology like the plague, in favor of words like "oscillations"!
Defiant_Traffic_2863@reddit
Turchin's "End Times" is a good read and one of the few non "everything's great and will only get better" books at my local library.
NVByatt@reddit
you mean this? https://youtu.be/C7rLZejDznI
i recommend Bastani's interview with Karen Hao (https://youtu.be/8enXRDlWguU), or better read her book, is nicely written
Genaforvena@reddit
Thanks for the post! Super interesting! Is it ok to ask where to start (papers, links, etc).
Kudos and blessings!
Bigtimeknitter@reddit
Peter Turchin has many books detailing his research, search his name at your library!
SenatorCoffee@reddit
Peter Turchin is a pretty active blogger and very good popular writer, imho.
I dont know him that well but if you go to his blog and start with the top posts he will do a real good job of outlining his thoughts in these very self-contained, clear prosed essays.
https://peterturchin.com/popular/
Genaforvena@reddit
:heart:
darkunor2050@reddit
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/164-peter-turchin
ConundrumMachine@reddit
Well this is a fun rabbit hole, thanks!