Cliometrics

In the paper, we express some doubts about one of the assumptions
of Robert Carneiro’s model on state (and chiefdom) formation,
namely the role of circumscription. In our opinion, the main flaw of
Carneiro’s original theory of state formation is that it implicitly
assumes that every community dreamt to conquer its neighboring
communities. We test the presence of various types of warfare (such
as conquest warfare, land acquisition warfare, and plunder warfare)
in societies with different degrees of political centralization.
Quantitative cross-cultural tests reveal a rather strong correlation
between political complexity and the presence of conquest warfare
suggesting that conquest warfare was virtually absent among
independent communities. Newer works by Carneiro propose a
model explaining how simple chiefdoms could appear in the absence
of conquest warfare. This model also includes circumscription, but
our analysis suggests that it is unnecessary.

Highlighting the events of Egyptian Revolution 2011, various mass­media tried to explain what had caused the riots. Most explanations followed the same pattern, blaming economic stagnation, poverty, inequality, corruption and unemployment. A typical explanation is that " Egyptians have the same complaints that drove Tunisians onto the streets: surging food prices, poverty, unemployment and authoritarian rule that smothers public protests quickly and often brutally ". Such unanimity incited us to investigate to what extent those accusations reflected the Egyptian reality. So we decided to take each of the above mentioned " revolution causes " and to look into the actual dynamics of the relevant socioeconomic indicators in the years preceding the Egyptian revolution. Resumen En los titulares de los eventos de la Revolución egipcia de 2011, varios medios de masas intentaron explicar qué había causado los disturbios. La mayoría de las explicaciones seguían el mismo patrón, protestas por el estancamiento económico, pobreza, desigualdad, corrupción y desempleo. Una explicación típica es que " Los egipcios tienen las mismas quejas que llevaron a los tunecinos a las calles: precios galopantes de los alimentos, pobreza, desempleo y reglas autoritarias que silenciaron las protestas públicas rápida y a menudo brutalmente ". Esa unanimidad nos incitó a investigar hasta qué punto esas actuaciones reflejaban la realidad Egipcia. Así que decidimos tomar cada una de las mencionadas " causas de la revolución " y mirar en la actual dinámica de los indicadores relevantes de la socio­economía, en los días previos a la revolución egipcia. Palabras clave: Egipto, revolución, demografía.

The paper is devoted to the study of sex and age structure of the Old Believed population of Kharkiv province. The influence of the features of legal status of Old Believers and the changes of statistics on the sex ratio among registered Old Believers is detected. The regional features of the demographics of the Old Believed population of Kharkiv province are explored. The age structure of the Old Believed population of the region is analyzed.

The article analyzes the specifics of urbanization dynamics in Egypt, which is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, there was a shift from the logistic trend in the 1970s, and the share of urban population stopped growing. The UN data analysis shows that such a shift usually occurs against the background of very serious economic difficulties (and other problems associated with them). However, the urban population proportion stopped growing in Egypt when the country
was experiencing a period of exceedingly rapid economic growth. We find labor migration of
unprecedented scale to be the main reason which engendered this seemingly paradoxical situation.
We further proceed to analyze the UN forecast on the dynamics of the Egyptian urban population
proportion up to 2050, which implies a return to the logistic trend and rapid growth of the urban
population share, which is fraught with socio-political instability risks. However, we present data
proving that the logistic urbanization trajectory is not inevitable for Egypt, and the destabilization
risks connected with the rapid increase of urban population share are largely irrelevant to Egypt in the forecasted period.

