Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people who survived
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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Hmm, looks like this guy is an economist. The basic idea that collapse is redistributive has been kicking around for a while, so that's fine. The idea that collapse happens because of inequality has to deal with a mountain of counterexamples, and the idea that all leaders are evil has to deal with the fact most of them are just random people with the right family, historically.
Without buying his book, I'd love to know what the citation for the post-Roman thing is, and what area and period was being analysed.
...except for, you know, all the people that die.
You ignore the people dying or just withering away right under your nose in the current system.
Or worse, you demonize them.
Yeah, I feel there's an "eventually" missing off the end of that.
Are we gonna pretend there's not a shit load of people dying right now as a direct result of our current system?
It is really nothing compared to what will happen if the current international infrastructure supporting hospitals and food delivery breaks down.
Most people don't grow their own food, they buy it from a store. There's about a week, maybe two of fresh food in the system, depending on local population density and available suppliers. Maybe a month or two of dry goods.
Hospitals are highly dependent on consumables to provide care. In a month they're out of exam gloves, masks, sample tubes, hand sanitizer, antibiotics - then sanitation starts to break down and hospital-acquired infections start to ramp up. Less time for high-value items like anesthetics, immune suppressants and other specialty drugs. The volume of chlorine and isopropyl needed daily just to keep things clean will be a problem. Anything less than immediate life-threatening conditions starts getting turned away because the hospital is a source of danger for otherwise healthy people, and they might not have the resources to provide care anyway. The emergency room runs out of blood bags.
In the present, the things that keep people alive are dependent on just-in-time logistics systems. There's very little inventory stored anywhere, because it's cheaper to not store stuff. If the trade relationships break down and the supplies become unreliable, it falls apart. And it doesn't have to all come to a complete halt for people to die, it just has to become unstable so that sometimes the right things don't show up at the right places at the right times.
Systemic collapse would lead to orders of magnitude more deaths.
Mortality rates are rock bottom by historical standards, if you want to bring the present into it.
I mean, you are right, but the media doesn't really like to cover those stories or their root causes so to the average uninformed person it can seem like that.
Most of the world now lives in huge cities. A societal collapse probably would be devastating for a much larger proportion of the population than in previous times. A lot of dead people as well as lot of dog eat dog behaviour due to no food in cities.
It'd be pretty easy to migrate out of cities. And necessary, if we had to go back to more primitive, labour intensive kinds of agriculture for some reason (although I question how easy fully forgetting mechanisation would be, at this point).
Indeed, it's exactly what tends to happen after a collapse. Rome was whittled down to a minor center, almost a village, before it started to grow again IIRC.
yeah we have never had a global societal collapse.
Maybe for 99% of the next generation that grows up in a new society...
Definitely not for 99% of society when it collapses.
Yeah, when this society collapses, most of us will be dead. Maybe all, depending on how destroyed our biosphere will be.
Destroying society could actually save the biosphere...
The Mongol invasion of Asia in the 1200s took enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to offset a year's worth of the world's gasoline demand today, according to a new study. But even Genghis Khan couldn't create more than a blip in atmospheric carbon compared to the overwhelming effect of agriculture.
The study, published online Jan. 20 in the journal The Holocene, looked at land use and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between the years 800 and 1850. Globally at the time, humans were cutting down forests for agriculture, driving carbon into the atmosphere (vegetation stores carbon, so trees and shrubs are what scientists call "carbon sinks"). But in some regions during certain times, wars and plagues culled the population, disrupting agriculture and allowing forests to regrow.
https://www.livescience.com/11739-wars-plagues-carbon-climate.html
Sure, it would suck to live in Europe while it was happening, but if we didn't have that breathing room we'd really be fucked by climate change right now.
On a long enough timeline, there's very little "good" or "bad". Life, uh, finds a way.
Only problem is, we are by now in a technological position that the next collapse has a decent chance of being our last collapse.
So we’ll be healthy and egalitarian forever, hooray!
About 80 years.
Except for nuclear bombs in the hands of a toddler with dementia.
Historically, the only thing we've learned from past events is that we can't ever learn from past events
the words many and most are doing a lot of heavy lifting here
It largely depends on us choosing to organize hegemony for more equality, or not.