Societal Collapse

From time to time you come across a paper that blows you away with the amount of work it must have needed to create it and the fascinating insights that can be gleaned from it. For me the preprint “All Crises are Unhappy in their Own Way: The role of... [Read More]

One question that often comes up when discussing global catastrophes and societal collapse is: What is the best place to stay in such a case? This simple question is surprisingly hard to answer, as it depends on a lot of factors. This post is meant to give an overview of... [Read More]

The tricky thing with collapse is that all the possible proximate causes can interact with and cause each other. In an earlier post we discussed a literature review by Joseph Tainter (Tainter, 2023). Tainter lists three main kinds of events that have been identified as a cause for collapse: 1)... [Read More]

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]