Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends

Korotayev, Andrey; Zinkina, Julia; Andreev, Alexander E.

doi:10.21237/c7clio7230484

Cited by 22 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Taagepera and Kremer did not test this hypothesis empirically in a direct way. Empirical tests of this hypothesis performed by other researchers, however, have found support [ 34 , 40 ]. Note that Kremer observed that these new technologies would, in turn, likely generate population growth, suggesting a positive feedback between technological innovation and population.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…Connectedness is a harder variable to quantify. Here we build on the concept of IN used by Chase-Dunn and Hall and other world-systems theorists [ 34 , 43 ] who define the extent of any particular IN as the zone within which spatially and culturally distinct regions exchange information, so that technological innovations made in one society diffuse relatively rapidly (on the time scale of centuries) to all other societies within the system than to societies that may be close (spatially and culturally) but fall outside of the IN. As an example, the contacts between Western and Eastern Eurasia (mediated via Central Asia) in the third and especially the second millennia BCE led to the spread of multiple technological innovations between the western and eastern parts of Eurasia: wheat, cattle, horses, bronze metallurgy, wheeled chariots, among others [ 44 , 56 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution

et al. 2021

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What have been the causes and consequences of technological evolution in world history? In particular, what propels innovation and diffusion of military technologies, details of which are comparatively well preserved and which are often seen as drivers of broad socio-cultural processes? Here we analyze the evolution of key military technologies in a sample of pre-industrial societies world-wide covering almost 10,000 years of history using Seshat: Global History Databank. We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role. We discuss how our approach can be extended to explore technological change more generally, and how our results carry important ramifications for understanding major drivers of evolution of social complexity.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution

et al. 2021

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“…This impression became even stronger when the equation describing the planetary macroevolution acceleration pattern turned out to be identical with the equation that was found by Heinz von Foerster in 1960 to describe in an extremely accurate way the global population growth acceleration pattern between 1 and 1958 CE. I had some grounds to expect that the planetary macroevolutionary acceleration in the last 4 billion years could be described by a single hyperbolic equation quite accurately, because our earlier research found that both biological and social macroevolution could be described by rather similar simple hyperbolic equations (Korotayev 2005(Korotayev , 2006a(Korotayev , 2006b(Korotayev , 2007a(Korotayev , 2007b(Korotayev , 2008(Korotayev , 2009(Korotayev , 2012(Korotayev , 2013Khaktourina et al 2006;Korotayev, Malkov, Khaltourina 2006a, 2006bMarkov, Korotayev 2007Markov, Anisimov, Korotayev 2010;Korotayev, S. Malkov 2012;Korotayev, Markov 2014Grinin, Markov, Korotayev 2013Korotayev, A. Malkov 2016;Zinkina, Shulgin, Korotayev 2016;Korotayev, Zinkina 2017), but I NOTE: black markers correspond to empirical estimates of the world population by McEvedy and Jones (1978) for 1000-1950 and UN Population Division (2018) for 1950-1970. The grey curve has been generated by von Foerster's Eq.…”

Section: On the Formula Of Acceleration Of The Global Evolutionary Dementioning

confidence: 99%

The 21st Century Singularity and its Big History Implications: A re-analysis

Korotayev

2018

JBH

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The idea that in the near future we should expect "the Singularity" has become quite popular recently, primarily thanks to the activities of Google technical director in the field of machine training Raymond Kurzweil and his book The Singularity Is Near (2005). It is shown that the mathematical analysis of the series of events (described by Kurzweil in his famous book), which starts with the emergence of our Galaxy and ends with the decoding of the DNA code, is indeed ideally described by an extremely simple mathematical function (not known to Kurzweil himself) with a singularity in the region of 2029. It is also shown that, a similar time series (beginning with the onset of life on Earth and ending with the information revolution-composed by the Russian physicist Alexander Panov completely independently of Kurzweil) is also practically perfectly described by a mathematical function (very similar to the above and not used by Panov) with a singularity in the region of 2027. It is shown that this function is also extremely similar to the equation discovered in 1960 by Heinz von Foerster and published in his famous article in the journal "Science"-this function almost perfectly describes the dynamics of the world population and is characterized by a mathematical singularity in the region of 2027. All this indicates the existence of sufficiently rigorous global macroevolutionary regularities (describing the evolution of complexity on our planet for a few billion of years), which can be surprisingly accurately described by extremely simple mathematical functions. At the same time it is demonstrated that in the region of the singularity point there is no reason, after Kurzweil, to expect an unprecedented (many orders of magnitude) acceleration of the rates of technological development. There are more grounds for interpreting this point as an indication of an inflection point, after which the pace of global evolution will begin to slow down systematically in the long term.

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“…Structural-demographic theory (SDT) was proposed by Jack Goldstone [ 3 , 4 ] and further developed and tested by an international crew of investigators, including Nefedov [ 5 , 6 ], Turchin [ 7 – 10 ], Turchin and Nefedov [ 11 ], Korotayev et al [ 12 , 13 ]. The SDT proposes that the causes of revolutions and major rebellions are in many ways similar to processes that cause earthquakes [ 3 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade: A retrospective assessment

Turchin

Korotayev

2020

PLoS ONE

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This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010-2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe Turchin P. 2018. This prediction was based on a computational model that quantified in the USA such structural-demographic forces for instability as popular immiseration, intraelite competition, and state weakness prior to 2010. Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected forward in time the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability. Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structuraldemographic study for the United Kingdom. Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and several major Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions. We find that such measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010-2020 decade in all of these countries.

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Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends

Cited by 22 publications

References 19 publications

Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution

Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution

The 21st Century Singularity and its Big History Implications: A re-analysis

The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade: A retrospective assessment

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