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Secular Cycles
Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations--what the authors call secular cycles.
Secular Cycles elaborates and expands upon the demographic-structural theory first advanced by Jack Goldstone, which provides an explanation of long-term oscillations. This book tests that theory's specific and quantitative predictions by tracing the dynamics of population numbers, prices and real wages, elite numbers and incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability. Turchin and Nefedov study societies in England, France, and Russia during the medieval and early modern periods, and look back at the Roman Republic and Empire. Incorporating theoretical and quantitative history, the authors examine a specific model of historical change and, more generally, investigate the utility of the dynamical systems approach in historical applications.
An indispensable and groundbreaking resource for a wide variety of social scientists, Secular Cycles will interest practitioners of economic history, historical sociology, complexity studies, and demography.
Secular Cycles elaborates and expands upon the demographic-structural theory first advanced by Jack Goldstone, which provides an explanation of long-term oscillations. This book tests that theory's specific and quantitative predictions by tracing the dynamics of population numbers, prices and real wages, elite numbers and incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability. Turchin and Nefedov study societies in England, France, and Russia during the medieval and early modern periods, and look back at the Roman Republic and Empire. Incorporating theoretical and quantitative history, the authors examine a specific model of historical change and, more generally, investigate the utility of the dynamical systems approach in historical applications.
An indispensable and groundbreaking resource for a wide variety of social scientists, Secular Cycles will interest practitioners of economic history, historical sociology, complexity studies, and demography.
360 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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August 9, 2013
This is an absolutely great book, clearly of interest to anyone who is concerned about things like the collapse of civilizations, and specifically the possible collapse of our civilization. And it was published in 2009, and I'm only finding out about it, and reading it, now! I found out about it through Gail Tverberg's blog, "Our Finite World," and I hope it finds a wide readership. But a word of warning: this book is not for the faint of heart. You've got to love the subject or you'll never make it through the book. It doesn't use a lot of technical terms, and it's clearly written, just very dry.
There have been many other notable books written on collapse, such as Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies, and Craig Dilworth's book Too Smart for Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind. They are all good and I recommend them all. However, there is one critical question which Turchin and Nefedov answer which the other books don't: why can't societies avoid collapse? Can't the ruling groups and the intellectuals see the collapse coming? Why are they all so blind?
Tainter comes the closest to providing an explanation, but Tainter's statements about "decreasing returns on investments in complexity" (or something like that) don't really edify, they just perplex. Tainter does state the problem accurately though: we have to wonder why societies collapse, since societies are problem- solving mechanisms. Why is it, then, that eventually they encounter problems which they can't solve, even though the social structure is set up precisely to solve problems?
Turchin and Nefedov answer this question by describing an overall cycle for civilizations. It is an interesting synthesis of thinkers such as Malthus and Marx, both of whom the authors reference. A typical "secular cycle" will last about 300 years or so. In the early stages of the cycle the civilization spreads and provides bounty for its subjects. But the result of this bounty is that, naturally, the standard of living rises and population increases. Eventually the population outruns their bounty and the condition of the masses declines (as Malthus suggests). There is a revolution or collapse and the elites are swept away and a new order put in its place (as Marx suggests). Because historically Marx detested Malthus, it is especially interesting to see their respective insights integrated into a single theory.
The reason that the society can't avert collapse comes because of the reaction of the elites to the declining condition of the masses, as population increases. Of course for us, and for historians, irreversible declining wages in a society is a sign of imminent social decline. But from the point of view of the elites in the society, it's great news! If wages are declining, then it means that Mr. Capitalist (or the typical member of the ruling elite) can hire a lot more workers for less money and make even more profits hand over fist. So while the condition of the people at the bottom of the social heap declines, the elites are doing better than they ever have! And they're doing better precisely because wages are declining. Of course they don't want to change anything, so they don't.
At this point, more and more people want to join the elite class. The fact that there is so much money to be made allows this to happen up to a point. But then it becomes apparent that the society has far too many elites. On top of that, because of declining wages, it becomes harder for the government to raise money through collecting taxes. While the government falters, the elites then duke it out with each other for supremacy. In this situation you may have one of the elite groups emerging in triumph, or sometimes a totally new elite group will come out on top (as in the Communist revolution in 1917). But either way, the number of elites is sharply reduced. Then the secular cycle starts over, with a new elite class.
Turchin and Nefedov lay all of this out in their first and last chapters. In between comes detailed and very quantitative analysis of various civilizations. It's also pretty dry and repetitive. It's also very honest, and they admit that the theory doesn't explain everything. They show how this pattern works in medieval and early modern England, medieval and early modern France, in the Roman Republic and then the later Roman Empire, and the Muscovy and Romanov dynasties in Russia. There is nothing "deterministic" about this pattern. In England and France, feudalism was swept away in the early modern period. But in Russia, it continued, only to result in an even more dramatic upheaval in 1917.
The authors show very quantitatively how wages and population interact during a cycle. They calculate wages based on the ability of the average wage to buy a staple such as bread. As population rises, wages fall. They calculate the increase of the elite class by looking at the number of peers, knights, and gentry. Profits of the elites at first increase but then there is social instability as everyone scrambles to join the elite class, leading to a surplus of elites, and finally a crisis and a depression.
Just how academic is this book? Let's put it this way. On a scale of 1 to 10, with "1" being light summer reading and "10" being totally for academics, this book is a "10." The title is typical academia: it makes sense once you've read the book, but doesn't tell anyone not familiar with the basic layout of the book what's in it. A better title would have been something like: "Cycles of Growth and Collapse in Empires and Nations" (accurate but still a bit wordy) or perhaps "Why Civilizations Decline" (which is catchier).
So don't expect a blow-by-blow account of the Wars of the Roses or a dramatic account of Lenin and Trotsky's agitation. It's pretty dry stuff, but precisely the repetitive and quantitative character of the book lend strength and credibility to its thesis. If you didn't understand the cycle the first time through, they repeat it for you, eight times, until it is perfectly predictable and they show you exactly how to test its truth. On the other hand, if just want the "bottom line" and are willing to trust their analysis, you can pretty much get that by reading the first and last chapters, which are the most interesting.
