Cliodynamics

Cliodynamics "is a transdisciplinary area of research integrating historical macrosociology, cultural and social evolution, economic history/cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases."

The effort reminds me of Lewis Fry Richardson creating his data sets and fitting linear dynamical models in the unsuccessfully search for unstable arms races leading to violent quarrells. Richardson seemed far more aware of the creative act he was involved undertaking. The data in this field are not actual measurements, but often educated guesses by historians that may differ orders of magnitude, or dubious inferences from proxy sources. His honest assesment of the sensistivity of his quantitative conclusions to choices he made in creating the data should be an exemplar to any budding Cliodynamicists.

The effort to create data for Cliodynamics is Seshat. Seshat is intended to "systematically collect[s] what is currently known about the social and political organization of human societies and how civilizations have evolved over time."

Sources

• Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past
• Can History Predict the Future?
• Hacker News Discussion of Can History Predict the Future?
• Turchin response to Can History Predict the Future?
• An Introduction to Seshat: Global History Databank

Cloudy with a Chance of War

Forecast Factory: In his seminal 1922 book, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, Richardson imagined a large theater with 64,000 human “computers.” Each would work on weather in one region, while their leader, “like a conductor of an orchestra” blended their work into a global forecast. Decades before “parallel processing” in computing, Richardson had hit on the concept. Image courtesy of L. Bengtsson / NOAA.gov.

An interesting article on the work of Lewis Fry Richardson: Cloudy with a Chance of War

... the English physicist and mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson, for whom doing science came as naturally as breathing. “It was just the way he looked at the world,” recalls his great-nephew, Lord Julian Hunt. “He was always questioning. Everything was an experiment.” Even at the age of 4, recounts his biographer Oliver Ashford in Prophet or Professor? Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson, the young Lewis had been prone to empiricism: Told that putting money in the bank would “make it grow,” he’d buried some coins in a bank of dirt. (Results: Negative.) In 1912, the now-grown Richardson had reacted to news of the Titanic’s sinking by setting out in a rowboat with a horn and an umbrella to test how ships might use directed blasts of noise to detect icebergs in fog.

Tracking the PLA Rocket Forces

The Arms Control wonk podcast: Tracking the PLA Rocket Forces Mapping the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force with downloadable map file.

The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say?

Study of the tails of violent conflict distributions. The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say?

Abstract

We propose a methodology to look at violence in particular, and other aspects of quantitative historiography in general, in a way compatible with statistical inference, which needs to accommodate the fat-tailedness of the data and the unreliability of the reports of conflicts. We investigate the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, incompatible with fat tails and non-robust to minor changes in data formatting and methodologies. There is no statistical basis to claim that “times are different” owing to the long inter-arrival times between conflicts; there is no basis to discuss any “trend”, and no scientific basis for narratives about change in risk. We describe naive empiricism under fat tails. We also establish that violence has a “true mean” that is underestimated in the track record. This is a historiographical adaptation of the results in Cirillo and Taleb (2016).

Suggested Citation:
Cirillo, Pasquale and Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say? (November 27, 2016). The Nobel Foundation, Causes of Peace, Forthcoming, NYU Tandon Research Paper No. 2876315, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2876315 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2876315

The paper on arxiv.

Correlates of War

Correlates of War

• Data Sets
• Correlates of War Project
• History

Lewis Fry Richardson: His Intellectual Legacy and Influence in the Social Sciences

 

Free open access book: Lewis Fry Richardson: His Intellectual Legacy and Influence in the Social Sciences

The Missile War in Yemen

The Arms Control Wonk podcast: Lessons Learned from the War in Yemen Discussing the CSIS Report: The Missile War in Yemen that covers an interesting data set on missile launches and defensive intercepts created from open source material.