Andrey Korotayev

Andrey Vitalievich Korotayev (Андре́й Вита́льевич Корота́ев; born 17 February 1961) is a Russian anthropologist, economic historian, comparative political scientist, demographer and sociologist, with major contributions to world-systems theory, cross-cultural studies, Near Eastern history, Big History, and mathematical modelling of social and economic macrodynamics.

He is currently the Director of the Centre for Stability and Risk Analysis at the HSE University in Moscow, and a Senior Research Professor at the Center for Big History and System Forecasting of the Institute of Oriental Studies as well as in the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In addition, he is a senior research professor of the International Laboratory on Political Demography and Social Macrodynamics (PDSM) of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, as well as a full professor of the Faculty of Global Studies of the Moscow State University.

He is co-editor of the journals Social Evolution & History and Journal of Globalization Studies, as well as History & Mathematics yearbook

In collaboration with his colleagues, Artemy Malkov and Daria Khaltourina, he has shown that till the 1970s the hyperbolic growth of the world population was accompanied by quadratic-hyperbolic growth of the world GDP, and developed a number of mathematical models describing both of these phenomena simultaneously; he has also described mathematically the World System withdrawal from the blow-up regime observed in the recent decades.

The hyperbolic growth of the world population and quadratic-hyperbolic growth of the world GDP observed till the 1970s have been correlated by him and his colleagues to a non-linear second order positive feedback between the demographic growth and technological development that can be spelled out as follows: technological growth – increase in the carrying capacity of land for people – demographic growth – more people – more potential inventors – acceleration of technological growth – accelerating growth of the carrying capacity – the faster population growth – accelerating growth of the number of potential inventors – faster technological growth – hence, the faster growth of the Earth's carrying capacity for people, and so on.

See, e.g., Korotayev A., Malkov A., Khaltourina D. Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth.

Born in Moscow, Andrey Korotayev attended Moscow State University, where he received an MA in 1984.

He earned a PhD in 1993 from Manchester University, and in 1998 a Doctor of Sciences degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Since 2000, he has been Professor and Director of the Anthropology of the East Center at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, and Senior Research Professor in the Oriental Institute and Institute for African Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 2001–2003, he also directed the "Anthropology of the East" Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and is now the Director of the Centre for Stability and Risk Analysis at this university.

In 2003–2004, he was a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

Korotayev is a laureate of the Russian Science Support Foundation in "The Best Economists of the Russian Academy of Sciences" nomination (2006).

Moscow: URSS Publishers, 2006; Korotayev A. V. A Compact Macromodel of World System Evolution // Journal of World-Systems Research 11/1 (2005): 79–93 ; for a detailed mathematical analysis of this issue see A Compact Mathematical Model of the World System Economic and Demographic Growth, 1 CE – 1973 CE; for an analysis of this pattern suggested by Korotayev see, e.g., Carter, B., (2008), "Five or six step scenario for evolution?"

Int.

Together with Askar Akayev and George Malinetsky he was in 2008-2018 a coordinator of the Russian Academy of Sciences Program "System Analysis and Mathematical Modeling of World Dynamics".

J. Astrobiology 7 (2008) 177–182.

As Francis Heylighen puts it, "an elegant example is the explanation by Korotayev of the hyperbolic growth of the world population until 1960. In the model, population growth is initially modeled by a traditional logistic growth equation, where population N starts by growing exponentially but then slows down until it reaches the maximum value expressed by the carrying capacity of the environment. This carrying capacity is proportional to the overall productivity of technology, i.e. its ability to extract from the natural environment the resources necessary for survival. In a second equation, the growth of technological productivity is considered to be proportional to the technology that is already there (simple exponential growth), but also to the population number, under the simple assumption that more individuals will discover more innovations. The authors shows that the two equations together produce a hyperbolic growth curve that mimics the observed historical growth of world population with a surprising accuracy (explaining over 99% of the variation for the period 500 BC–1962)" ( ISBN 978-1-135-97764-1.).

He has also shown that the world urban population growth curve has also up till recently followed a quadratic-hyperbolic pattern.

In addition, Korotayev and his colleagues have proposed a number of forecasts of the World System development up to 2100.

In collaboration with Alexander V. Markov he has demonstrated that a similar mathematical model can be developed to describe the macrotrends of biological evolution.

They have shown that changes in biodiversity through the Phanerozoic correlate much better with hyperbolic model (widely used in demography and macrosociology) than with exponential and logistic models (traditionally used in population biology and extensively applied to fossil biodiversity as well).

The latter models imply that changes in diversity are guided by a first-order positive feedback (more ancestors, more descendants) and/or a negative feedback arising from resource limitation.

Hyperbolic model implies a second-order positive feedback.

The hyperbolic pattern of the world population growth has been demonstrated by Korotayev to arise from a second-order positive feedback between the population size and the rate of technological growth.

According to Korotayev and Markov, the hyperbolic character of biodiversity growth can be similarly accounted for by a feedback between the diversity and community structure complexity.

They suggest that the similarity between the curves of biodiversity and human population probably comes from the fact that both are derived from the interference of the hyperbolic trend with cyclical and stochastic dynamics.

Finally, Korotayev has demonstrated that the hyperbolic models of this type may be used to describe in a rather accurate way the overall growth of the planetary complexity of the Earth since 4 billion BC up to the present.

In the field of cliodynamics, Korotayev has developed a number of mathematical models of interaction between the very long-term, "millennial" hyperbolic trend dynamics of social systems and the shorter-term, "secular" (that is, observed at the scale of centuries), cyclical dynamics.

He has also produced a number of mathematical models describing specifically long-term political-demographic dynamics of Egypt and used them for a demographic structural analysis of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

In 2012 he was awarded with the Gold Kondratieff Medal by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation.

Andrey Korotayev has made important contributions to the following fields.

In this field he has proposed one of the most convincing mathematical explanations for von Foerster's Doomsday Equation.

Korotayev was one of the first to predict and assess the June 2013 Egyptian protests.

Note also his study of 2013-2014 revolutionary wave and his interpretation of the Arab Spring events as a trigger of a global "phase transition".

Of special importance is his study of the hypothesis that population pressure causes increased warfare.

This hypothesis has been recently criticised on the empirical grounds.

Both studies focusing on specific historical societies and analyses of cross-cultural data have failed to find positive correlation between population density and incidence of warfare.

Korotayev, in collaboration with Peter Turchin, has shown that such negative results do not falsify the population-warfare hypothesis.

Population and warfare are dynamical variables, and if their interaction causes sustained oscillations, then we do not in general expect to find strong correlation between the two variables measured at the same time (that is, unlagged).