Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Andreas Hoffman and I now have our working paper posted at PhilPapers. Here is the abstract: The paper aims to explore what it means for something to be a social cycle, for a theory to be a social cycle theory, and to offer a suggestion for a simple, yet, we believe, fundamentally grounded schema for categorizing them. We show that a broad range of cycle theories can be described within the concept of disruption and adjustments. Further, many important cycle theories are true endogenous social cycle theories in which the theory provides a reason why the cycle should recur. We find that many social cycle theories fit with a two-population disruption and adjustment model similar to the well-known predator-prey model. This implies that a general modeling framework could be established for creating agent-based models of many social cycle theories.

From a very interesting paper using a predator-prey model to capture the business cycle: "From a financial markets viewpoint, the implication is of course that everyone could be buying a stock that each one of the investors privately thinks is overvalued, but which nevertheless keeps soaring because the purchase decision is not made on the basis on one's individual assessment of the asset value itself but of everyone else's assessment: in short, this interpretation says that, in a financial 'bubble', an asset price would go up because everyone is buying it, and everyone would buy it because it is going up, regardless of its fundamentals." This definition seems sound to me, and contra Scott Sumner, it shows how we can have a bubble even if we cannot reliably profit from the fact that it exists: we have no idea how long people will keep buying an asset because everyone else is buying it.

"Except during short intervals of time, people are always governed by an elite. I use the word elite (It. aristocrazia ) in its etymological sense, meaning the strongest, the most energetic, and most capable--for good as well as evil. However, due to an important physiological law, elites do not last. Hence--the history of man is the history of the continuous replacement of certain elites: as one ascends, another declines... "The new elite which six to supersede the old one, or merely to share its power and honors, does not admit to such an intention frankly and openly. Instead it assumes the leadership of all the oppressed, declares that it will pursue not its own good but the good of the many; and it goes to battle, not for the rights of restricted class, but for the rights of almost the entire citizenry. Of course, once victory is won, it subjugates the erstwhile allies..." -- The rise and fall of the elites , p. 36

"there is a rhythm of sentiment which we can observe in ethics, in religion, and in politics as waves resembling the business cycle." -- The Rise and Fall of the Elites , p. 31

"It is well known at the Stock Exchange the public at large buys only in a rising market and sells in a declining one. The financiers who, because of their greater practice in this business, use their reason to a greater extent, although they too sometimes allow themselves to be swayed by sentiment, do the opposite, and this is the main source of their gains." -- The Rise and Fall of Elites , p. 94

"Now the first of these [political forms] to come into being is monarchy, it's growth being natural and unaided; and next arises kingship derived from monarchy by the aid of art and by the correction of defects. Monarchy first changes into its vicious allied form, tyranny; and next, the abolishment of both gives birth to aristocracy. Aristocracy by its very nature degenerates into oligarchy; and when the commons inflamed by anger take vengeance on this government for its unjust rule, democracy comes into being; and in due course the licence and lawlessness of this form of government produces mob-rule to complete the series. The truth of what I have just said will be quite clear to anyone who pays due attention to such beginnings, origins, and changes as are in each case natural. For he alone who has seen how each form naturally arises and develops, will be able to see when, how, and where the growth, perfection, change, and end of each are likely to occur again. And it is to t...

"In the Way of Rhythm a round of experiences, forming a determinate sequence of contrasts attainable within a definite method, are codified so that the end of one such cycle is the proper antecedent stage for the beginning of another such cycle. The cycle is such that its own completion provides the conditions for its own mere repetition." -- The Function of Reason , p. 21

"The invention of this theory of cycles in the history of mankind was a natural corollary to the sensational astronomical discovery, apparently made in the Babylonic society at some date between the eighth and the sixth centuries BC, that the three conspicuous and familiar cycles--the day-and-night, the lunar month and the solar year--were not the only examples of periodic recurrence in the movements of the heavenly ; that there was also a larger coordination of stellar movements embracing all the planets as well as Earth, Moon and Sun; and that 'the music of the spheres', which was made by the harmony of this heavenly chorus, came round full circle, chord for chord, in a great cycle which dwarfed the solar year into insignificance." -- Toynbee, A Study of History , p 251

T HE  world's great age begins anew,     The golden years return,   The earth doth like a snake renew     Her winter weeds outworn;   Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam     Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.     A brighter Hellas rears its mountains     From waves serener far;   A new Peneus rolls his fountains     Against the morning star;   Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep   Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.     A loftier Argo cleaves the main,     Fraught with a later prize;   Another Orpheus sings again,   And loves, and weeps, and dies;   A new Ulysses leaves once more   Calypso for his native shore.