There have been many other notable books written on collapse, such as Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies, and Craig Dilworth's book Too Smart for Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind. They are all good and I recommend them all. However, there is one critical question which Turchin and Nefedov answer which the other books don't: why can't societies avoid collapse? Can't the ruling groups and the intellectuals see the collapse coming? Why are they all so blind?
Tainter comes the closest to providing an explanation, but Tainter's statements about "decreasing returns on investments in complexity" (or something like that) don't really edify, they just perplex. Tainter does state the problem accurately though: we have to wonder why societies collapse, since societies are problem- solving mechanisms. Why is it, then, that eventually they encounter problems which they can't solve, even though the social structure is set up precisely to solve problems?
Turchin and Nefedov answer this question by describing an overall cycle for civilizations. It is an interesting synthesis of thinkers such as Malthus and Marx, both of whom the authors reference. A typical "secular cycle" will last about 300 years or so. In the early stages of the cycle the civilization spreads and provides bounty for its subjects. But the result of this bounty is that, naturally, the standard of living rises and population increases. Eventually the population outruns their bounty and the condition of the masses declines (as Malthus suggests). There is a revolution or collapse and the elites are swept away and a new order put in its place (as Marx suggests). Because historically Marx detested Malthus, it is especially interesting to see their respective insights integrated into a single theory.
The reason that the society can't avert collapse comes because of the reaction of the elites to the declining condition of the masses, as population increases. Of course for us, and for historians, irreversible declining wages in a society is a sign of imminent social decline. But from the point of view of the elites in the society, it's great news! If wages are declining, then it means that Mr. Capitalist (or the typical member of the ruling elite) can hire a lot more workers for less money and make even more profits hand over fist. So while the condition of the people at the bottom of the social heap declines, the elites are doing better than they ever have! And they're doing better precisely because wages are declining. Of course they don't want to change anything, so they don't.
At this point, more and more people want to join the elite class. The fact that there is so much money to be made allows this to happen up to a point. But then it becomes apparent that the society has far too many elites. On top of that, because of declining wages, it becomes harder for the government to raise money through collecting taxes. While the government falters, the elites then duke it out with each other for supremacy. In this situation you may have one of the elite groups emerging in triumph, or sometimes a totally new elite group will come out on top (as in the Communist revolution in 1917). But either way, the number of elites is sharply reduced. Then the secular cycle starts over, with a new elite class.
Turchin and Nefedov lay all of this out in their first and last chapters. In between comes detailed and very quantitative analysis of various civilizations. It's also pretty dry and repetitive. It's also very honest, and they admit that the theory doesn't explain everything. They show how this pattern works in medieval and early modern England, medieval and early modern France, in the Roman Republic and then the later Roman Empire, and the Muscovy and Romanov dynasties in Russia. There is nothing "deterministic" about this pattern. In England and France, feudalism was swept away in the early modern period. But in Russia, it continued, only to result in an even more dramatic upheaval in 1917.
The authors show very quantitatively how wages and population interact during a cycle. They calculate wages based on the ability of the average wage to buy a staple such as bread. As population rises, wages fall. They calculate the increase of the elite class by looking at the number of peers, knights, and gentry. Profits of the elites at first increase but then there is social instability as everyone scrambles to join the elite class, leading to a surplus of elites, and finally a crisis and a depression.
Just how academic is this book? Let's put it this way. On a scale of 1 to 10, with "1" being light summer reading and "10" being totally for academics, this book is a "10." The title is typical academia: it makes sense once you've read the book, but doesn't tell anyone not familiar with the basic layout of the book what's in it. A better title would have been something like: "Cycles of Growth and Collapse in Empires and Nations" (accurate but still a bit wordy) or perhaps "Why Civilizations Decline" (which is catchier).
So don't expect a blow-by-blow account of the Wars of the Roses or a dramatic account of Lenin and Trotsky's agitation. It's pretty dry stuff, but precisely the repetitive and quantitative character of the book lend strength and credibility to its thesis. If you didn't understand the cycle the first time through, they repeat it for you, eight times, until it is perfectly predictable and they show you exactly how to test its truth. On the other hand, if just want the "bottom line" and are willing to trust their analysis, you can pretty much get that by reading the first and last chapters, which are the most interesting.
September 2, 2017
TL;DR this hypothesis and methodology seem like a major watershed moment in historical thinking but the book itself is not ideally constructed for lay audiences (in interest, not comprehension) and it's very much worth reading even if you want to skip/skim some of the case study chapters.
I can't believe this book, or at least this hypothesis and the evidence behind it, haven't made a bigger splash. I've been reading stuff in this vein for a long time, from Jared Diamond's stuff to Catton's Overshoot to all the soil erosion and deforestation theories of history. Those theories are always tantalizing but feel, for one reason or another, incomplete in ways that made them feel unstable, not viable contenders in the arena of History on their own. Turchin and Nefedov's approach is still narrow and myopic and far from a complete explanation for historical events. Yet it finally feels like a serious effort to understand history scientifically.
Like all great ideas, Turchin's hypothesis feels obvious once understood, like your brain wants to trick you into thinking you'd figured it out before but just hadn't bothered putting it into words. There is a remarkable effort put into data collection and collation here. Indeed, I had no idea there was sufficient data available in any form to track trends in so many variables in so many places. There has been a tremendous amount of work by the "natural historians" of history doing field work to build the datasets Turchin and Nefedov analyze here. Perhaps that is part of the explanation. Yet it's still hard to see how these patterns could have gone unnoticed by prior historians. Like, of course there have been scholars doing this work, from Malthus to Boserup and onward. But Turchin's data is so compelling that, unless it's misleadingly presented to conceal major flaws, it must compel a major reorientation in how history is understood. I certainly get the impression this work is taking place so late not because of lack of data, but because institutional culture in the field of history had it that this sort of thinking was a trap, could never yield meaningful understanding.
