@BretDevereaux In his response to @Noahpinion Bret takes a swipe in passing at my work. It is not clear to what he refers ("effort to find support for this hypothesis in the ancient world"), as my my main effort for empirically testing this hypotheses has centered on the US from 1789 to ... @BretDevereaux @Noahpinion ... the present. With a huge emphasis on the contemporary America (from the 1970s on). Perhaps America in the late 20 century is an ancient country? The main source is Ages of Discord
peterturchin.com/ages-of-discor…

As I said, I really enjoyed this piece. Noah shows data for a bunch of new "proxies", variables that can help us with quantifying elite overproduction. Some reactions follow.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1562966527820804096

.@Noahpinion First, I disagree with the (apparent) criticism that my definition of elite overproduction focuses only on the supply -- it is explicitly the issue of balance of supply/demand. In #AgesOfDiscord I always consider both sides of the equation.

There is a remarkably biased and deceptive piece in Foreign Policy with a critique of #Cliodynamics, among other things.

Thread

foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/20/his… 2. The author writes, “Peter Turchin and his collaborators have championed a new approach in which history as a discipline will be replaced by cliodynamics”. This is an outrageous falsehood. The relationship between cliodynamics and history is a mutualistic symbiosis.

1. Thanks for this calculation! The starting point is very interesting, but I am not sure the answer is right (there seem to be a few extra orders of magnitude...)

2. So let's try to simplify it.

https://twitter.com/WFlyte/status/1310770582158479361

3. 100 k people burn 200 k ha, so we have 2 ha burned per person.

4. Taking median standing crop biomass in grasslands as 300 g per sq.m (it varies, dry steppe is less, moist savanna is more, but let's for the order of magnitude).

Which Preindustrial Society was the Most Energy-Rich?

1. Thanks to all who proposed their answers here, as well as commenters on my blog.

2. Remember that I formulated the questions so that the answer must be expressed as W (Watts) per capita. W=J/s

peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/q… 3. I now have three contenders, one that was a surprise for me, two that I had in mind when asked the question.

4. Let's start with the surprising one: hinter-gatherers burning grass-lands or brush-lands to create habitat suitable for their life-styles.

The conservative case for defunding the Pentagon
#antiwar
politi.co/32sIigq The liberal case for defunding the Pentagon
#antiwar
politi.co/3hb4tMp

My 2020 African adventure was cancelled thanks to coronavirus... but I still have pictures from previous trips.

This one is a female kudu in South Luangwa, Zambia Waiting for lions to finish their meal

@WalterScheidel @BjoernGehrmann We've just experienced a wave of deadly collective violence. That's different from peaceful demonstrations. Of course, dozens killed and hundreds of thousands killed are very different orders of magnitude. But the nature of internal warfare is that it easily escalates. @WalterScheidel @BjoernGehrmann Historically and statistically, smaller-scale outbreaks of political violence serve as a reliable leading indicators of worse to come. For example, incidence of deadly riots started to increase in Antebellum America in the 1830s and exploded during the 1850s.

As we are living through 2020, it's worth remembering that such violence spikes recur roughly every 50 years. The spike of c.1920 was much worse than that of the late 1960s.

1921 was a particularly dark year.

reuters.com/news/picture/t… via @Reuters The Tulsa Riot of 1921 was preceded by the Red Summer of 1919 -- race riots in c.20 cities that claimed up to 1000 lives

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Summer

Italy Turns the Corner peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/i… Spain is at the turning point, but how successful is the intervention is still in balance.

As usual, points are data, curves are predictions of the SIRD model with time-varying parameters.

Explanation of the method: peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/h…

An excellent explanation from Bob Frank on why individual steps to achieve better societal outcomes may look ineffectual, but can succeed hugely through indirect effects.

How peer pressure can help save the planet washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0… Bob Frank is one of those rare economists who have broken out from the dogma of market fundamentalism way before the rest of the discipline.

I have been using his insights in courses that I teach for years, here's an example.

A very interesting article, via @WalterScheidel
I've been following the Patriotic Millionaires and I think it is one of the most hopeful signs in an otherwise very gloomy situation. 1/n
newyorker.com/magazine/2020/… @WalterScheidel Some great insights in the article include the generational dynamics about which I wrote in #AgesOfDiscord
What this paragraph doesn't stress enough is that the previous generation lived through the turbulent times; the succeeding didn't.

Lottie, this is a wonderful statement of how scientific discussions *should* be conducted, but Twitter is very far from such an ideal. As an example, some time ago I wrote a critique of an article by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/a…

https://twitter.com/LottyBrand/status/1172294332872843264

Their Twitter responses were far from scholarly, to say the least. Wengrow then banned me on Twitter. I am told that he periodically says nasty things about me behind my back. I, of course, can’t respond. Quite pathetic. Not that I am particularly interested in responding.

Canaries in a Coal Mine peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/c… peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/c…

Second response to our critics (and more on the way). While the critique by Beheim et al looks serious on the surface, Pat Savage took a closer look and found that it requires making rather heroic assumptions to reverse our main result.
natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/users/233752-p… 2. A particularly bizarre re-analysis is the one that shifts back in time the appearance of moralizing gods (MG) by 100 or 300 years. As Pat notes, in half the cases where we can date the appearance of MGs fairly precisely, this approach simply doesn’t make sense.

.@davidwengrow @Tash_Reynolds @jens2go @Evolving_Moloch @C_Kavanagh
1. This has been a good discussion and I learned a lot. And I agree that whether these mammoth bone structures are “monumental” or not depends on the definition one uses. 2. But to return to my critique of Graeber and Wengrow. They are debunking the idea that humans before agriculture lived in “tiny egalitarian bands”. I actually agree that adoption of agriculture is not a clean break point, and that the scale of human groups increases before...

Let's try again (Twitter screwed up the chain I was trying to post)
Thanks, @SageThinker99 , for your experiences in the Occupy Movement (OM). I was sympathetic to the goals of OM, and disappointed when it failed to achieve them. Of course, reversing the trend to increasing popular immiseration in the US, which has been developing for decades, is not easy, and it would take time.

Just watched the first part of the @PBS series on First Civilizations. Very well done!

https://twitter.com/PBS/status/988855094446829569

They filmed in me in Mexico City last June. It takes a long time to produce these series! But well worth the wait.