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.

It has been a while since the last update post. Since then I have come across a lot of interesting papers and also changed some things around this blog here. I now keep both the Substack as well as the archive up to date, so you never have to wonder if you are reading the most recent version of a post. Due to popular demand (one person asked for it) I now also provide a list of all references used in the writing.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Reflecting about the end of our modern civilization requires counterfactual thinking, because fortunately it hasn’t happened yet. But this is not the only way counterfactuals help us understand collapse better. We can also create counterfactuals to reflect about past events.

This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Electricity is essential for the functioning of our modern society, as nearly everything we do depends on the electrical grid in some way. While this reliance provides significant comfort and convenience, it also makes us vulnerable if the grid fails. But what happens when the grid stops working?