The science of human history (Cliodynamics, as Turchin terms it) faces the same obstacles as other historical sciences, like paleoecology, cosmology, geology, and phylogenetics. Namely, it's difficult to definitively infer causation without valid experimental design, which is impossible. Thus, aside from presenting their hypothesis and all the data they have collated to test it, Turchin and Nefedov's main task is to justify the decisions they made about which events and patterns they attribute to demographic-structural effects and which are exogenous or anomalous to it. This is dicey territory, a thread that critics can try to pull to reveal the whole effort is an exercise in bias-confirmation. It would be nice to see a critical or at least independent assessment of this data; it's hard to know how well it holds up without digging pretty deep. It seems very convincing, but ultimately I'm less concerned about the specific validity of demographic-structural theory in these cases than I am about the kind of historical thinking and hypothesis testing in general, and the integration of economics and human ecology the hypothesis pioneers.
I'd been kicking around the idea of integrating economics and ecology for like a year now, certain that this thinking had been advanced before but never finding the research I was conceiving. Secular Cycles is exactly what I was looking for. The basic idea here is, again, one of those ideas that's so obvious in retrospect that it's hard to believe you've never heard it before. Fundamentally, we learn about market dynamics in the abstract, and hypotheticals involve varying supplies of various goods and such, but the basic and obvious effects of changing human population are not, in my experience, identified explicitly.
Turchin's idealized cycle is a kind of Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model for the interaction of peasants and elites. As peasant populations grow, labor supply (and thus prices) rises, land demand (and thus value) increases, and food demands (and thus prices) rise. This economic situation benefits landholding elites, and their population grows, through recruitment and reproduction. However, once the region's carrying capacity for peasants is reached, peasant populations plateau. Because of the time lag in population trends, elite numbers continue to rise even though their economic base is saturated. They attempt to extract more and more from peasants who have less and less to give. Elites compete for those resources and in the process destabilize social structures that enable high food production. Civil wars and other local conflicts break out, people move to cities for safety, and this prevents recovery from density-dependent mortality events like epidemics, famine, and war. Populations of peasants and elites fall, population pressure is low, and the cycle begins anew.
Turchin never frames this process as ecological, and questions like soil erosion, deforestation, and game depletion are never mentioned. However, ecological terms frequently crop up in interesting ways. Carrying capacity, of course, is the major driving force of the secular cycle. Another, more novel, application of an ecological term is the use of 'landscapes of fear' to describe periods when states are weak and in conflict, and bandits or armies cause farmers to flee to cities. This is a familiar process, but it's very satisfying to me to have this put in ecological terms. Bandits become like wolves, changing the whole face of the landscape just by pursuing this newly opened niche. Farmers abandon the land, reducing carrying capacity but also creating opportunities for forests and soils to recover--as well as other keystone species, like wolves. Hyperkeystone indeed.
The Lotka-Volterra cycles work well as an analogy here. They are still regarded as a fundamental part of ecology, but they rarely exist in their idealized form in nature because nature is complicated. Demographic-structural cycles are compelling predictors of economic changes and rates of social instability, but they don't necessarily explain major historical events. Internal conflict, for instance, is attributed to demographic factors but external wars don't seem to be the product of overpopulation, as one might imagine.
While they aren't the main focus of the book, some exogenous forces and other processes do come into play in explaining some inconsistencies with the theory. The Boserupian flexibility of carrying capacity is mentioned as marginal lands are brought into production as conditions necessitate--though Turchin frames this as a function of diminishing marginal returns. More labor is available/affordable, grain is more valuable, so it's worthwhile to invest in expensive conversion projects. . . until it's not; there is still a functioning limit. One squishy aspect of the case studies presented is their fuzzy territorial boundaries. For instance, two cycles--one Russian, one Roman--don't follow the typical curve because they are interrupted by the dramatic addition of new territory. It's just not entirely clear why the dynamics of the cycle would follow the border of the state? Another exogenous factor is the influence of changing technology. The cultural evolution that describes those changes are never discussed except as a black box that screws with cycles when industrialization begins.
There's a ton of work to be done integrating the theory of secular cycles with environmental history, from soil degradation and habitat destruction to the coevolution of weeds, crops, and wildlife with this century-scale disturbance cycle. The crisis phase seems particularly ripe for ecological insight--there are some causal questions to be parsed here between density dependent mortality, carrying capacity, and social structure. It offers an opening to integrate human niche construction, broadly understood, as the framework underlying everything in human history, integrating into deep time "prehistory" and human evolution as well. It's a huge deal!
So the ideas in here are extremely exciting and fruitful and ought to be taken pretty seriously by scholars of history. But as a book and a piece of research, it's a bit of an odd duck, and certainly not the most enjoyable read. The introduction and conclusion give a general outline of the hypothesis, which is much clearer in the conclusion than the introduction. The rest of the book is occupied with case studies, each of which are designed as independent tests of the hypothesis. The first weird thing about these chapters is that despite the pretty large sets of time-series data they have, there are never any statistical analyses until the conclusion (one extremely strong t-test on one simplistic comparison). This is perhaps because the evidence is too incomplete or inconsistently collected to meet the assumptions of a GLM or something, but it doesn't necessarily seem that way, and if that's true then they also aren't good enough to just eyeball and interpret?
The case study text is also a bit scant on context and framing linking things to the hypothesis and a broader discussion of causality. Instead, they often feel like appendices, detailing the limitations of data sources, the assumptions made, and indulging in descriptions of historical events without clarifying their relevance. Some are consistent with the hypothesis (ie, events that might be caused by DS factors) while others are anomalies that must be caused by other forces, that might perturb the pattern expected by the hypothesis or not (incidentally, aside from those two territorial expansions, there are practically no points where the data doesn't conform to expectations; it seems like a very good hypothesis or a very misleading data collection effort; they aren't spending a lot of time excusing away bad fits).
