moralizing-gods-reanalysis

This Economist article is from October of 2020. Peter Turchin is not a historian. He is instead in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Universtiy of Connecticut. He advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse. The Nature article from about decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ Some descriptive work such as: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full Sone of the work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1] and some recent (2017) related work [2]. Finally, in his own words, a comparison of Psychohistory and Cliodynamics (2012) [3] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4

The short of it: Turchin advocates for a field of 'cliodynamics' which tries to apply math to meaningfully describe and predict social trends, especially large ones such as collapse. His own description from a decade ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a A large project he directs and uses to study this: http://seshatdatabank.info/seshat-about-us/ And has produced some interesting descriptive work such as: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/E144.full Some of his group's work [0] has been criticized on methodological grounds [1]. While some of his work may produce overdetermined models (trying to model history, considering all of the possible variables, can be tricky), the sorts of things he is interested in have been developed a fair bit, of late [2]. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4 [1] https://github.com/babe