Jack A. Goldstone is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor and an Eminent Scholar of Public Policy at George Mason University, USA. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley and San Diego, The California Institute of Technology, University of Konstanz, Cambridge University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is the author or editor of 13 books and over 175 research articles. His primary research interests are the effects of population change on political stability and economic growth, economic history, global population cycles, the causes and outcomes of revolutions, and improving governance in developing nations. Leonid Grinin is a Senior Research Professor at the Laboratory for Monitoring of Sociopolitical Destabilization Risks, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia, as well as a Senior Research Professor at the Oriental Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a co-editor of the international journals Social Evolution & History and the Journal of Globalization Studies, as well as the international almanacs Evolution, History and Mathematics, and Kondratieff Waves. He is the author of more than 500 publications, including 30 monographs in Russian, English, Chinese, and Spanish. His current research focuses on comparative political studies, political anthropology, the global economy, global history, historical sociology, and futurology. He was honored with the N. D. Kondratieff Gold Medal in 2012. Andrey Korotayev is a Senior Research Professor at the Laboratory for Monitoring of Sociopolitical Destabilization Risks, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia, as well as a Senior Research Professor at the Oriental Institute and Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of over 300 scholarly publications, including monographs like Ancient Yemen (Oxford University Press, 1995), World Religions and Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene Civilizations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth (URSS, 2006), and Great Divergence and Great Convergence (Springer, 2015, with Leonid Grinin). He is a laureate of the Russian Science Support Foundation under ‘The Best Economists of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Nomination (2006). He is a co-editor of the international journals Social Evolution & History and the Journal of Globalization Studies, as well as the international almanacs Evolution, History and Mathematics, and Kondratieff Waves.