Авторы теории последовательности человеческого развития Р. Инглхарт и К. Вельцель утверждают, что модернизация является одним из основных процессов, формирующих ценностные установки населения. В статье исследуется соотношение
ценностей и модернизации с использованием некоторых элементов методики Инглхарта и Вельцеля на данных Ш. Шварца. В обследовании Шварца выделяются две основные оси ценностей: «сохранение — открытость к изменениям» и «забота о лю-дях — самоутверждение». Нами выявлена разная направленность корреляций между этими двумя ценностными осями в западном мире (включающем страны Европы и бывшие переселенческие колонии обеих Америк и Океании) и афразийском мире.
Действительно, в обоих макрорегионах модернизация (аппроксимируемая через такие показатели, как ВВП на душу населения и доли занятых по секторам экономики)
сопровождается уменьшением ценностей сохранения и ростом ценностей открытости к изменениям, но в западном мире рост открытости сопровождается ростом заботы об окружении, а в афразийском мире — ростом самоутверждения. Мы выдвигаем две гипотезы, позволяющие объяснить противоположную направленность корреляций в данных макрорегионах — нахождение на разных стадиях модернизации и различие в цивилизационных паттернах. Дальнейший анализ показывает, что
обнаруженное различие между Европой и Востоком можно объяснить через стадиальный фактор лишь очень частично. В значительно большей степени речь, видимо,
идет о различных цивилизационных паттернах модернизации ценностей.

It is not surprising that Mubarak's administration " overlooked " the social explosion. Indeed, statistical data righteously claimed that the country was developing very successfully. Economic growth rates were high (even in the crisis years). Poverty and inequality levels were among the lowest in the Third World. Global food prices were rising, but the government was taking serious measures to mitigate their effect on the poorest layers of the population. Unemployment level (in per cent) was less than in many developed countries of the world and, moreover, was declining, and so were population growth rates. What would be the grounds to expect a full-scale social explosion? Of course, the administration had a sort of reliable information on the presence of certain groups of dissident " bloggers " , but how could one expect that they would be able to inspire to go to the Tahrir any great masses of people? It was even more difficult to figure out that Mubarak's regime would be painfully struck by its own modernization successes of the 1980s, which led to the sharp decline of crude death rate and especially of infant and child mortality in 1975–1990. Without these successes many young Egyptians vehemently demanding Mubarak's resignation (or even death) would have been destined to die in early childhood and simply would not have survived to come out to the Tahrir Square.

Oyun teorisinin tarih biliminde uygulanmasını ve analizini içeren bu araştırmada amaç, dış politika tarihi, siyasi tarih ve sosyal tarih gibi alanlarda olay – olgu ilişkisini ve olaylardaki sapmaları tespit etmektir. Kısaca, tarihsel olaylar arasındaki sapmaları, bu olayların sonuca ya da olguya etkisini ve tarihsel olaylara karşı oluşan tepkileri sistemli bir şekilde incelemektir. Bunun yanında değişen diplomatik, sosyal ya da askeri durum ve tepkilerin hangi olaylarda belirginleştiği de araştırmanın bir parçasını teşkil etmektedir. Ortaya çıkan tepkilerin incelenmesi, sınıflandırılması ve değerlendirilmesini de içeren bu araştırma, dış politika alanında Milli Mücadele’yi, siyasi alanda Osmanlı – Bizans Savaşı’nı, sosyal alanda da Milli Mücadele’de İtalyan kamuoyunu kapsamaktadır.

The authors suggest to view the origins of Islam against the background of the 6th century AD Arabian socio-ecological crisis whose model is specified in the paper through the study of cli-matological, seismological, volcanological and epidemiological history of the period. Most so-cio-political systems of the Arabs reacted to the socio-ecological crisis by getting rid of the rig-id supra-tribal political structures (kingdoms and chiefdoms) which started posing a real threat to their very survival. The decades of fighting which led to the destruction of the most of the Arabian kingdoms and chiefdoms (reflected in Ayyam al-`Arab tradition) led to the elabora-tion of some definite "anti-royal" freedom-loving tribal ethos. At the beginning of the 7th cen-tury a tribe which would recognize themselves as subjects of some terrestrial super-tribal polit-ical authority, a "king", risked to lose its honour. However, this seems not to be applicable to the authority of another type, the "celestial" one. At the meantime the early 7th century evi-dences the merging of the Arabian tradition of prophecy and the Arabian Monotheist "Rah-manist" tradition which produced "the Arabian prophetic movement". The Monotheist "Rahmanist" prophets appear to have represented a supratribal authority just of the type many Arab tribes were looking for at this very time, which seems to explain to a certain extent those prophets' political success (including the extreme political success of Muhammad).

