#1057 Daniel Hoyer: Cliodynamics, Inequality, Elite Overproduction, and Revolution
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lopes, and today I have a return guest for you, Dr. Daniel Hoyer. He is senior research associate and managing director for CSHAT Global History Data Bank, research scientist with the social AI research group and founder of Sodai. Last time we talked about his great book, Figuring Out the Past. I'm leaving a link to it in the description down below. And today we're talking about cliodynamics or the use of maths and data to study history instead of some other more traditional approaches. So Doctor Hoyer, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to have you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Ricardo. So I mean let's start perhaps with the most basic question here. So what is Cliodynamics? Cliodynamics it is an interesting kind of new field. Really all it means is bringing a sort of scientific method. to study in the past. And so it stands for Clio is sort of the old Greek use of history, which is uh what it's named after
And dynamics is really just the study of how and why things change over time. And so it's trying to bring the kind of formalism, the Um You know, theory testing hypothesis testing from science. into understanding um the way that uh historical societies have changed over time.
And how does it compare to other more traditional approaches in history? It's a really interesting question. I I I think, you know, it's a little more um in line with the traditional approaches than it seems at first. I think it can accommodate many different um methods and tools. I see the main difference as they say is is
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