Five thousand years of data. Draw your own conclusions.

The Cliodynamist

Five thousand years of data. Draw your own conclusions.

Latest Articles

The Eight-Person Rule: Why History's Most Effective Teams Were Never the Biggest Ones
Technology & Media

The Eight-Person Rule: Why History's Most Effective Teams Were Never the Biggest Ones

From the Macedonian hypaspists to the Manhattan Project's inner core, the historical record consistently rewards small, elite groups over large, coordinated ones when the stakes are highest. Modern corporations have built elaborate org charts that ignore roughly five thousand years of evidence about the upper limits of human cooperation. The science has a name for this ceiling — and your last all-hands meeting almost certainly blew past it.
The Oldest Mistake in the Book: What Five Millennia of Monetary Collapse Tell Us About Modern Central Banking
Technology & Media

The Oldest Mistake in the Book: What Five Millennia of Monetary Collapse Tell Us About Modern Central Banking

From Roman coin-clippers to Weimar printing presses, the mechanics of monetary debasement have remained stubbornly unchanged across five thousand years of civilizations that each believed they were navigating unprecedented territory. Central bankers today are not pioneering new errors — they are rehearsing a script so old it predates the alphabet. The psychological playbook behind every collapse is identical, and we have the receipts.
The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Digg: A Decade of Digital Democracy
Technology & Media

The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Digg: A Decade of Digital Democracy

Few stories in the history of the American internet are as instructive — or as cautionary — as that of Digg, the social news aggregator that once rivaled Google in cultural cachet. From its meteoric rise in the mid-2000s to its dramatic collapse and subsequent attempts at reinvention, Digg's trajectory offers a masterclass in the volatile economics of attention, community, and platform design.