Youth As Abundance
Many technologies and business practice details have changed greatly over the last few centuries. And looking at the specifics of who did what when, much of this change looks like selection and...
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Pre-Civilization Egypt
When we look into the distant past, we often compare ourselves to ancient Greeks and Romans. But their peaks were actually closer in time to us than to the peak of the prior society that they compared...
View ArticleThe Puzzle of Human Sacrifice
Harvey Whitehouse in New Scientist: Today’s small-scale societies tend to favour infrequent but traumatic rituals that promote intense social cohesion – the kind that is necessary if people are to risk...
View ArticleThe Big Change In Blame
Law is our main system of official blame; it is how we officially blame people for things. So it is a pretty big deal that, over the last few centuries, changes to law have induced big changes in who...
View ArticleScience 2.0
Skepticism … is generally a questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more items of putative knowledge or belief or dogma. It is often directed at domains, such as the supernatural, morality (moral...
View ArticleLost Advanced Civilizations
Did life on Earth start on Earth, or did it start on Mars and move to Earth? If you frame such panspermia as an “extraordinary claim” for which you demand “extraordinary evidence”, you will of course...
View ArticleYay Parliaments
Voters may like the idea of direct democracy, but as Garett Jones mentions in 10% Less Democracy, most scholars agree that representative democracy produces better outcomes. Similarly, while voters may...
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Try-Try or Try-Once Great Filter?
Here’s a simple and pretty standard theory of the origin and history of life and intelligence. Life can exist in a supporting oasis (e.g., Earth’s surface) that has a volume V and metabolism M per unit...
View ArticleThe Long Term Future of History
Assuming that dark energy continues to make the universe expand at an accelerating rate, in about 150 billion years all galaxies outside the Local Supercluster will pass behind the cosmological...
View ArticleWhy Did Religion Change?
In his new book How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures, Robin Dunbar reviews many details of the history and correlates of religion. He says that religion’s main function is to aid group cohesion,...
View ArticleBest Decade Ever
Not only was the last decade the best of my life, it was best for the world: A lot has changed in the past six years. The economies of the developing world have expanded 50 percent in real terms,...
View ArticleSelf-Indulgence Stinks
As industry has made humans rich, we have become more self-indulgent. But while we might each prefer to be self-indulgent, we are less thrilled by the self-indulgence of those around us. For example,...
View ArticleWhy Magic + Nostalgia?
I don’t usually care for fantasy, though I like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Rewatching the first Harry Potter movie, I was reminded of the puzzling correlation in fiction between magic and...
View ArticleIP+ Like Barbed Wire?
“Without barbed wire the Plains homestead could never have been protected from the grazing herds and therefore could not have been possible as an agricultural unit.” (1931) … English common law made...
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Fertility Fall Myths
In the latest JEL, Tim Guinnane does a nice job debunking misconceptions about the great fertility fall associated with the industrial revolution. For example, “The decline in French fertility began in...
View ArticleHistorical Heresy
Famed Historian Angus Deaton: It is sometimes supposed … that rich people have always lived healthier and longer lives than poor people. That this supposition is generally false is vividly shown by...
View ArticleNostalgia Example
Both magic and nostalgia are common, arise more when we feel threatened, and comfort us in such situations. … Both … rely especially heavily on wishful thinking – magic presumes we are especially able...
View ArticleHatin’ On Farmers
Zahavi’s seminal book on animal signaling tells how certain birds look high status by forcing food down the throat of other birds, who thereby seem low status. While this “altruism” does help low...
View ArticleHail John Watkins
In the 1900 Ladies Home Journal, railroad engineer John Watkins offered unusually insightful predictions for a hundred years hence. His example seems a great place to learn lessons on sources of...
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The History of Inequality
I recently posted on how cities and firms are like distributed as a Zipf power law, with a power of one, where above some threshold each scale holds roughly the same number of people, until the size...
View ArticleKeynes’ Forager Future
Suresh Naidu pointed me to a fascinating 1930 essay (excerpts below) by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes on the long term future. Consideration of the far future put Keynes into a very far...
View ArticleTube Earth Econ
Imagine someone plans to build a gas station far out in an isolated desert. They plan to sell gas and snacks to the truck drivers who come out to deliver gas and snacks. Want to invest? No? How about...
View ArticleTesting My Growth Model
I have suggested that long run growth can be described as a sequence of exponential growth modes, from primates to foragers to farmers to industry, where mode transitions are similar in their degree of...
View ArticleSchools Are For War
The main reason we had rules to force kids to attend primary school was to make obedient soldier citizens to support their nation in time of war. This effect was even stronger for democracies: Using...
View ArticleIs World Government Inevitable?
Several sources lately incline me to think of world (or solar) government as very likely in the long run. First, I read Betrand Russell, in a 1950 essay The Future of Mankind, advocating violence to...
