6.2 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrey Korotayev | 3/7 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Korotayev | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:59:46.151712+00:00 | kb-cron |
Andrey Korotayev claims that the present-day world-system ("the World System"), which in the 2nd millennium CE encompassed the whole globe, originated in the 9th millennium BCE in direct connection with the Neolithic Revolution. According to Korotayev, the centre of this system was originally in West Asia. In general, Korotayev and his colleagues have suggested a rather novel approach to the world-system analysis. Within this approach the main emphasis is moved to the generation and diffusion of innovations. If a society borrows systematically important technological innovations, its evolution already cannot be considered as really independent, but should rather be considered as a part of a larger evolving entity, within which such innovations are systematically produced and diffused. The main idea of the world-system approach was to find the evolving unit. The basic idea was that it is impossible to account for the evolution of a single society without taking into consideration that it was a part of a larger whole. However, traditional world-system analysis concentrated on bulk-good movements, and core – periphery exploitation, somehow neglecting the above-mentioned dimension. However, according to Korotayev, the information network turns out to be the oldest mechanism of the World System integration, and remained extremely important throughout its whole history, remaining important up to the present. It seems to be even more important than the core – periphery exploitation (for example, without taking this mechanism into consideration it appears impossible to account for such things as the demographic explosion in the 20th century, whose proximate cause was the dramatic decline of mortality, but whose main ultimate cause was the diffusion of innovations produced almost exclusively within the World System core). This also suggests a redefinition of the World System core. Within the approach in question the core is not the World System zone, which exploits other zones, but rather the World System core is the zone with the highest innovation donor/recipient ratio, the principal innovation donor.
Korotayev suggests that the hyperbolic trend observed for the world population growth after 10000 BCE does appear to be primarily a product of the growth of the World System.Articles from journals The presence of the hyperbolic trend itself indicates that the major part of the entity in question had some systemic unity, and Korotayev insists that the evidence for this unity is readily available. Indeed, he shows that we have evidence for the systematic spread of major innovations (domesticated cereals, cattle, sheep, goats, horses, plow, wheel, copper, bronze, and later iron technology, and so on) throughout the whole North African – Eurasian Oikumene for a few millennia BCE. As a result, the evolution of societies of this part of the world already at this time cannot be regarded as truly independent. By the end of the 1st millennium BCE we observe a belt of cultures, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with an astonishingly similar level of cultural complexity characterised by agricultural production of wheat and other specific cereals, the breeding of cattle, sheep, and goats; use of the plow, iron metallurgy, and wheeled transport; development of professional armies and cavalries deploying rather similar weapons; elaborate bureaucracies, and Axial Age ideologies, and so on – this list could be extended for pages. A few millennia before, we would find another belt of societies strikingly similar in level and character of cultural complexity, stretching from the Balkans up to the Indus Valley outskirts. Korotayev interprets this as a tangible result of the World System's functioning.
==== Great Divergence and Great Convergence ==== Together with Leonid Grinin he has also made a significant contribution to the current Great Divergence debate. As is noted by Jack Goldstone, the "new view, carefully presented and rigorously modeled by Grinin and Korotayev, provides a richer and more nuanced version of the "Great Divergence," bridging many of the differences between the traditional and California viewpoints. Yet they go further. Amazingly, by building a model using human capital (education), global population growth, and regional productivity, they show how both the Great Divergence and the recent "Great Convergence" (the economic catching up of developing countries) are phases of the same process of global modernisation." In addition, Korotayev's research has revealed a close coupling between phases of global demographic transition and phases of the Great Divergence and Great Convergence.
==== Kondratieff waves ====
Note also his research on Kondratiev waves in the world GDP dynamics that, employing spectral analysis, has confirmed their presence at an acceptable level of statistical significance. He has also detected Kondratieff waves in the global dynamics of invention activities.
==== General theory of social macroevolution ==== In addition, it appears necessary to maintain that Korotayev's theory of the World System development suggests a novel approach to the formation of a general theory of social macroevolution. The approach prevalent in social evolutionism is based on the assumption that evolutionary regularities of simple systems are significantly simpler than the ones characteristic of complex systems. A rather logical outcome of this almost self-evident assumption is that one should first study the evolutionary regularities of simple systems and only after understanding them move to more complex ones, whereas Korotayev's findings suggest that the simplest regularities accounting for extremely large proportions of all the macrovariation can be found precisely for the largest possible system – the human world, and, hence, the study of sociocultural evolution should proceed from the detection of simple regularities of the development of the most complex systems to the study of the complex laws of the dynamics of simple social systems.
=== Cross-cultural studies ===