The authors quantitatively analyse the long-term dynamics of technological progress from 40,000 BCE and offer projections through the 22nd century. We provide one method to measure technological progress over that time period, using a simple hyperbolic equation, yt = C/(t0 – t), as our model. We define yt as the
technological growth rate, measured as number of technological phase transitions per unit of time. Our method measures the worldwide technology dynamic growth
with an accuracy of R2 = 0.99. We find the singularity date occurs in the early 21st century and expect a new powerful acceleration of technological development
after the 2030s followed by a slow-down in the late 21st and early 22nd centuries. The authors discuss the role of global ageing as one of the main factors in both the technological acceleration and the subsequent deceleration.

У монографії на прикладі старообрядницьких общин Харківщини прослідковано вплив релігійних уявлень на характер об’єднання віруючих у соціальні спільноти різних масштабів, показані закономірності трансформації цих спільнот під впливом внутрішньої логіки розвитку конфесійних угрупувань та зовнішніх факторів. На основі сучасних статистичних підходів визначені масштаби применшення чисельності старообрядців Харківської губернії у матеріалах офіційного обліку ХІХ – початку ХХ ст. Виявлені чинники, що зумовлювали зміни кількості офіційно зареєстрованих та таємних старовірів регіону, визначено вплив регіональних та конфесійних особливостей на статевовікові характеристики старообрядницької спільноти Харківщини. ........................... В монографии на примере старообрядческих общин Харьковского региона прослежено влияние религиозных представлений на характер объединения верующих в социальные сообщества разных уровней, показаны закономерности трансформации этих сообществ под влиянием внутренней логики развития конфессиональных групп и внешних факторов.
На основе современных статистических методик выяснены масштабы приуменьшения численности старообрядцев Харьковской губернии в материалах официального учёта XIX – начала ХХ вв. Выявлены факторы, которые обуславливали изменения количества официально зарегистрированных и тайных старообрядцев региона, описано влияние региональных и конфессиональных особенностей на половозрастные характеристики старообрядческого населения Харьковской губернии.

От издателя
В монографии демонстрируется возможность глубокой исторической реконструкции эволюции мифологических систем на основе системного анализа фольклорно-мифологических и генетических данных. Особое внимание уделяется происхождению и эволюции дуалистических космогоний. Предлагается реконструкция наиболее архаических протодуалистических космогоний, локализуемых в Юго-Восточной Азии; прослеживаются пути распространения и трансформации данного мифологического комплекса. Исследуется проникновение дуалистических космогоний в Северную Америку и их распространение по Северной Евразии. Анализируется возможность проникновения дуалистических мотивов от протофинноугров к протоиранцам в период "федоровского контакта". Рассматривается распространение и трансформация дуалистических космогоний на Ближнем Востоке и в Западной Евразии.

Книга рассчитана на широкий круг читателей, интересующихся древнейшей историей человечества, эволюцией мифологических систем, а также проблемами интеграции точных, естественных и социальных наук.

Еремеев Павел Викторович. Современное состояние и перспективы развития исторической информатики: по результатам XIV конференции Ассоциации «История и компьютер».
В статье рассматриваются современные тенденции и перспективы развития исторической информатики по результатам конференции,  проведенной Ассоциацией «История и компьютер» в Подмосковье 3–5 октября  2014 г. Охарактеризованы основные направления современных дискуссий относительно соотношения терминов «историческая информатика» и «Digital History», проанализированы отличия мировых  тенденций развития исторической  информатики и ситуации на постсоветском пространстве.
Ключевые слова: историческая информатика, Digital History, Ассоциация «История и Компьютер».