"We have seen, in fact, that when, in the history of any society, a creative minority generates into a dominant minority which attempts to retain by force a position that it has ceased to merit, this change in the character of the ruling element provokes, on the other side, the secession of a proletariat which no longer admires and imitates its rulers and revolts against it servitude. We have also seen that this proletariat, when it asserts itself, is divided from the outset into two distinct parts. There is an internal proletariat, prostrate tand recalcitrant, and an external proletariat beyond the frontiers who now violently resisted incorporation." -- A Study of History , p. 246

These people have totally topped me:

Brad DeLong highlights a paper that appears to do this. The conclusion? We had a Hayekian problem, but we've dispensed with that. Now we are having a Keynesian problem. Anyway, this makes the point I've been repeating: Hayek and Keynes both had sensible cycle theories, and their theories are not even contradictory. There is no reason we can't have structural maladjustments and aggregate demand shortfalls at the same time, or in succession.

Let us try to distinguish true social cycle theories from cycle theories involving humans but not representing true social cycles. Let us define a true social cycle as one in which both the initial disruption, the subsequent adjustments, the disruptions that follow them, the adjustments that follow on, and so on, are all primarily social in nature, i.e., they are driven by human action and the social environment that gives human action its setting. Let us offer a paradigmatic case of a true cycle that is not a social cycle: the spike in the sale of sunscreen in the summer, and its trough in the winter. This cycle clearly includes human action and social factors, but the primary driver of the cycle is the earth's rotation around the sun, a distinctly non-human, non-social phenomenon. That, we will say, is a genuine cycle, but not a social cycle. The fact that farmers en masse plant corn in the spring and harvest it in late summer is another such cycle: it is obviously true that...

We don't follow fashion That would be a joke You know we're going to set them, set them So everyone can take note, take note -- Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni In his book Knowledge and Coordination , Daniel Klein distinguishes between mutual coordination and concatenate coordination. Mutual coordination is coordination which people intend: you and I plan to meet for lunch, or several con artists devise a scheme to defraud an elderly widow of her fortune. Concatenate coordination is coordination that is pleasing to an observer: one of Klein's examples is a room designed with a harmonious combination of colors, shapes, and so on. It is important to note that successful mutual coordination does not imply concatenate coordination. If the con artists pull off their scheme to defraud the widow, they will have achieved mutual coordinaiton that is not concatenate coordination. (I really cannot do this schema full justice here; I am just introducing it to make sense ...

Joseph Fetz posts an interesting video on a day without a traffic light versus one with the light at a fairly busy intersection. It certainly gives one things to think about. But if you click through to YouTube, you find people making ludicrous claims about what the video "proves": no regulations are necessary and so on. Here is the actual question the video raises: when do we need explicit signalling mechanisms to coordinate our actions, and when can we get by without them? It has nothing at all to do with state versus non-state solutions: Plenty of private entities create plenty of explicit signalling mechanisms: factories have bells to start and end work, private parking lots erect stop signs and create one-way lanes, drummers count bands into a song, coaches call out set plays in basketball, the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. Sometimes these are a good idea, sometimes not: For instance, I have seen it suggested that basketball coaches are far too anxious to r...

Lewis discusses a situation where everyone wears a raincoat because they see others wearing raincoats. Say, the first person up and about puts one on as a lark, the second person sees her and says, "Oh, my, rain!" and puts his on, and so on. He makes the following important observation about the rationality of the situation: It may be that everyone was completely reasonable in inferring and acting as he did -- although no one will think so when he learns what happened. The manifest irrationality of the group may not be due to any irrationality of its members. It is no mistake to expect rain when one sees people in raincoats, despite the bad results of doing so this time. -- p. 120 I think this idea has very important implications for the study my colleague and I have launched into on a general theory of the social cycle: group irrationality may arise in the presence of uniformly rational behavior on the part of individuals. (And it is nice to see it demonstrated in a situ...

Food fads come in cycles as well: 'Even The Wall Street Journal applied its business lingo to the trend's end in 2010, with writer Katy McLaughlin declaring that "we are in the midst of a bacon bubble," and that it was bursting.' (Hat tip Andrew Sullivan.) UPDATE: How can Google generate such God-awful HTML code? (You know what I mean if you saw how the first version of this post was formatted.) When I pasted in a single quote from The Atlantic , Blogger put in literally about a dozen "span" tags, tags that wound up making the text look ridiculous. All of that work to achieve a horrific result!

More on social cycles at ThinkMarkets.

Some nut job over at Think Markets purports to be working on " a general theory of the social cycle "! What hubris.