View ArticleFairy Tales Were Cynical
A recent New Yorker article on fairy tales fascinated me (quotes below). Apparently the fairy tales once “told at rural firesides” were for adults, full of sex and violence, and cynical – they did not...
View ArticleInequality /=> Revolt
Famous historical revolutions were not consistently caused by high or rising income inequality: [French income] inequality during the eighteenth century was large but decreased during the revolutionary...
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USA, Beware 2020
Both Nature and New Scientist recently covered the work of Peter Turchin, who suggests, based on prior trends, that the US is in for a new period of political instability peaking around 2020. He finds...
View ArticleA History Of Foom
I had occasion recently to review again the causes of the few known historical cases of sudden permanent increases in capacity growth rates in broadly capable systems: humans, farmers, and industry....
View ArticleGoldilocks Disruptions
A society’s history of climatic shocks shaped the timing of its adoption of farming. Specifically, as long as climatic disturbances did not lead to a collapse of the underlying resource base, the rate...
View ArticleImagining Futures Past
Our past can be summarized as a sequence of increasingly fast eras: animals, foragers, farmers, industry. Foragers grew by a factor of about four hundred over two million years, farmers grew by a...
View ArticleFrench Fertility Fall
Why do we have fewer kids today, even though we are rich? In ancient societies, richer folks usually had more kids than poorer folks. Important clues should be found in the first place where fertility...
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The Poor Wore Color
A year ago I posted on how ancient buildings are usually depicted as colorless, even though they were brightly colored, and suggested this is because we think about the distant past in far mode. I’ve...
View ArticleBest Combos Are Robust
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what a future world of ems would be like, and in doing so I’ve been naturally drawn to a simple common intuitive way to deal with complexity: form best estimates...
View ArticlePhilosophy Between The Lines
Seven years ago I raved about a Journal of Politics article by Arthur Melzer that persuaded me that ancient thinkers often wrote “esoterically,” e.g., praising their local religions and rulers on the...
View ArticleIndustry-Era Action Stories
This semester I teach graduate industrial organization. And while preparing, it occurred to me that if our stories adapted fast to our changing world, many and perhaps most action stories today would...
View ArticleGrowth Could Slow
Human history has seen accelerating growth, via a sequence of faster growth modes. First humans grew faster than other primates, then farmers grew faster than foragers, and recently industry has grown...
View ArticleDoes Decadence Cause Decay?
Noble gentlemen and ladies in [Japan’s] Heian period (794-1185) were often remarkably promiscuous. … “Heian society was on the whole governed by style rather than by any moral principles, and good...
View ArticleTesting Moral Progress
Mike Huemer just published his version of the familiar argument that changing moral views is evidence for moral realism. Here is the progress datum he seeks to explain: Mainstream illiberal views of...
View ArticleCities As Harems
Many animal species are organized into harems, wherein a single male dominates a group of females and their children. When males become adult, they must leave home and wander singly or in small male...
View ArticleGet A Grip; There’s A Much Bigger Picture
Many seem to think the apocalypse is upon us – I hear oh so much much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But if you compare the policies, attitudes, and life histories of the US as it will be under Trump,...
View ArticleCycles of War & Empire
I’ve just read five of Peter Turchin’s books: Historical Dynamics (2003), War & Peace & War (2006), Secular Cycles (2009), Ultra Society (2015), and Ages of Discord (2016). Four of them in the...
View ArticleCowen On Complacency
A week ago I summarized and critiqued five books wherein Peter Turchin tries to document and explain two key historical cycles: a several century cycle of empires rising and falling, and a fifty year...
View ArticleThe Great Cycle Rule
History contains a lot of data, but when it comes to the largest scale patterns, our data is very limited. Even so, I think we’d be crazy not to notice whatever patterns we can find at those largest...
View ArticleHow Big Future Change?
The world has seen a lot of very big changes over the last few centuries. Many of these changes seem so large, in fact, that it is hard to see how changes over the next few centuries could be remotely...
View ArticleThe Master and His Emissary
I had many reasons to want to read Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary. Its an ambitious big-picture book, by a smart knowledgeable polymath. I love that sort of book. I’ve been...
View ArticleIntellectual Status Isn’t That Different
In our world, we use many standard markers of status. These include personal connections with high status people and institutions, power, wealth, popularity, charisma, intelligence, eloquence, courage,...
View ArticleLong Legacies And Fights In An Uncaring Universe
What can one do today to have a big predictable influence on the long-term future? In this post I’ll use a simple decision framework, wherein there is no game or competition, one is just trying to...
View ArticleLong Legacies And Fights In A Competitive Universe
My last post discussed how to influence the distant future, using a framework focused on a random uncaring universe. This is, for example, the usual framework of most who see themselves as...
View ArticleOverconfidence From Moral Signaling
Tyler Cowen in Stubborn Attachments: The real issue is that we don’t know whether our actions today will in fact give rise to a better future, even when it appears that they will. If you ponder these...
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