Nice, thanks for writing this up, super interesting. Some random questions and thoughts that came up while reading, no pressure to respond:
1. Do they include the cause of the crisis in their data? I find it plausible that it makes a large difference whether the crisis is kinda caused by the polity's government or a natural catastrophe? E.g. the latter might not affect the perceived need for reforms, or even might strengthen the state (never let a crisis go to waste).
2. The reform variable seems kinda odd if it only counts positive change, right? The sum.reform in the charts suggest that the variable is also never negative, so I wonder how they capture crises that worsen the state, e.g. turning it into a more despotic dictatorship with negative outcomes on well-being etc.?
3. It would've been cool if they would have looked at the set of actors and their nature, e.g. how well organized were non-state actors, how cooperative with the state were they, how #extractive were they. Also interesting to think about the narrow corridor idea from Acemoglu and Robinson, where the balance between state power and civil society power plays a key role in the successful longevity of a polity.
4. > If the secular cycles idea holds true, we should expect that polities end with a major crisis event.
I thought you have only shown that polities don't necessarily end with *every* crisis, not that every polity doesn't end with a crisis event? Though arguably if there were only ~180 identifiable crises in the last few thousand years, there sure were many more than ~180 polities that ended during that period. :D
5. > Religions as social glue - This hypothesis seems to be true, but only to a small extent. The major religions seem to make crises less severe, but only by a small amount.
Wondering if this dataset is a good basis to make this assessment.
a) Wouldn't you have to compare p(crisis | polity with shared religion) and p(crisis | similar polity without shared religion)? But you only kinda have p(religious status of polity | crisis)
b) The religion as social glue hypothesis as I understood it should probably be primarily evaluated on the basis of societal size and complexity, instead of crisis intensity, anyway?
6. Overall, I come away thinking that almost all of the narratives (apart from the last one you discuss) seem to me to basically each describe relevant "drivers"/causal mechanisms of change in the world, and they are not incompatible with each other. E.g. you can have secular circles while with each circle there are more resources, slightly better values, slightly better governance, slightly better technology, etc. You can have improving coordination via religions, and better governance through stronger institutions. It is more difficult to maintain more complex institutions, but the payoffs of pulling it off are great.
1) I don't think they have an explicit cause in their dataset, at least I did not see it in the paper or the supplement, but I agree that it would be helpful.
2) It cannot be negative as it only counts the positive reforms. I think they focused on this, as they were mainly interested in increasing living conditions. But I agree here as well and it would have been interesting to also look at negative reforms.
3) True, but also probably a magnitude more work than this already gigantic project.
4) I meant this more in the way that if secular cycles are a thing, every polity should end with a big crisis.
5a) I think this assessment is based on Fig12 in the supplement (https://osf.io/dm5xb). Though after looking at it again, I am not sure if I would really take any conclusion from this. Not sure though if I might be misunderstanding something.
5b) Why? The crisis intensity was what we were interested in here.
6) Agree, human societies are just a clusterfuck of complexity^^
All making sense, yeah, I'm pretty sympathetic to the complexity science point-of-view for large scale societal issues like this. :D
5b) Yeah, *we* are here interested in crisis intensity, but the people who argue for the religion-as-social-glue hypothesis might have been mostly thinking about enabling social complexity through large-scale cooperation. That was the rough impression I got after reading WEIRDest People from Henrich, who seems to be one of the proponents.
Nice, thanks for writing this up, super interesting. Some random questions and thoughts that came up while reading, no pressure to respond:
1. Do they include the cause of the crisis in their data? I find it plausible that it makes a large difference whether the crisis is kinda caused by the polity's government or a natural catastrophe? E.g. the latter might not affect the perceived need for reforms, or even might strengthen the state (never let a crisis go to waste).
2. The reform variable seems kinda odd if it only counts positive change, right? The sum.reform in the charts suggest that the variable is also never negative, so I wonder how they capture crises that worsen the state, e.g. turning it into a more despotic dictatorship with negative outcomes on well-being etc.?
3. It would've been cool if they would have looked at the set of actors and their nature, e.g. how well organized were non-state actors, how cooperative with the state were they, how #extractive were they. Also interesting to think about the narrow corridor idea from Acemoglu and Robinson, where the balance between state power and civil society power plays a key role in the successful longevity of a polity.
4. > If the secular cycles idea holds true, we should expect that polities end with a major crisis event.
I thought you have only shown that polities don't necessarily end with *every* crisis, not that every polity doesn't end with a crisis event? Though arguably if there were only ~180 identifiable crises in the last few thousand years, there sure were many more than ~180 polities that ended during that period. :D
5. > Religions as social glue - This hypothesis seems to be true, but only to a small extent. The major religions seem to make crises less severe, but only by a small amount.
Wondering if this dataset is a good basis to make this assessment.
a) Wouldn't you have to compare p(crisis | polity with shared religion) and p(crisis | similar polity without shared religion)? But you only kinda have p(religious status of polity | crisis)
b) The religion as social glue hypothesis as I understood it should probably be primarily evaluated on the basis of societal size and complexity, instead of crisis intensity, anyway?
6. Overall, I come away thinking that almost all of the narratives (apart from the last one you discuss) seem to me to basically each describe relevant "drivers"/causal mechanisms of change in the world, and they are not incompatible with each other. E.g. you can have secular circles while with each circle there are more resources, slightly better values, slightly better governance, slightly better technology, etc. You can have improving coordination via religions, and better governance through stronger institutions. It is more difficult to maintain more complex institutions, but the payoffs of pulling it off are great.
Thanks for your interest :)
Some quick replies:
1) I don't think they have an explicit cause in their dataset, at least I did not see it in the paper or the supplement, but I agree that it would be helpful.
2) It cannot be negative as it only counts the positive reforms. I think they focused on this, as they were mainly interested in increasing living conditions. But I agree here as well and it would have been interesting to also look at negative reforms.
3) True, but also probably a magnitude more work than this already gigantic project.
4) I meant this more in the way that if secular cycles are a thing, every polity should end with a big crisis.
5a) I think this assessment is based on Fig12 in the supplement (https://osf.io/dm5xb). Though after looking at it again, I am not sure if I would really take any conclusion from this. Not sure though if I might be misunderstanding something.
5b) Why? The crisis intensity was what we were interested in here.
6) Agree, human societies are just a clusterfuck of complexity^^
All making sense, yeah, I'm pretty sympathetic to the complexity science point-of-view for large scale societal issues like this. :D
5b) Yeah, *we* are here interested in crisis intensity, but the people who argue for the religion-as-social-glue hypothesis might have been mostly thinking about enabling social complexity through large-scale cooperation. That was the rough impression I got after reading WEIRDest People from Henrich, who seems to be one of the proponents.
Hmmm yeah fair point. Unfortunately, this is not something that the paper looks at.