Pavlo Yeremieiev. Current state and development prospects of Historical Information Science: on the results of the 14th Conference of the Association for History and Computing.
The paper deals with the contemporary tend of the development of the Historical Information Science on the results of the conference, which was organized by the Association for History and Computing in Moscow suburbs on 3–5 October 2014. The discussions  about  the correlation between the terms «Historical Information Science» and «Digital History» are described. The difference between the World’s tend in Historical Information Science and the situation on the Post-Soviet state is analyzed.
Keywords: Historical Information Science, Digital History, Association for History and Computing.

Source: Актуальные проблемы глобальных исследований: ценности глобального мира / под ред. И.В. Ильина. – М., МООСИПНН Н.Д. Кондратьева, 2018. C. 92-118.

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, the authors of the Human Development Sequence Theory, suggest modernization to be one of the main processes forming the value structures in a population. The current paper investigates the relation between values and modernization applying some elements of the method proposed by Inglehart and Welzel to the data of Shalom Schwartz. The values survey by Schwartz specifies two main value axes, namely conservation/openness to change and self-transcendence/self-enhancement. Our research has revealed that the correlation between these two value axes differs in its direction when estimated for " macro-Europe " (including Europe and former settlement colonies of North and South America and Oceania) and " Afrasia " (including Asia and Africa). In the Western world there is a significant positive correlation between openness to change and self-transcendence, while in the Eastern world this correlation is strong, significant, and negative. We investigate the possible impact of modernization on this difference. To do this, we approximate modernization through such indicators as GDP per capita and the proportions of the labour force employed in various sectors of the economy. We find that in both megazones modernization is accompanied by increasing openness to

Reviews: Bonifay, M. 2016. Journal of Roman Archaeology 29: 880-85; Stone, D.L. 2016. American Journal of Archaeology (online) 120.4 (October); McCarty, M. M. 2016. Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2016.04.36).

This study attempts to evaluate the social implications of economic changes that
occurred in Roman North Africa between the fall of Carthage in 146 BC and the arrival
of the Vandals in the mid-5th century AD. Several authors have argued that Africa
experienced significant economic growth during this period. Some have even argued
that this increase in economic activity resulted in the lower orders being substantially
better off by late Antiquity than they had been previously. Here, as well as assembling
much quantitative information, I examine the qualitative elements which
characterised this specific period of expansion in economic activity, manifested most
clearly in the increasing exportation of African ceramics to Rome in the late 2nd century
AD and the intensification of agricultural production visible in the remains of farms
specialising in the production of olive oil and wine.

I repudiate the use of certain modern economic concepts such as GDP, per
capita income, and consumer behaviour, which I see as reflecting the
neoliberalisation of the study of the Roman economy. In their place, I attempt to
substitute an approach that examines the changing structure of ancient North African
society in its particular historical context. Substantial use is made of archaeological
data, as well as literary and epigraphic sources, to try to piece together this structure.

A primary conclusion is that, from the point of the Roman conquest onward,
high levels of inequality existed between Afriac's various social classes. Whilst the
landscape of North Africa changed hugely during the course of the Roman period,
privileged elites were able, at all times, to secure a high degree of personal wealth at
the expense of an exploited mass of peasants and agricultural labourers. The structural
inequalities between classes that existed in the aftermath of the conquest, although
qualitatively altered, still existed nearly six centuries later, in spite of considerable
economic growth having occurred.

Human society is a complex nonequilibrium system that changes and develops constantly. Complexity, multivariability, and contradictoriness of social evolution lead researchers to a logical conclusion that any simplification, reduction, or neglect of the multiplicity of factors leads inevitably to the multiplication of error and to significant
misunderstanding of the processes under study. The view that any simple general laws are not observed at all with respect to social evolution has become totally predominant within the academic community, especially among those who specialize in the Humanities
and who confront directly in their research all the manifold unpredictability of social processes. A way to approach human society as an extremely complex system is to recognize differences of abstraction and time scale between different levels. If the main task
of scientific analysis is to detect the main forces acting on systems so as to discover fundamental laws at a sufficiently coarse scale, then abstracting from details and deviations from general rules may help to identify measurable deviations from these laws in finer
detail and shorter time scales. Modern achievements in the field of mathematical modeling suggest that social evolution can be described with rigorous and sufficiently simple macrolaws.