It's just not clear why these are here. Like an appendix, they are of interest to those interested in the details behind each case study, or in any historical period in particular. But without more contextualizing detail the result for the general reader is a lot of apparently irrelevant information. It's confusing, too, because it watered down for me the authors' claims about what exactly the theory could be held responsible for. Nor did it look to other historical theories to explain these events (with the exception of the Father-and-Sons cycles, which I was a bit skeptical about but are apparently empirically supported? They predict generational gaps in civil conflict because people exposed to war are inoculated against it).
At some point I stopped reading the case studies in detail, just reading the intro and conclusion and skimming the rest. The figures are all extremely compelling, and they find some remarkably strong correlations between various proxy variables (coin hoards strongly match incidence of civil conflict, and average skeleton height falls predictably with population growth) as well as the main factors of their predictions (wages and grain prices change in almost perfect correlation with population density). But the conclusion of each case study is the same: they all support the hypothesis. The interesting exceptions are discussed in the conclusion chapter.
I can't believe this book, or at least this hypothesis and the evidence behind it, haven't made a bigger splash. I've been reading stuff in this vein for a long time, from Jared Diamond's stuff to Catton's Overshoot to all the soil erosion and deforestation theories of history. Those theories are always tantalizing but feel, for one reason or another, incomplete in ways that made them feel unstable, not viable contenders in the arena of History on their own. Turchin and Nefedov's approach is still narrow and myopic and far from a complete explanation for historical events. Yet it finally feels like a serious effort to understand history scientifically.
Like all great ideas, Turchin's hypothesis feels obvious once understood, like your brain wants to trick you into thinking you'd figured it out before but just hadn't bothered putting it into words. There is a remarkable effort put into data collection and collation here. Indeed, I had no idea there was sufficient data available in any form to track trends in so many variables in so many places. There has been a tremendous amount of work by the "natural historians" of history doing field work to build the datasets Turchin and Nefedov analyze here. Perhaps that is part of the explanation. Yet it's still hard to see how these patterns could have gone unnoticed by prior historians. Like, of course there have been scholars doing this work, from Malthus to Boserup and onward. But Turchin's data is so compelling that, unless it's misleadingly presented to conceal major flaws, it must compel a major reorientation in how history is understood. I certainly get the impression this work is taking place so late not because of lack of data, but because institutional culture in the field of history had it that this sort of thinking was a trap, could never yield meaningful understanding.
The science of human history (Cliodynamics, as Turchin terms it) faces the same obstacles as other historical sciences, like paleoecology, cosmology, geology, and phylogenetics. Namely, it's difficult to definitively infer causation without valid experimental design, which is impossible. Thus, aside from presenting their hypothesis and all the data they have collated to test it, Turchin and Nefedov's main task is to justify the decisions they made about which events and patterns they attribute to demographic-structural effects and which are exogenous or anomalous to it. This is dicey territory, a thread that critics can try to pull to reveal the whole effort is an exercise in bias-confirmation. It would be nice to see a critical or at least independent assessment of this data; it's hard to know how well it holds up without digging pretty deep. It seems very convincing, but ultimately I'm less concerned about the specific validity of demographic-structural theory in these cases than I am about the kind of historical thinking and hypothesis testing in general, and the integration of economics and human ecology the hypothesis pioneers.
I'd been kicking around the idea of integrating economics and ecology for like a year now, certain that this thinking had been advanced before but never finding the research I was conceiving. Secular Cycles is exactly what I was looking for. The basic idea here is, again, one of those ideas that's so obvious in retrospect that it's hard to believe you've never heard it before. Fundamentally, we learn about market dynamics in the abstract, and hypotheticals involve varying supplies of various goods and such, but the basic and obvious effects of changing human population are not, in my experience, identified explicitly.
Turchin's idealized cycle is a kind of Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model for the interaction of peasants and elites. As peasant populations grow, labor supply (and thus prices) rises, land demand (and thus value) increases, and food demands (and thus prices) rise. This economic situation benefits landholding elites, and their population grows, through recruitment and reproduction. However, once the region's carrying capacity for peasants is reached, peasant populations plateau. Because of the time lag in population trends, elite numbers continue to rise even though their economic base is saturated. They attempt to extract more and more from peasants who have less and less to give. Elites compete for those resources and in the process destabilize social structures that enable high food production. Civil wars and other local conflicts break out, people move to cities for safety, and this prevents recovery from density-dependent mortality events like epidemics, famine, and war. Populations of peasants and elites fall, population pressure is low, and the cycle begins anew.
Turchin never frames this process as ecological, and questions like soil erosion, deforestation, and game depletion are never mentioned. However, ecological terms frequently crop up in interesting ways. Carrying capacity, of course, is the major driving force of the secular cycle. Another, more novel, application of an ecological term is the use of 'landscapes of fear' to describe periods when states are weak and in conflict, and bandits or armies cause farmers to flee to cities. This is a familiar process, but it's very satisfying to me to have this put in ecological terms. Bandits become like wolves, changing the whole face of the landscape just by pursuing this newly opened niche. Farmers abandon the land, reducing carrying capacity but also creating opportunities for forests and soils to recover--as well as other keystone species, like wolves. Hyperkeystone indeed.
The Lotka-Volterra cycles work well as an analogy here. They are still regarded as a fundamental part of ecology, but they rarely exist in their idealized form in nature because nature is complicated. Demographic-structural cycles are compelling predictors of economic changes and rates of social instability, but they don't necessarily explain major historical events. Internal conflict, for instance, is attributed to demographic factors but external wars don't seem to be the product of overpopulation, as one might imagine.
While they aren't the main focus of the book, some exogenous forces and other processes do come into play in explaining some inconsistencies with the theory. The Boserupian flexibility of carrying capacity is mentioned as marginal lands are brought into production as conditions necessitate--though Turchin frames this as a function of diminishing marginal returns. More labor is available/affordable, grain is more valuable, so it's worthwhile to invest in expensive conversion projects. . . until it's not; there is still a functioning limit. One squishy aspect of the case studies presented is their fuzzy territorial boundaries. For instance, two cycles--one Russian, one Roman--don't follow the typical curve because they are interrupted by the dramatic addition of new territory. It's just not entirely clear why the dynamics of the cycle would follow the border of the state? Another exogenous factor is the influence of changing technology. The cultural evolution that describes those changes are never discussed except as a black box that screws with cycles when industrialization begins.
