Most important historical trends
Which longterm trends have best predicted humanity’s trajectory?
This profile is tailored towards students studying economics and history, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
Analysing long-term historical trends – such as economic and technological changes, and changes to human welfare and values – could help decision-makers anticipate major events, prioritise resources and identify the most effective strategies for positively steering the future.
For example, research could focus on key inflection points that caused the world to rapidly transform in the past, or analyse which trends can be used to predict catastrophic events, in order to help humanity prepare for future events. Research could also seek to identify which trends appear most important for making the world a better place; for example those that seem to improve human wellbeing.
If you’re interested in this research direction, you might find helpful information in many of the other profiles we feature, as analysing long-term historical trends could help predict events and inform attempts to improve the world in many areas. For example, this kind of research could help predict great power wars and societal collapses, or improve our understanding of if and why humanity’s moral circle has widened over time. Understanding which historical trends have had the biggest positive impact on the world could also inform attempts to speed up progress and illuminate which metrics we should use to measure it.
See the talk below for an exploration of one approach to using historical trends to predict future events using cliodynamics.
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Research papers
Chaisson, Eric J. (2014) The Natural Science Underlying Big History, Scientific World Journal
Turchin, Peter (2008) Arise Cliodynamics, Nature
Chaisson, Eric J. (2022) Energy Budgets of Evolving Nations and Their Growing Cities, Energies
Goldstone, Jack A. (2010) The New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World, Foreign Affairs
Goudsblom, Johan (2012) Energy and Civilization, International Review of Sociology
Turchin, Peter, et al. (2017) Quantitative Historical Analysis Uncovers a Single Dimension of Complexity That Structures Global Variation in Human Social Organization, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Turchin, Peter, et al. (2021) Rise of the War Machines: Charting the Evolution of Military Technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution, PLoS ONE
Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. (2018) The Anthropocene, Geology Today
Books
Chaisson, Eric J. (2002) Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, Harvard University Press
Christian, David (2011) Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, University of California Press
Diamond, Jared (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel, W. W. Norton
Dyson, George (2012) Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, Basic Books
Evans, Alice (forthcoming) The Great Gender Divergence
Manning, Patrick (2020) Methods for Human History: Studying Social, Cultural, and Biological Evolution, Springer
Maynard Smith, John & Eörs Szathmáry (1995) The Major Transitions in Evolution, Oxford University Press
McNeill, John Robert (2001) Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, W. W. Norton
Morris, Ian (2013) The Measure of Civilisation, Princeton University Press
Pinker, Steven (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Viking
Roth, Paul, & Thomas Ryckman (1995) Chaos, Clio, and Scientistic Illusions of Understanding, History and Theory
Scheidel, Walter (2018) The Great Leveler, Princeton University Press
Smil, Vaclav (2017) Energy: A Beginner’s Guide, Oneworld
Turchin, Peter & Sergey A. Nefedov (2009) Secular Cycles, Princeton University Press
Organisations
Seshat is an organisation creating a global history databank to analyse broad historical trends.
The research and grant-making foundation Open Philanthropy has done some work in this area – see here for an example.
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Big History is an interdisciplinary field that explores the history of the universe. Although this means looking at a history over a much longer timescale than we recommend in this profile, you may find researchers in these communities who are particularly open to the kinds of questions we include here.
There is an active European Big History network which holds regular meetings and the International Big History Association holds conferences.
Many history departments will consider research looking at broad historical trends to be outside the scope of academic historical research, however some universities have institutes or programmes focused on Big History, such as the Dominican University of California and the University of Amsterdam.
You may also want to explore:
80000 Hours’ post on becoming a historian of large social trends and considerations to take into account if you are interested in pursuing this path.
Our World in Data’s list of 12 key metrics to understand the state of the world.
Luke Muehlhauser’s post on whether the industrial revolution seems to have increased human wellbeing by analysing various metrics.
This spreadsheet from Holden Karnofsky mapping out historical events that seemed to have mattered most from the perspective of wellbeing and empowerment and this blog post about whether wellbeing has improved over time.
Contributors: This profile was last updated 31/12/22. Thanks to Elise Bohan for helpful feedback on this profile. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
