Cliodynamics
Description
1. From the Wikipedia:
"Cliodynamics is a transdisciplinary area of research that integrates cultural evolution, economic history/cliometrics, macrosociology, the mathematical modeling of historical processes during the longue durée, and the construction and analysis of historical databases.
Cliodynamics treats history as science. Its practitioners develop theories that explain such dynamical processes as the rise and fall of empires, population booms and busts, and the spread and disappearance of religions. These theories are translated into mathematical models. Finally, model predictions are tested against data. Thus, building and analyzing massive databases of historical and archaeological information is one of the most important goals of cliodynamics.
The word cliodynamics is composed of clio- and -dynamics. In Greek mythology, Clio is the muse of history. Dynamics, most broadly, is the study of how and why phenomena change with time.[5]
The term was originally coined by Peter Turchin in 2003,[6] and can be traced to the work of such figures as Ibn Khaldun, Alexandre Deulofeu, Jack Goldstone, Sergey Kapitsa, Randall Collins, John Komlos, and Andrey Korotayev."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliodynamics)
2. Laura Spinney:
"Turchin's approach — which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history — is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social forces that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies. It is an attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another'”, says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee.
...
Turchin and his allies contend that the time is ripe to revisit general laws, thanks to tools such as nonlinear mathematics, simulations that can model the interactions of thousands or millions of individuals at once, and informatics technologies for gathering and analysing huge databases of historical information. And for some academics, at least, cliodynamics can't come a moment too soon. “Historians need to abandon the habit of thinking that it's enough to informally point to a sample of cases and to claim that observations generalize,” says Joseph Bulbulia, who studies the evolution of religion at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
...
What is new about cliodynamics isn't the search for patterns, Turchin explains. Historians have done valuable work correlating phenomena such as political instability with political, economic and demographic variables. What is different is the scale — Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact.
In their analysis of long-term social trends, advocates of cliodynamics focus on four main variables: population numbers, social structure, state strength and political instability. Each variable is measured in several ways. Social structure, for example, relies on factors such as health inequality — measured using proxies including quantitative data on life expectancies — and wealth inequality, measured by the ratio of the largest fortune to the median wage. Choosing appropriate proxies can be a challenge, because relevant data are often hard to find. No proxy is perfect, the researchers concede. But they try to minimize the problem by choosing at least two proxies for each variable.
Then, drawing on all the sources they can find — historical databases, newspaper archives, ethnographic studies — Turchin and his colleagues plot these proxies over time and look for trends, hoping to identify historical patterns and markers of future events. For example, it seems that indicators of corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of instability or violence is imminent. Such analysis also allows the researchers to track the order in which the changes occur, so that they can tease out useful correlations that might lead to cause–effect explanations." (http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#/)
Example
Laura Spinney:
"When Turchin refined the concept of cliodynamics with two colleagues — Sergey Nefedov of the Institute of History and Archaeology in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and Andrey Korotayev of the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow — the researchers found that two trends dominate the data on political instability. The first, which they call the secular cycle, extends over two to three centuries. It starts with a relatively egalitarian society, in which supply and demand for labour roughly balance out. In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. At a certain point, the society becomes top-heavy with elites, who start fighting for power. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again.
Superimposed on that secular trend, the researchers observe a shorter cycle that spans 50 years — roughly two generations. Turchin calls this the fathers-and-sons cycle: the father responds violently to a perceived social injustice; the son lives with the miserable legacy of the resulting conflict and abstains; the third generation begins again. Turchin likens this cycle to a forest fire that ignites and burns out, until a sufficient amount of underbrush accumulates and the cycle recommences.
These two interacting cycles, he says, fit patterns of instability across Europe and Asia from the fifth century BC onwards. Together, they describe the bumpy transition of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire in the first century BC. He sees the same patterns in ancient Egypt, China and Russia, and says that they explain the timing of last year's Egyptian uprising, which took the regime of then-president Hosni Mubarak by surprise. At the time, the Egyptian economy was growing and poverty levels were among the lowest in the developing world, so the regime could reasonably have expected stability. In the decade leading up to the revolution, however, the country saw a quadrupling of graduates with no prospects — a marker of elite overproduction and hence, Turchin argues, trouble."