The 20th century revolutionary process had a big impact on the World System and significantly changed its entire configuration. However, there are essential gaps in terms of theoretical approaches, in particular, in terms of the typology of revolutions. Moreover, there is clearly insufficient research related to qualitative and quantitative analysis and consideration of the revolutions of the 20th century in their entirety. This article aims to fill those gaps by pursuing three main goals: (1) comparison of revolutions of the 20th and 19th centuries, highlighting the important characteristics of the former; (2) classification of revolutions of the 20th century; (3) identification of the main revolutionary waves of the 20th century and their essential characteristics.

Human society is a complex nonequilibrium system that changes and develops constantly. Complexity, multivariability, and contradictoriness of social evolution lead researchers to a logical conclusion that any simplification, reduction, or neglect of the multiplicity of factors leads inevitably to the multiplication of error and to significant
misunderstanding of the processes under study. The view that any simple general laws are not observed at all with respect to social evolution has become totally predominant within the academic community, especially among those who specialize in the Humanities
and who confront directly in their research all the manifold unpredictability of social processes. A way to approach human society as an extremely complex system is to recognize differences of abstraction and time scale between different levels. If the main task
of scientific analysis is to detect the main forces acting on systems so as to discover fundamental laws at a sufficiently coarse scale, then abstracting from details and deviations from general rules may help to identify measurable deviations from these laws in finer
detail and shorter time scales. Modern achievements in the field of mathematical modeling suggest that social evolution can be described with rigorous and sufficiently simplemacrolaws.
This book discusses general regularities of the World System growth. It is shown that they can be described mathematically in a rather accurate way with rather simple models.

Human society is a complex nonequilibrium system that changes and develops constantly. Complexity, multivariability, and contradictions of social evolution lead researchers to a logical conclusion that any simplification, reduction, or neglect of the multiplicity of factors leads inevitably to the multiplication of error and to significant misunderstanding of the processes under study. The view that any simple general laws are not observed at all with respect to social evolution has become totally dominant within the academic community, especially among those who specialize in the Humanities and who confront directly in their research the manifold unpredictability of social processes. A way to approach human society as an extremely complex system is to recognize differences of abstraction and time scale between different levels. If the main task of scientific analysis is to detect the main forces acting on systems so as to discover fundamental laws at a sufficiently coarse scale, then abstracting from details and deviations from general rules may help to identify measurable deviations from these laws in finer detail and shorter time scales. Modern achievements in the field of mathematical modeling suggest that social evolution can be described with rigorous and sufficiently simple macrolaws.
The first book of the Introduction (Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2006) discusses general regularities of the World System long-term development. It is shown that they can be described mathematically in a rather accurate way with rather simple models. In this book the authors analyze more complex regularities of its dynamics on shorter scales, as well as dynamics of its constituent parts paying special attention to "secular" cyclical dynamics. It is shown that the structure of millennial trends cannot be adequately understood without secular cycles being taken into consideration. In turn, for an adequate understanding of cyclical dynamics the millennial trend background should be taken into account.

This article offers a mathematical model describing the influence of one of the major factors of the World System's macrodynamics throughout most of its history (since the 'urban revolution')-the interaction between civilizations and their tribal peripheries. The proposed mathematical model is intended to describe the possible influence of the interaction between the World System civilizational core and its tribal periphery on the formation of the specific curve of the world urbanization dynamics. It simulates completion of the phase transition, behavior of the system in the attraction basin and beginning of the phase transition to the attraction basin of the new attractor and is aimed at identifying the role of the factor of interaction between the civilizational core and barbarian periphery in the formation of attractor effect during the completion of phase transition, that is for clarification of the reasons why there was observed not only the slowdown of growth rates of the main indicators of the World System development after completion of phase transitions during its development, but also their falling with the subsequent temporary stabilization near some equilibrium level.

