When we study societal collapse, we typically examine it through the lens of elites. Using the records and remains left by emperors, nobles, and the literate classes who had the most to lose when their world ended. But what if we’ve been asking the wrong question all along? After years of reviewing collapse literature ranging from quantitative databases like Seshat to case studies spanning millennia, certain patterns emerge again and again.

The following text presents a condensed summary of "The state of global catastrophic risk research: a bibliometric review" by Jehn et al. (2025), published in Earth System Dynamics. The paper represents the first systematic bibliometric analysis of global catastrophic risk (GCR) and existential risk (ER) literature, examining a large number of documents to map the field's development, identify research clusters, and assess current challenges.

Time to update posts again. I know it is not that long ago since the last update post, but there are just so many interesting things I want to share with you. The first thing observant readers probably have already noticed: Every Substack post now has its own historical image. You can watch all of them by browsing through the archive. I tried to find ones that fit the general vibe of the post and I am quite happy with the result.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. For this post I aim to essentially create a little repository of catastrophic risk lists, so other people can find those more easily and get an overview of how groups of experts with different backgrounds categorize and evaluate risks.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. When we talk about societal collapse, we usually talk about the factors that led to the collapse of a given civilization. However, you could also turn this around and ask what factors allow civilizations to avoid societal collapse and major crises.

So, how do you actually write a living literature review? In the more than two years that I have been writing this (time really flies), sometimes I get asked how I go about writing the posts here. With this post, I want to answer this question. While this is focused on a living literature review, I think these notes are probably helpful for everybody who has to do at least some scientific writing or wants to do more of that in the future.

Once again it is time to update the existing posts with new papers I have found. This time the majority of them revolve around how trade and democracy keep our society stable. I also have a little request to my readers: Do you have any paper recommendations for me to read? I have a lot of channels to go hunting for new, interesting papers, but I figured I would be interested in what my readers find relevant.

What do you think about when you hear the term revolution? Likely, you think of the French Revolution and things like the Storm of the Bastille, the Guillotine or Louis XVI’s execution. It is on the forefront of our minds, because the French Revolution escalated so quickly and so violently that it left a permanent mark on the world.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Imagine a row of dominoes where knocking over one piece triggers a cascade that topples them all. This is systemic risk - when a single failure can bring down an entire system. Now imagine several such cascade failures happening simultaneously at a global scale and making each other worse.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. While writing this living literature review on societal collapse, one topic that keeps popping up again and again is economic inequality. It seems that this inequality makes societies inherently less stable and less able to internally coordinate and thus more vulnerable to collapse.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. What would we eat if the sun disappeared tomorrow? Or if our electrical grid collapsed worldwide? This is a topic I am quite interested in, because many of the facets of societal collapse are quite intimately linked to the food system.