(http://www.nature.com/news/human-cycles-history-as-science-1.11078#/)
More information
* Book: The Mathematics of History. By Alexandre Deulofeu.
"Deulofeu argued that civilizations and empires go through cycles which correspond to the natural cycles of living beings. Each civilization passes through a minimum of three 1700-year cycles. As part of civilizations, empires have an average lifespan of 550 years. He also stated that by knowing the nature of these cycles, it could be possible to modify the cycles in such a way that change could be peaceful instead of leading to war. He wanted mankind to modify the cycles and bring about a universal confederation of free people.
His mathematical laws related to the evolution of people can be summarized as below (Chapter III of Mathematics of History, 1967 edition):
- All people pass through alternating periods of demographic division and periods of unification or imperialism.
- The periods of great division last six centuries and a half. The periods of great unification last ten centuries and a half. Therefore, the evolutionary cycle comprises seventeen centuries.
- During this evolutionary process people go through clearly defined phases, finding themselves at the end of the cycle in the same position as in the beginning.
- The evolutionary cycle encompasses all types of human activity, besides considering political cycles we must also consider social, artistic, philosophical and scientific cycles.
- All people follow the same evolution more or less rapidly depending on the geographic characteristics of each country.
- Not all people display the same creative impulse. In each cycle there are periods of maximum creativity and these periods continue from one cycle to the next. In Europe, this passes in the Mediterranean from the East to West and then from the Iberian Peninsula to Gaul, then to the British Isles and on to the Germanic people and finally reaching the Northern and Slavic people.
- The imperialist nuclei, which give rise to periods of strong political unification, follow identical organic processes, which last five to six centuries.
- The transformation of sociopolitical regimes does not take place following a constant upward or downward trend, but by means of forward and backward steps, each being alternatively more intense than the others. This results in a broken line, which is an advancement in a given direction. It is what is called The Law of two steps forward and one backwards.
Deulofeu's thoughts are related to the ideas of Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee, who also theorised on the cyclical character of civilizations, but not in the same precise mathematical way as Deulofeu."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Deulofeu)
Directory of Databases
"Databases utilized by cliodynamics practitioners include:
which systematically collects state-of-the-art accounts of the political and social organization of human groups and how societies have evolved through time into an authoritative databank.[11] Seshat is affiliated also with the Evolution Institute, a non-profit think-tank that "uses evolutionary science to solve real-world problems."
- D-Place, (Database of Places, Languages, Culture and Environment),
which provides data on over 1,400 human social formations.
- The Atlas of Cultural Evolution, an archaeological database created by Peter N. Peregrine.
"The Atlas of Cultural Evolution provides basic data on the evolution of cultural complexity using the Outline of Archaeological Traditions sample. The Outline of Archaeological Traditions constitutes a sampling universe from which cases can be drawn for diachronic cross-cultural research, an activity I refer to as archaeoethnology. Data for the Atlas were drawn from entries in the Encyclopedia of Prehistory, a nine volume work providing summary information on all cases in the Outline of Archaeological Traditions, thus the Atlas also demonstrates the utility of the Encyclopedia of Prehistory as a basic tool for archaeoethnology."
- CHIA (Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis), a multidisciplinary collaborative endeavor hosted by the University of Pittsburgh with the goal of archiving historical information and linking data as well as academic/research institutions around the globe.
- Clio-Infra, a database of measures of economic performance and other aspects of societal well-being on a global sample of societies from 1800 CE to the present.
- The Google Ngram Viewer, an online search engine that charts frequencies of sets of comma-delimited search strings using a yearly count of n-grams as found in the largest online body of human knowledge, the Google Books corpus.'