Human society is a complex nonequilibrium system that changes and develops constantly. Complexity, multivariability, and contradictions of social evolution lead researchers to a logical conclusion that any simplification, reduction, or neglect of the multiplicity of factors leads inevitably to the multiplication of error and to significant misunderstanding of the processes under study. The view that any simple general laws are not observed at all with respect to social evolution has become totally dominant within the academic community, especially among those who specialize in the Humanities and who confront directly in their research the manifold unpredictability of social processes. A way to approach human society as an extremely complex system is to recognize differences of abstraction and time scale between different levels. If the main task of scientific analysis is to detect the main forces acting on systems so as to discover fundamental laws at a sufficiently coarse scale, then abstracting from details and deviations from general rules may help to identify measurable deviations from these laws in finer detail and shorter time scales. Modern achievements in the field of mathematical modeling suggest that social evolution can be described with rigorous and sufficiently simple macrolaws.
The first book of the Introduction (Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2006) discusses general regularities of the World System long-term development. It is shown that they can be described mathematically in a rather accurate way with rather simple models. In the second book (Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2006) the authors analyze more complex regularities of its dynamics on shorter scales, as well as dynamics of its constituent parts paying special attention to "secular" cyclical dynamics. It is shown that the structure of millennial trends cannot be adequately understood without secular cycles being taken into consideration. In turn, for an adequate understanding of cyclical dynamics the millennial trend background should be taken into account.
In this book the authors analyze the interplay of trend and cyclical dynamics in Egypt and Subsaharan Africa.

Extremely simple mathematical models are shown to be able to account for 99.2–99.91 per cent of all the variation in economic and demographic macrodynamics of the world for almost two millennia of its history. In this article we show that it is in no way coincidental that the world GDP dynamics in 1–1973 is approximated so well with a quadratic hyperbola, whereas the world population one does with a simple hyperbola. This appears to suggest a novel approach to the formation of the general theory of social macroevolution.

The idea that in the near future we should expect “the Singularity” has become quite popular recently, primarily thanks to the activities of Google technical director in the field of machine training Raymond Kurzweil and his book The Singularity Is Near (2005). It is shown that the mathematical analysis of the series of events (described by Kurzweil in his famous book), which starts with the emergence of our Galaxy and ends with the decoding of the DNA code, is indeed ideally described by an extremely simple mathematical function (not known to Kurzweil himself) with a singularity in the region of 2029. It is also shown that, a similar time series (beginning with the onset of life on Earth and ending with the information revolution – composed by the Russian physicist Alexander Panov completely independently of Kurzweil) is also practically perfectly described by a mathematical function (very similar to the above and not used by Panov) with a singularity in the region of 2027. It is shown that this function is also extremely similar to the equation discovered in 1960 by Heinz von Foerster and published in his famous article in the journal “Science” – this function almost perfectly describes the dynamics of the world population and is characterized by a mathematical singularity in the region of 2027. All this indicates the existence of sufficiently rigorous global macroevolutionary regularities (describing the evolution of complexity on our planet for a few billion of years), which can be surprisingly accurately described by extremely simple mathematical functions. At the same time it is demonstrated that in the region of the singularity point there is no reason, after Kurzweil, to expect an unprecedented (many orders of magnitude) acceleration of the rates of technological development. There are more grounds for interpreting this point as an indication of an inflection point, after which the pace of global evolution will begin to slow down systematically in the long term.

This article offers a comparison of sociopolitical instability forecasting systems. It compares systematically their efficiency by correlating their predictions for particular years with actual levels of destabilization in the respective years. It is demonstrated that the predictive capacity of those systems dropped dramatically after 2011. This is shown to be connected with the fact that the Arab Spring in 2011 acted as a trigger for a global phase transition, resulting in the World System making a transition to a qualitatively new phase, with the emergence of new patterns that are not taken into account by forecasting systems developed before its beginning.

