核心逻辑： 宏观历史的量化分析，侧重地缘决定论、经济周期与博弈。
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana
📚 Reading List (10 Books)
| # | Book | Author | Core Idea |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Guns, Germs, and Steel | Jared Diamond | Geographic determinism in civilization |
| 2 | Why Nations Fail | Acemoglu & Robinson | Institutional economics and inclusive vs. extractive systems |
| 3 | Das Kapital | Karl Marx | Political economy and the structure of capitalism |
| 4 | A Brief History of Humankind | Yuval Noah Harari | The cognitive revolution and beyond |
| 5 | A People’s History of the United States | Howard Zinn | History from the perspective of the oppressed |
| 6 | The Wealth of Nations (excerpts) | Adam Smith | The invisible hand and free markets |
| 7 | World Order | Henry Kissinger | Geopolitics and the international system |
| 8 | Light and Dreams | Eric Hobsbawm | The Age of Revolution and its consequences |
| 9 | Talking to Strangers | Malcolm Gladwell | Miscommunication, trust, and systemic failure |
| 10 | The Social Contract | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The philosophical basis of governance |
✍️ Essay Topics (15 Blog Posts)
| # | Title | Core Question |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Geography as a Feature | Using Jared Diamond’s geographic framework as ML feature engineering |
| 2 | Inequality Index | A quantitative approach to measuring civilization inequality — from Gini to new metrics |
| 3 | Institutional Variables | Regression analysis: do institutions truly predict GDP growth? |
| 4 | The Network Effect of Empire | Analyzing the rise and fall of empires via Network Centrality |
| 5 | Modeling Revolutions | Can we model revolutions using Markov Chain transitions? |
| 6 | Data of War | Using historical big data to predict international conflict patterns |
| 7 | Currency Volatility | From the gold standard to Bitcoin — a stochastic analysis of monetary stability |
| 8 | The Algorithm of Dictatorship | How autocracies optimize for regime survival |
| 9 | Population Dynamics | Modeling demographic transitions using logistic growth and SDE |
| 10 | Trade Gravity Model | Verifying the gravity model of trade with Python and historical data |
| 11 | Poverty Traps | Dynamic programming and the feedback loops of poverty |
| 12 | Cognitive Revolution | Was the Agricultural Revolution actually humanity’s worst mistake? A review of Sapiens |
| 13 | Financial Crises | Analyzing the network structure of cascading financial failures |
| 14 | Game of Nations | Game theory applied to the Arms Race and Cold War strategies |
| 15 | Cliometrics | Quantitative history: can we use statistics to “rewrite” history? |
This is Series 2 of 5.
← Series I: Humanities · → Series III: China History & Modern Economy