There's a ton of work to be done integrating the theory of secular cycles with environmental history, from soil degradation and habitat destruction to the coevolution of weeds, crops, and wildlife with this century-scale disturbance cycle. The crisis phase seems particularly ripe for ecological insight--there are some causal questions to be parsed here between density dependent mortality, carrying capacity, and social structure. It offers an opening to integrate human niche construction, broadly understood, as the framework underlying everything in human history, integrating into deep time "prehistory" and human evolution as well. It's a huge deal!
So the ideas in here are extremely exciting and fruitful and ought to be taken pretty seriously by scholars of history. But as a book and a piece of research, it's a bit of an odd duck, and certainly not the most enjoyable read. The introduction and conclusion give a general outline of the hypothesis, which is much clearer in the conclusion than the introduction. The rest of the book is occupied with case studies, each of which are designed as independent tests of the hypothesis. The first weird thing about these chapters is that despite the pretty large sets of time-series data they have, there are never any statistical analyses until the conclusion (one extremely strong t-test on one simplistic comparison). This is perhaps because the evidence is too incomplete or inconsistently collected to meet the assumptions of a GLM or something, but it doesn't necessarily seem that way, and if that's true then they also aren't good enough to just eyeball and interpret?
The case study text is also a bit scant on context and framing linking things to the hypothesis and a broader discussion of causality. Instead, they often feel like appendices, detailing the limitations of data sources, the assumptions made, and indulging in descriptions of historical events without clarifying their relevance. Some are consistent with the hypothesis (ie, events that might be caused by DS factors) while others are anomalies that must be caused by other forces, that might perturb the pattern expected by the hypothesis or not (incidentally, aside from those two territorial expansions, there are practically no points where the data doesn't conform to expectations; it seems like a very good hypothesis or a very misleading data collection effort; they aren't spending a lot of time excusing away bad fits).
It's just not clear why these are here. Like an appendix, they are of interest to those interested in the details behind each case study, or in any historical period in particular. But without more contextualizing detail the result for the general reader is a lot of apparently irrelevant information. It's confusing, too, because it watered down for me the authors' claims about what exactly the theory could be held responsible for. Nor did it look to other historical theories to explain these events (with the exception of the Father-and-Sons cycles, which I was a bit skeptical about but are apparently empirically supported? They predict generational gaps in civil conflict because people exposed to war are inoculated against it).
At some point I stopped reading the case studies in detail, just reading the intro and conclusion and skimming the rest. The figures are all extremely compelling, and they find some remarkably strong correlations between various proxy variables (coin hoards strongly match incidence of civil conflict, and average skeleton height falls predictably with population growth) as well as the main factors of their predictions (wages and grain prices change in almost perfect correlation with population density). But the conclusion of each case study is the same: they all support the hypothesis. The interesting exceptions are discussed in the conclusion chapter.
April 3, 2014
This book exemplifies my type of futures - a grand sweep of human history, a causal model, and a dynamic framework from which we can view our present lives. The first chapter outlines the model and is followed by eight turns of the cycle, two per chosen country. The final chapter draws together the evidence and the model.
I found the model to be quite interesting. It seems to be based on two perspectives of history. One is the Malthusian, where history can be described as a series of cycles where where the population of a country grows to the point where it exceeds the carrying capacity of the country, only to suffer a crisis and population reduction, which eases the crisis of carrying capacity. On top of this is a Marxian overlay that considers who is suffering from the prospective of class relations.
The main objection to this approach is that it is all very well for an agrarian economy and society, but that means it has limited use in explaining (and forecasting) present conditions. I think that there is some truth to this, but not the whole truth. I wonder how useful it is to think of carrying capacity as aggregate supply? Could population growth be a surrogate for growth in aggregate demand?
To me, there seems some merit in going back to the base model and attempting to update it. Perhaps that ought to be one our projects in the future?
I found the model to be quite interesting. It seems to be based on two perspectives of history. One is the Malthusian, where history can be described as a series of cycles where where the population of a country grows to the point where it exceeds the carrying capacity of the country, only to suffer a crisis and population reduction, which eases the crisis of carrying capacity. On top of this is a Marxian overlay that considers who is suffering from the prospective of class relations.
The main objection to this approach is that it is all very well for an agrarian economy and society, but that means it has limited use in explaining (and forecasting) present conditions. I think that there is some truth to this, but not the whole truth. I wonder how useful it is to think of carrying capacity as aggregate supply? Could population growth be a surrogate for growth in aggregate demand?
To me, there seems some merit in going back to the base model and attempting to update it. Perhaps that ought to be one our projects in the future?
March 24, 2020
Secular Cycles
This book postulates a grand neo-Malthusian theory of history, as follows.
1. The population of commoners increases (approximately exponentially) to the carrying capacity of land they possess at their technological level.
2. The population the elites increases to the carrying capacity of of the commoner population with a lag of a few generations. The elite population overshoots the carying capacity of the commoner population due to faster reproduction rates (healthier food, better sanitation...)
Since the peasants can't support the elites the peasants have a reduced living standard. Two consequences are that there is inter-elite struggle for zero sum status (civil wars, palace coups etc.) and the peasant population is not healthy enough to absorb shocks (famine, plague, etc.) so they are whipped out. The drop in peasant population from whatever source, further lowers the number of elites the population can support causing more competition... The system stabilizes at much reduced total population, and a much reduced noble population, and the cycle can begin again.
Plus they add a shorter term fathers-and-sons (~40 year) cycle of warfare on top.