Demographic changes associated with the transformation from traditional to advanced economies are the basis for many of today's theories of violent and non-violent protest formation. Both levels of urbanization and the size of the "youth bulge" have shown to be reliable measures for predicting protest events in a country. As these two processes result from modernization, it seems logical to hypothesize that the combined effect of the rise in urbanization and the increase in the youth population, urban youth bulge, would be a more relevant predictor for protests. Our tests on cross-national timeseries data from 1950 to 2010 for 98 countries reveal that the combined effect of the two forces is an important predictor of anti-government protests. It may seem that the role of the urban youth bulge would appear to be an issue of the past as in more recent decades the proportion of the urban youth tends to decline in most countries of the world. However, this factor tends to be very relevant for many developing countries where both youth bulges have been growing for several decades and the general urban population is on the rise.

Представление о том, что в ближайшее время нас ждет некая «Сингулярность», стало в последнее время
достаточно популярным, прежде всего благодаря деятельности технического директора Google в области
технического обучения Рэймонда Курцвейла и его книге The Singularity Is Near (2005). Показано, что
математический анализ приводимого им ряда событий, начинающегося с возникновения нашей Галактики
и заканчивающегося расшифровкой кода ДНК, действительно практически идеально описывается
(неизвестной самому Курцвейлу) крайне простой математической функцией с сингулярностью в районе
2029 г. Показано также, что составленный в начале 2000-х (совершенно независимо от Курцвейла)
российким физиком А. Д. Пановым аналогичный временной ряд (начинающийся с возникновения жизни
на Земле и заканчивающийся информационной революцией) также практически идеально описывается
(не использованной А. Д. Пановом) математической функцией (крайне сходной с вышеупомянутой) с
сингулярностью в районе 2027 г. Показано, что эта функция также чрезвычайно сходна с уравнением,
открытым в 1960 г. Х. фон Ферстером, показавшим в своей знаменитой статье в журнале Science, что она
практически идеально описывает динамику численности населения и характеризуется математической
сингулярностью в районе 2027 г. Все это говорит о наличии достаточно строгих глобальных
макроэволюционных закономерностей, которые могут удивительно точно описываться крайне простыми
математическими функциями. Вместе с тем продемонстрировано, что в районе точки сингулярности
нет основания вслед за Курцвейлом ожидать невиданного (на много порядков) ускорения темпов
технологического развития; имеются бóльшие основания интерпретировать эту точку как индикатор зоны
перегиба, после прохождения которой темпы глобальной эволюции будут систематически в долгосрочной
перспективе замедляться.

This article analyzes the hierarchy of factors in the development of crisis trends in a consolidated democracy using the example of the United States of America. The authors assess the surge of political instability in the United States, which led to the deconsolidation of the liberal democracy regime, through the prism of centrifugal processes within the American elite and the erosion of democratic institutions over the past 30 years. The main problem of the study is the contradiction between the crisis of democratic regimes in the countries of the Euro-Atlantic region and the high indicators of the factors of the consolidation of democracy, according to classical political science theories. The authors use the path analysis method to determine the main path and hierarchy of factors of erosion of the liberal democracy regime in the United States, which is an example of the "old" democracy and, according to traditional political science, is the most protected from destructive processes. Consideration of the case of deconsolidation of the liberal democracy regime in the United States, thus, sheds light on the possible ways of democracy reversion and risk factors for stability of democratic political systems.

Abstract: The authors suggest to view the origins of Islam against the background of the 6th century AD Arabian socio-ecological crisis whose model is specified in the paper through the study of clima-tological, seismological, volcanological and epidemiological history of the period. Most socio-po-litical systems of the Arabs reacted to the socio-ecological crisis by getting rid of the rigid supra-tribal political structures (kingdoms and chiefdoms) which started posing a real threat to their very survival. The decades of fighting which led to the ...

