Societal Collapse

One explanation for collapse is just bad luck. Sometimes all the factors that influence your society just point in the wrong direction and your empire crumbles without you being able to stop it. I want to use this post to explore if bad luck is a helpful framing for societal... [Read More]

This post primarily centers around a comprehensive 2022 case study conducted by Markus Stoffel and colleagues (Stoffel et al., 2022). This information dense paper is notable for its integration of a literature review and the combination of data from diverse sources and historical records. It underscores the far-reaching societal consequences... [Read More]

The first post of this living literature review gave a summary of the field of collapse studies. One thing that post makes clear is that we need better models of societal dynamics. This post explores the state of societal dynamics modeling. [Read More]

If you read about collapse in past societies, one thing that comes up almost always is famine. Why is famine so closely connected with societal collapse? This post will summarize the reasons for this strong connection. [Read More]

In the last year nuclear winter was a topic I spent a lot of time on. It is one of the potential global catastrophes that motivates me in general and it is directly relevant to my work (Jehn, 2023; Jehn et al., 2023). This makes it kind of obvious that... [Read More]