This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. 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?

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 I take nuclear winter seriously.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. The risk of societal collapse is dependent not only on the problems a society faces, but also on the adaptation it makes to counter those problems. These adaptations can increase the resilience of a society and make it less vulnerable to potential hazards.

I created a list of researchers in the existential risk field based on the amount of papers they have published. In the following I provide links to their work. This is not meant as a strict evaluation of the value of their contributions to the field, but more as a quick overview of who is working on what.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. If we want to learn about human society’s resilience or fragility, it’s helpful to learn from our species’ prior experiences. The trouble is, since collapse is a relatively rare phenomenon, we’re short on data.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Past societies often found their end amid a challenging climate. Environmental changes can put considerable strain on a society and there are many cases in history where it was a major contributor to their collapse, especially when the change was sudden.

Going forward this blog here will work somewhat differently. I got some funding by Open Phil to start a living literature review on societal collapse (thanks to Matt Clancy for making this happen).  So how is this gonna work? The idea behind this project is to make research on societal collapse more accessible to anyone who’s interested in the topic, by writing it up in a nicely sorted and easy to read way.

This post is the first in a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Societal collapse has been with humanity since the agricultural revolution, but only during the enlightenment did humans gain the means to understand these cataclysms in a systematic way.

Existential risk studies look at events that have the chance of either ending humanity or its potential (for example, by locking us in an eternal pre-industrial state). These kinds of events can vary wildly. Humanity could be wiped out by nuclear war, a pandemic, a supervolcanic eruption and a variety of other causes. Those events need knowledge from all kinds of fields, ranging from geology to medicine.

I want to try something different with this post here. The post is actually a conference paper for the Stanford Existential Risk Conference in April. I publish it both here and as a preprint to test if I can get more feedback for it this way.

Some time ago I came across the potato famine and how it contributed or even caused the revolutions of 1848. I wondered if this is an good example to show how cascading failures lead societal crisis. Starting from a natural event to an agricultural crisis, to an economic crisis, to a financial crisis and finally resulting in a political crisis.