Among many influences that the pandemic has and will have on society and the World System as a whole, one of the most important is the acceleration of the start of a new technological wave and a new technological paradigm in the near future. This impact is determined by the growing need for the development of a number of areas in medicine, bio-and nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and others, which we denote as "MANBRIC convergence". It is shown that the experience of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed that the final phase of the Cybernetic Revolution will begin in the 2030s at the intersection of a number of medical, bio, digital and several other technologies, with medical needs as an integrating link. Among the multitude of self-regulating systems in the economy and life (which, in our opinion, will flourish during the Cybernetic Revolution) sociotechnical self-regulating systems (SSSs) will play a special role. Thus, COVID-19 becomes a powerful impetus not only in terms of accelerating technological development and approaching the final phase of the Cybernetic Revolution, but also in changing sociopolitical (and socio-administrative) relations in the forthcoming decades.

Our article draws attention to a crucial factor frequently omitted from the global development agenda, namely the explosive population growth inevitably expected in Tropical Africa in the nearest decades as a result of the region's laggardness in fertility transition. Population doubling (or even tripling) in the next decades can seriously undermine the development prospects of Tropical African countries and lead to sociopolitical destabilization or even large-scale violent conflicts with possibly global consequences. Bringing down the population growth rates (mainly through substantially reducing the fertility rates) appears to be crucial for the achievement of the 1977 " Goals for Mankind, " as well as the Millennium Development Goals, and, as we proceed to show, can be most effectively achieved through substantially increasing female secondary education, which, in turn, should be achieved by introducing compulsory secondary education and making it the first-rate development priority.

The spatial distribution of folklore-mythological motifs is shown to correlate rather tightly with the distribution of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome (NRY) haplogroups. The analysis of spatial distribution of folklore mythological motifs confirms earlier findings of geneticists which identified South Siberia as the Old World homeland of the main wave of the peopling of the New World (the diffusion of the respective populations in the New World turns out to be associated with the spread of Clovis and para-Clovis archaeological cultures). Indeed, this is just South Siberia where the highest concentration of the Amerindian folklore-mythological motifs in Eurasia is observed. On the other hand, it turns out to be possible to connect the penetration of mtDNA HG C and NRY HG Q > Q3 to the New World with this migration wave. The spatial distribution of the 'Circumgobi-Amerindian' folklore-mythological motifs follows rather closely the distribution of mtDNA HG C in the New World. This makes it possible to reconstruct up to a considerable detail the mythology brought to the New World from South Siberia by this migration wave. Another migration wave turns out to be associated with the distribution of mtDNA HG B and motifs of 'Melazonian' mythological complex whose highest concentration is observed in Melanesia, on the one hand, and Amazonia, on the other. These motifs form a few connected sets, which suggest certain possibilities for the *

The hypothesis that population pressure causes increased warfare has been recently criticized on the empirical grounds. Both studies focusing on specific historical societies and analyses of cross-cultural data fail to find positive correlation between population density and incidence of warfare. In this paper we argue that such negative results do not falsify the population-warfare hypothesis. Population and warfare are dynamical variables, and if their interaction causes sustained oscillations, then we do not in general expect to find strong correlation between the two variables measured at the same time (that is, unlagged). We explore mathematically what the dynamical patterns of interaction between population and warfare (focusing on internal warfare) might be in both stateless and state societies. Next, we test the model predictions in several empirical case studies: early modern England, Han and Tang China, and the Roman Empire. Our empirical results support the population-warfare theory: we find that there is a tendency for population numbers and internal warfare intensity to oscillate with the same period but shifted in phase (with warfare peaks following population peaks). Furthermore, the rates of change of the two variables behave precisely as predicted by the theory: population rate of change is negatively affected by warfare intensity, while warfare rate of change is positively affected by population densityKey words: population, warfare, dynamics, nonlinear feedback loops, mathematical models.