Using various parameters for humans (inter generational times, number of children, etc.) they estimate that this cycle should take ~300 years. They then show how this theory fits 10 different cycles in Western-ish countries. They use a ton of data, led concentrations in Greenland ice (as a proxy for the GDP of ancient Rome), height of Russian soldiers (as a proxy for how well fed commoners are), coin hords (as a proxy for how worried people were), price of wheat (in days labor to measure food excess), etc.
A lot of the mechanisms make sense to me - and boy do I have a weakness for Malthusian ideas. eg in the boom times, when there is a solid government, people move into hard-to-protect valleys that increase the population but are impossible to defend when the trouble starts, so the trouble can compound when it gets started.
The data presented is pretty persuasive. I know they have the advantage of choosing what data to present, but they when possible they tried to use the same data for each civilization (usually coin hordes and population estimates). So I don't think there was too much fucker-y going on there.
My principal objection to the book is that any cyclic model can explain a cyclic process. If you used a simple predator prey model where nobles eat peasants (maybe not too far from true) you will also get cycles, and given enough free variables you'll be able to fit whatever cycle you have on hand. So what I would have liked is a chapter about what this theory gets wrong, or about how the secular cycles theory better explains the data than other long term cyclical models. To the authors credit they did include some things that don't fit the model (eg. the year of the 3 emperors in Rome).
Other objections.
I'd also like to see a discussion of what happens when two societies in different parts of the cycle hit one another (thought the data will be limited), if the model is correct then a war between two societies with 'equal' strength (no Guns, Germs and Steel) should be determined by where in the cycle each is right? Napoleon vs The Holy Roman Empire. Rome vs Carthage. Rome vs Persia...
What about non western societies? The Byzantine Empire lasted for 500+ years, enough time for 2 cycles. The middle east has been controlled by one unified empire for almost all time right (Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Ottoman...). Egypt has 6000 years of history, some of that without being invaded. China has been large and (kind of) unified for a long time...
Also shout out to a way better review than mine over at -
Slate Star Codex
This book postulates a grand neo-Malthusian theory of history, as follows.
1. The population of commoners increases (approximately exponentially) to the carrying capacity of land they possess at their technological level.
2. The population the elites increases to the carrying capacity of of the commoner population with a lag of a few generations. The elite population overshoots the carying capacity of the commoner population due to faster reproduction rates (healthier food, better sanitation...)
Since the peasants can't support the elites the peasants have a reduced living standard. Two consequences are that there is inter-elite struggle for zero sum status (civil wars, palace coups etc.) and the peasant population is not healthy enough to absorb shocks (famine, plague, etc.) so they are whipped out. The drop in peasant population from whatever source, further lowers the number of elites the population can support causing more competition... The system stabilizes at much reduced total population, and a much reduced noble population, and the cycle can begin again.
Plus they add a shorter term fathers-and-sons (~40 year) cycle of warfare on top.
Using various parameters for humans (inter generational times, number of children, etc.) they estimate that this cycle should take ~300 years. They then show how this theory fits 10 different cycles in Western-ish countries. They use a ton of data, led concentrations in Greenland ice (as a proxy for the GDP of ancient Rome), height of Russian soldiers (as a proxy for how well fed commoners are), coin hords (as a proxy for how worried people were), price of wheat (in days labor to measure food excess), etc.
A lot of the mechanisms make sense to me - and boy do I have a weakness for Malthusian ideas. eg in the boom times, when there is a solid government, people move into hard-to-protect valleys that increase the population but are impossible to defend when the trouble starts, so the trouble can compound when it gets started.
The data presented is pretty persuasive. I know they have the advantage of choosing what data to present, but they when possible they tried to use the same data for each civilization (usually coin hordes and population estimates). So I don't think there was too much fucker-y going on there.
My principal objection to the book is that any cyclic model can explain a cyclic process. If you used a simple predator prey model where nobles eat peasants (maybe not too far from true) you will also get cycles, and given enough free variables you'll be able to fit whatever cycle you have on hand. So what I would have liked is a chapter about what this theory gets wrong, or about how the secular cycles theory better explains the data than other long term cyclical models. To the authors credit they did include some things that don't fit the model (eg. the year of the 3 emperors in Rome).
Other objections.
I'd also like to see a discussion of what happens when two societies in different parts of the cycle hit one another (thought the data will be limited), if the model is correct then a war between two societies with 'equal' strength (no Guns, Germs and Steel) should be determined by where in the cycle each is right? Napoleon vs The Holy Roman Empire. Rome vs Carthage. Rome vs Persia...
What about non western societies? The Byzantine Empire lasted for 500+ years, enough time for 2 cycles. The middle east has been controlled by one unified empire for almost all time right (Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Ottoman...). Egypt has 6000 years of history, some of that without being invaded. China has been large and (kind of) unified for a long time...
Also shout out to a way better review than mine over at -
Slate Star Codex
December 11, 2015
I would recommend reading war and peace and war instead of this one, this goes into much much more details but unless you know the math and are really that skeptical the same concept gets a worthy write up in his other book. Still very good and more of the same which is why I read it, but unless you really want more history from this perspective the same concept is done just fine in war and peace and war.
December 22, 2017
Secualr Cycles es un magnifico libro que busca mostrar como las predicciones de la teoría demográfica estructural es valida para el estudio de las sociedades agrarias. Los ciclos seculares de acuerdo a Turchin y Nefedov son procesos de muy largo plazo en los que las sociedades pasan por periodos de integración, expansión y estabilidad socioeconómica, llegan a periodos de estancamiento y luego de declive y desintegración.
La premisa de los autores es que es posible llegar a algo parecido a una ciencia de la historia, esto es, que se puede estudiar la historia de sociedades usando las herramientas de las ciencias naturales para llegar a conclusiones más precisas sobre los cambios de muy largo plazo en las sociedades. La existencia de "leyes de la historia" es un tema controvertido, no obstante, las predicciones de la teoría demográfica estructural se ajustan bien a los datos históricos y son una buena herramienta para entender fenómenos como los estallidos de violencia, guerras, revoluciones y sus efectos sobre las sociedades en cuestión.
