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Peter Turchin: End Times

The Book Club

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The Cycles of Human Society

I was trained as a radical biologist. And actually, I'm a complexity scientist. Until the age of 40, I was studying population cycles in insects and mammals,. Such as lemics, for example, deer. Well, what happened was that at that point, I felt that he sort of solved the really major questions. We can use a variety of, often, we call them proxies. For example, how do you measure popular immiseration in the past? If you don't have records telling you about the terrible life of peasants, which is often the case because the nobility didn't care that much about them. There is a very useful biological proxy, a proxy for biological well

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