Bret Devereaux

...that idea, presented as somehow Turchin's genius goes back to - and I am not kidding - Heraclitus of Ephesus (d. 475 BC) and was put into modern scholarly form no later than L. Keeley's War Before Civilization (1997). But sure, tell me more about how you can math the history.

The idea that he can accurately and mathematically track "a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions" with any precision over 10,000 years...

...is just plain laughable. The direction and extent of those changes is a point of real argument among actual experts (of which Turchin is not) for the Roman Empire, which is both 1) only 2,000 years ago and 2) without question the best attested society that old.

And the idea that Turchin is " filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians" is just evidence that Graeme Wood doesn't know much about what historians are doing. There are lots of wide-angle histories of all sorts of things...

...I've recommended a number on the blog! The 'niche' Turchin is filling is 'baseless speculation that sounds sophisticated to people who know little about the matter.' Sure, historians are not filling that niche. Nor should we.

There's probably room for a "why megahistories suck" book out there. Just imagine the demand for a book that would allow you to dunk on your Diamond-quoting friends.

I've had people burn bridges over the fact that, upon finding out that I was a historian, they immediately asked if I had read Jared Diamond, and I responded "yes, but his work is not taken very seriously in the field."

Only a semi-facetious question: how are peasants without a four-year history degree supposed to come to an assessment of Diamond? Is there no layman-accessible work concisely critiquing or pushing back on these grand narratives?