Event
Deep Roots of Political and Economic Development
Organizer(s)
- Attendance: in person
- Language: EN
Event
Deep Roots of Political and Economic Development
During the Holocene (roughly, the last 10,000 years) human social life has been transformed from small-scale relatively egalitarian groups to large-scale complex societies characterized by sophisticated governance institutions, elaborate information systems, extensive division of labor, and deep social and economic inequalities.
At the same time, there was a huge degree of variation in political and economic development between continents and regions, both in the past and persisting today. Thinkers of the past and modern social scientists have proposed a multitude of theories to account for this profound transformation, as well as for why there is so much variation around the overall trend.
New explanations continue to be proposed, and the theoretical corpus grows, but rejecting deficient explanations in favor of more logically cohesive and empirically adequate theories has not been keeping pace. This situation is made worse by disciplinary boundaries. In particular, the relatively new fields of Cultural Macroevolution and of the “Deep Roots” within Economics have developed largely in isolation of each other, with their separate corpora of modeling and empirical literature.
The main goal of this conference is to bring active practitioners from both fields to enable cross-disciplinary conversation and, ultimately, collaboration. Recent advances in the construction of new databases, which together constitute a massive, and growing, corpus of data for empirically testing theoretical predictions, make such trans-disciplinary dialogue timely and necessary.
List of Speakers & Topics
Oded Galor (Brown University):
Roots of Inequality
Peter J. Richerson (University of California, Davis): Human Macroevolution in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene
Peter Turchin (Complexity Science Hub):
Cultural Macroevolution: Understanding the rise of large-scale complex societies in human history
Kathryn Bard (Boston University):
Aksum, an early state in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tim Kohler (Washington State University):
The Surprising Prehistory of Wealth Inequality, and its causes, as seen from the record of housing disparities
Mark Koyama (George Mason University), Desiree Desierto & Jacob Hall:
Magna Carta
Motohiro Kumagai (Brown University):
The Horse, Battles, and the State: Military Origins of Autocracy
Helena Miton (Santa Fe Institute):
Evolution of trade: Using Seshat to investigate 15 centuries of the Silk Roads
Ömer Özak (Southern Methodist University):
Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the World’s Most Enduring Mega-State
David Schönholzer (IIES) & Pieter François (University of Oxford):
Migratory Bottlenecks and the Evolution of Social Complexity
Charles Efferson (Université de Lausanne):
When Norm Change Hurts
Eddie Lee (Complexity Science Hub):
Discovering Components, Mechanism, and Structure from Data
Laura Mayoral (Barcelona School of Economics):
The Evolution of States: Public Goods, Geography, and Political Stability from 3000 BCE to 1800 CE
Zhiwu Chen (HongKong University) & Wanda Wang:
Persistence, Shocks, and Reversal from the Neolithic to Modern China, 5000 BCE–2000 CE
Clair Yang (University of Washington):
The Longevity Mechanism of Chinese Absolutism
Teresa Almendros & Daniel Kondor (Complexity Science Hub):
The evolution of social organization in Bronze Age Mesopotamia: conquest, conflict, and the decline of the city-state system.
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Timetable
Hourly Schedule
Day 1 - June 26
- 09:00 - 09:15
- Introduction
- Peter Turchin
- 09:15 - 10:00
- Roots of Inequality
- Oded Galor
- 10:00 - 10:45
- Aksum, an Early State in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Kathryn Bard
- 10:45 - 11:00
- Coffee Break
- 11:00 - 11:45
- The Surprising Prehistory of Wealth Inequality, and its Causes, as seen from the record of housing disparities
- Tim Kohler
- 11:45 - 12:30
- Magna Carta
- Mark Koyama, Desiree Desierto, and Jacob Hall
- 12:30 - 14:00
- Lunch Break
- 14:00 - 14:45
- Cultural Macroevolution: Understanding the Rise of Large-Scale Complex Societies in Human History
- Peter Turchin
- 14:45 - 15:30
- The Horse, Battles, and the State: Military Origins of Autocracy
- Motohiro Kumagai
- 15:30 - 15:45
- Coffee Break
- 15:45 - 16:30
- The Evolution of States: Public Goods, Geography, and Political Stability from 3000 BCE to 1800 CE
- Laura Mayoral
- 16:30 - 17:30
- Discussion
- 17:30
- Adjourn
Day 2 - June 27
- 09:00 - 09:45
- Human Macroevolution in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene
- Peter J. Richerson
- 09:45 - 10:30
- Evolution of Trade: Using Seshat to Investigate 15 Centuries of the Silk Roads
- Helena Miton
- 10:30 - 11:00
- Coffee Break
- 11:00 - 11:45
- Migratory Bottlenecks and the Evolution of Social Complexity
- David Schönholzer and Pieter François
- 11:45 - 12:30
- Discussion: Local versus Distance Effects in Cultural Macroevolution. The Role of Individuals in Collective Dynamics
- 12:30 - 14:00
- Lunch Break
- 14:00 - 14:45
- Persistence, Shocks, and Reversal from the Neolithic to Modern China, 5000 BCE–2000 CE
- Zhiwu Chen and Wanda Wang
- 14:45 - 15:30
- The Longevity Mechanism of Chinese Absolutism
- Clair Yang
- 15:30 - 15:45
- Coffee Break
- 15:45 - 16:30
- Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the World's Most Enduring Mega-State
- Ömer Özak
- 16:30 - 17:30
- Discussion: China as a “Laboratory” for understanding socio-cultural Evolution
- 17:30
- Adjourn
Day 3 - June 28
- 09:00 - 09:45
- Discovering Components, Mechanism, and Structure from Data
- Eddie Lee
- 09:45 - 10:30
- The Evolution of Social Organization in Bronze Age Mesopotamia: Conquest, Conflict, and the Decline of the City-State System
- Teresa Almendros and Daniel Kondor
- 10:30 - 11:00
- Coffee Break
- 11:00 - 11:45
- When Norm Change Hurts
- Charles Efferson
- 11:45 - 12:30
- Discussion: Summing up. Future Plans?
- 12:30 - 14:00
- Lunch
- 14:00
- End of Conference