Los ejemplos en el libro como los ciclos de la República Romana y del Principado y de distintos periodos de la historia feudal Inglesa, Francesa y Rusa son muy didácticos y llenos de información y observaciones interesantes. Es un libro muy recomendable para aquellos interesados en historia económica, ciencias políticas y sociología. Si la existencia de alta desigualdad en la sociedad como causa de violencia y desintegración social es una pregunta que ronda nuestra cabeza, este libro de Turchin y Nefedov es un gran comienzo para pensar al respecto.
La premisa de los autores es que es posible llegar a algo parecido a una ciencia de la historia, esto es, que se puede estudiar la historia de sociedades usando las herramientas de las ciencias naturales para llegar a conclusiones más precisas sobre los cambios de muy largo plazo en las sociedades. La existencia de "leyes de la historia" es un tema controvertido, no obstante, las predicciones de la teoría demográfica estructural se ajustan bien a los datos históricos y son una buena herramienta para entender fenómenos como los estallidos de violencia, guerras, revoluciones y sus efectos sobre las sociedades en cuestión.
Los ejemplos en el libro como los ciclos de la República Romana y del Principado y de distintos periodos de la historia feudal Inglesa, Francesa y Rusa son muy didácticos y llenos de información y observaciones interesantes. Es un libro muy recomendable para aquellos interesados en historia económica, ciencias políticas y sociología. Si la existencia de alta desigualdad en la sociedad como causa de violencia y desintegración social es una pregunta que ronda nuestra cabeza, este libro de Turchin y Nefedov es un gran comienzo para pensar al respecto.
November 27, 2016
In this book the authors analyze several correlations that lead to rise and fall of the States based on population growth, labor market demands and excesses of upper classes.
I did not find their approach particularly innovative. One thing I remembered from this book is "plateau" stage they called stagflation. This is a stage in state's secular development when population saturation leads to wage decline that coincides with maximum profits for upper classes.
I would say that USA has entered stagflation phase in the beginning of 21st century. Based on the authors evaluations of several historical Empire States that went through secular cycles, it appears that stagflation phase could persist for decades, even for centuries. Though it inevitably leads to a crisis and fall, followed by renewed cycle.
posted by David
https://bookidealist.blogspot.com/201...
I did not find their approach particularly innovative. One thing I remembered from this book is "plateau" stage they called stagflation. This is a stage in state's secular development when population saturation leads to wage decline that coincides with maximum profits for upper classes.
I would say that USA has entered stagflation phase in the beginning of 21st century. Based on the authors evaluations of several historical Empire States that went through secular cycles, it appears that stagflation phase could persist for decades, even for centuries. Though it inevitably leads to a crisis and fall, followed by renewed cycle.
posted by David
https://bookidealist.blogspot.com/201...
December 14, 2020
This book is amazing and I doubt I can provide a review that does it justice. I point to this review by Less Wrong and this Guardian review as a good start.
Briefly, the author's theory is simple: society works in cycles (secular cycles). There is a growth stage, where society grows. The land is underutilised and there is resource extraction. Upward mobility exists.
This is followed by a stagflation stage, where inequality increases. The elites then extract / oppress the peasants. Because elites are insulated from the vicissitudes of life (e.g. pandemics / health), they reproduce more, and society faces elite overpopulation. There is increasing inequality.
The elite overpopulation creates instability; the state then faces internal disputes (the third stage of state breakdown). The last stage is then a depression: sociopolitical instability results in a subsistence crisis and more people die. The land has more carrying capacity, and we look at the next growth stage.
That's the major cycle; there's also minor cycles like the father-and-sons cycle, which happens every two generations (40-60 years). Basically, the sons have their own conflict eventually.
That's the first chapter. The remaining eight chapters of the book are the authors going through the data. The last chapter is a summary of how the data fit into the theory.
I can't comment on how valid the theory is, but as I read the book, I found myself fitting real life experiences into the theory. (My view is that we're in the stagflation stage, although the authors do caution that the theory should not be applied to after the industrial revolution.) It's impressive that even external forces get factored into the book.
I'm not familiar enough with history to think of counter-examples either, such as where this cycle isn't discernable in other societies.
Ultimately, this is a book that really introduced a new idea - so 5/5.
Briefly, the author's theory is simple: society works in cycles (secular cycles). There is a growth stage, where society grows. The land is underutilised and there is resource extraction. Upward mobility exists.
This is followed by a stagflation stage, where inequality increases. The elites then extract / oppress the peasants. Because elites are insulated from the vicissitudes of life (e.g. pandemics / health), they reproduce more, and society faces elite overpopulation. There is increasing inequality.
The elite overpopulation creates instability; the state then faces internal disputes (the third stage of state breakdown). The last stage is then a depression: sociopolitical instability results in a subsistence crisis and more people die. The land has more carrying capacity, and we look at the next growth stage.
That's the major cycle; there's also minor cycles like the father-and-sons cycle, which happens every two generations (40-60 years). Basically, the sons have their own conflict eventually.
That's the first chapter. The remaining eight chapters of the book are the authors going through the data. The last chapter is a summary of how the data fit into the theory.
I can't comment on how valid the theory is, but as I read the book, I found myself fitting real life experiences into the theory. (My view is that we're in the stagflation stage, although the authors do caution that the theory should not be applied to after the industrial revolution.) It's impressive that even external forces get factored into the book.
I'm not familiar enough with history to think of counter-examples either, such as where this cycle isn't discernable in other societies.
Ultimately, this is a book that really introduced a new idea - so 5/5.
September 16, 2020
First of all, this is a dry academic book. If you don't enjoy dry books, you won't think this is worth 4 stars.
That said, the framework of population dynamics of both the general population and elite population and the various stages of growth, stagnation and crisis is extremely powerful and compelling. As has been said in an online review, this framework gives a great way to learn, contextualize and remember history (e.g. I've never felt more confident in my recall of Plantagenet historical events).
