SUPERVISOR: Melanie PICHLER

PROJECT ASSIGNED TO: Harry Oak FOX

This project aims to explore the connection between heterogeneities in the economic landscapes of societies - notably wealth and income inequalities - and socio-political tension, including state collapse.

As much of the Western world struggles simultaneously with levels of economic inequality and support for the political far-right that has not been seen since the Second World War, both policy makers and academics are increasingly keen to understand the connection between the two. Ultimately following a Marxian tradition, more recently Jack Goldstone's structural demographic theory (as one part of an enormous body of work) has provided a framework for understanding how increasing inequality can exacerbate social tension. This project aims to extend such work to understand the conjugate relationship: how spiraling social tension; existing power dynamics; and collective action can impact inequality and hence either stabilize or doom a society in the long run.

This will be achieved through a modelling approach, seeking to capture and describe the underlying drivers of such social transformation. The framework of structural demographic theory has been developed by Peter Turchin into a set of models that describe trends in the internal tension of past societies, and this project will both study these models and augment them to more richly capture the dynamics of inequality in both historical and modern contexts. To complement this, a range of proxies for prosperity and inequality, including economic measures; human health indicators; and markers of social mobility, cohesion, and culture, will be employed to ground the theoretical aspect of the work in real data.

At the same time, this project seeks to understand the insights modern network and complexity science can offer in achieving a democratization of economic institutions and hence build a society that works for everyone.