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The Secular Cycles of History
There is one very general pattern in history, which we call secular cycles. Historical societies are affected by recurrent waves of political instability that tend to happen every couple centuries or so. And it turns out that there is a very interesting historian specializing in Southeast Asia who has discovered exactly the same pattern. The difference between identifying patterns or quantifying patterns and testing causal hypothesis seems to me the more tricky step in the case of human history.