Besides all the great historical proxy data that the authors examine, I really appreciated how they emphasized what someone currently experiencing various stages would notice. Are things cheap or expensive, is it easy or hard to provide for your family, is elite inequality increasing or decreasing, does the state feel powerful or besieged by crisis? Unfortunately, there's a lot of similarities to historical stagnation/crisis phases (often triggered by pandemics) and our world today although the precise theory advanced herein technically only applies to pre-industrial agrarian states.
This framework is one I'm sure I will use for the rest of my life as one of my main lenses to understand history and ask questions about the present and future.
That said, the framework of population dynamics of both the general population and elite population and the various stages of growth, stagnation and crisis is extremely powerful and compelling. As has been said in an online review, this framework gives a great way to learn, contextualize and remember history (e.g. I've never felt more confident in my recall of Plantagenet historical events).
Besides all the great historical proxy data that the authors examine, I really appreciated how they emphasized what someone currently experiencing various stages would notice. Are things cheap or expensive, is it easy or hard to provide for your family, is elite inequality increasing or decreasing, does the state feel powerful or besieged by crisis? Unfortunately, there's a lot of similarities to historical stagnation/crisis phases (often triggered by pandemics) and our world today although the precise theory advanced herein technically only applies to pre-industrial agrarian states.
This framework is one I'm sure I will use for the rest of my life as one of my main lenses to understand history and ask questions about the present and future.
March 7, 2021
Great book by Turchin with a seriously groundbreaking approach to history. There's no doubt that Turchin actually bases his theories on serious research and a comprehensive collection of data and analysis on a global scale from throughout ancient, up until modern, history. That being said, the book is obviously not beautifully written: the prose is repetitive and all chapters, except for the first and the last, mirror each other in almost every aspect. The middle chapters are throughout investigations of the socioeconomic-demographic trends of different places within certain timespans. Turchin then chops the time periods up into phases according to the observed trends and subsequently fits these observed timespans into his secular cycle theory, as outlined in the first chapter (and they do fit, sometimes unnervingly, well), before proceeding to the next case study; dry stuff obviously, but very good, solid reseach that provides a robust foundation for Turchin's approach - more than enough so to challenge dismissals of Turchin's theories as slightly thought-provoking, but ultimately irrelevant, "prophecies".
April 19, 2020
I bought the book long back but did not read it. The recent stock market fall and once in a century event of pandemic forced me to read this book. This book clearly states pandemic as one of the reasons for negative turn of growth cycle during stagflation phase. The ideas laid out by authors are succinct and relevant to today's economy even if they mention that they have studied cycles for agrarian economies. The four phases of cycle have been empirically studied with respect to various civilization.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants answers as to why the pandemic of coronavirus happened and what lies ahead for us. This will give you broad strokes of what lies ahead and be prepared for it.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants answers as to why the pandemic of coronavirus happened and what lies ahead for us. This will give you broad strokes of what lies ahead and be prepared for it.
October 10, 2019
Thought provoking, to put it mildly. Prof. Turchin proves once again that anthropologists make the best economists. Chapter 1 proposes a framework through which to understand why population ebbs and flows, and the remainder of the book follows 8 case studies that put the framework to the test. Part history lesson (did you know that the church was the largest money lender in 16th century Russia?), part social analysis (over/under-representation of elites in the total population is one of the driving factors of population decline/growth), the quantitative elements were sound and proxy variables prudently selected.
July 4, 2017
Very good intro to a revival of the study of historical cycles. The idea that population cycles and structures are more important historical movers than political ideology or regime type is not obvious in today's hyperpartisan political competition. Actually it became a heresy to not derive quality of personal welfare from type of installed political regime. It's refreshing to see a quantifiable theory saying otherwise. While this book covers agrarian societies, Turchin announces application of his approach to other type of societies as well.
December 5, 2020
I feel that I wasn't the right audience for this book. The authors had a very clear hypothesis (you can predict cycles of growth and collapse in pre-industrial societies based on certain factors) and then provided 8 cases to test and prove their theory. While I think this would be valuable for people in the field, as someone who is not, it was repetitious and not something that I have the knowledge to refute or agree with honestly.
January 25, 2021
You can listen to my critique, and the critiques of others, around the 1-hour mark on this podcast:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/dream-s...
To this, I will add the famous AJP Taylor line about historians of "decline" or "cyclical declension" being people whose perspective on this matter amounts to that of the tenured Oxford prof who laments how he could once afford three housekeepers but can now afford only two.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/dream-s...
To this, I will add the famous AJP Taylor line about historians of "decline" or "cyclical declension" being people whose perspective on this matter amounts to that of the tenured Oxford prof who laments how he could once afford three housekeepers but can now afford only two.
January 5, 2021
A dense but worthwhile read for anyone interested in long-run macro forces shaping the rise and fall of societies
January 8, 2021
An empirical application of Structural Demographic theory.
A must read if you are interested in History as a science.
A must read if you are interested in History as a science.
March 15, 2021
LOTS of data that supports novel and compelling theory of 3o0yr pre-industrial civilizational cycles. Impressive.
August 21, 2022
A must read for anyone interested in the rise and fall of empires, nations and civilisations.
October 1, 2022
Abandoned. Interesting theories but was way too dry and couldn't keep my attention.
January 14, 2012
There are still some very basic questions (how do you define "the elite"? What determines the number of "elite aspirants"? Is the model applicable to a post-agricultural economy? If so, what are we really talking about? People's ability to marshal enough resources to reproduce themselves biologically and economically?) that remain to be answered, but all in all I'm just a huge fan of this neo-Malthusian "structural-demographic" theory.
February 8, 2014
Very interesting book. Outlines a theory of history which explains a significant proportion of historical change in agrarian societies. It's a very interesting approach, and one which I think will provide extremely interesting insights into history and, potentially, the future.
Some minor issues with typos, and some of the history strikes me as potentially a little weak, but those are very minor issues when compared with the overall work.
Some minor issues with typos, and some of the history strikes me as potentially a little weak, but those are very minor issues when compared with the overall work.
June 12, 2016
Well documented validation of a very interesting theory.
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