I look into issues of inequality and social collapse in a US context, but go much deeper, having developed a rough sense on how this happens and how one can address it (it's not easy).
I start with Turchin's secular cycle as the framework around which I build the model. My take is a bit different than his (I see 3 cycles; he sees 2).
Inequality leads to elite overproduction, rising political tensions (measured by the PSI indicator) which eventually leads to crisis, and some sort of resolution, which often involves violence.
Very interesting topic! Thanks a lot for sharing this articles.
By the choice of the picture do you mean that inequality is an issue for a planetary society to address the way it is adressed by local societies? Or that the french society needed to better integrate the muslim algerian group to be part of french society so that inequality would be solved? There are fascinating equations to be hypothetically solved in either questions for that to become, or have become a reality.
To be honest my thinking was much simpler here. I just thought the picture nicely symbolized inequality by contrasting normal people in the front with the rich looking coastline.
But yes inequality definitely has a global component and if we want a more peaceful time on this planet having less inequality between countries seems like a helpful ingredient.
I fear I am not well read enough about the Russian economy to say something super insightful, but generally it seems to me that the Russian economy has massive problems due to the war (and before) and at one point something will break, the tricky question is what exactly and when. But from the things I have read it often reads to make like the Russian economy is acceleration towards and cliff and when it gets there, this will be a massive event.
I do not really think that is possible. Every non-Hunter Gatherer society over the last 10,000 years has had rampant inequality. It is not clear that there is an alternative.
And based on your description Blanton et al. (2020) has nothing to do with levels of inequality.
You state that it is about "equitable practices - like fair taxation, limits on leadership power, and impartial courts - generally achieved higher citizen welfare."
Equality and the practices that you mention above are completely separate topics. Admittedly, I have not read the article. I am only relying on your summary.
The reason why I bring up the point is because I recently published articles that have exactly the opposite view:
The "make sure no one is left behind" is more meant as an aspirational goal. Sure, you can never guarantee that everybody is taken care of, but there are clearly different ways possible on how much safety nets and redistribution a society provides for their citizens. Like Norway and the United States have a very different approach here to just make one example.
"Equality and the practices that you mention above are completely separate topics". I don't think so. If you want to do any economic redistribution you need fair taxation and fair taxation is only possible if you keep special interests in check, for which you need limits on leadership power and impartial courts.
Ok, I will not get fixated on the title, but there is a much bigger issue.
I think that you are missing my point.
You are mixing up policies with outcomes. Equality is not just the output of policies or institutions. Nations with identical policies and institutions can have very different levels of Equality, and vice versa.
None of those things (fair taxation, limits on leadership power, and impartial courts - generally achieved higher citizen welfare.) create Equality.
All modern and agricultural societies have very high levels of inequality, so how could Inequality be a key factor in collapse? There is simply not enough variation.
If we had many societies with Equality, then we could test your hypothesis, but there are not.
Just to use your examples, it is not clear that Norway is significantly further from collapse than the United States despite different levels of inequality.
The USA has more progressive taxes than Norway, and it is not clear that there is much difference on the other dimensions. I lived in Denmark so I am very familiar with the Scandinavian tax and social welfare system.
Iceland and Switzerland, for example, has a much smaller welfare state and lower taxes than Norway, and similar levels of Inequality.
I think that your moral dislike of Inequality is distorting your objectivity on the impact of Inequality on social collapse.
Historical and archaeological research actually shows significant variation in inequality levels across societies and times. For example, as discussed in the post, Teotihuacan maintained a Gini coefficient of 0.12 - far lower than modern societies. The comparative study of Egypt and England's responses to the Black Death also reveals how different institutional responses led to divergent inequality trajectories.
The core argument isn't that all inequality leads to collapse, but rather that rapid increases in inequality, especially when combined with elite capture of institutions, can make societies more vulnerable to other destabilizing forces. This is supported by research like Blanton et al. (2020) showing how elite abandonment of societal obligations often preceded collapse in premodern states.
The relationship between specific policies and inequality outcomes is complex and not deterministic. Rather than argue for any particular policy approach, the key insight from historical examples is that societies have multiple paths to manage inequality. They can either proactively reform (as suggested by Schmidt & Juijn 2024), or risk facing what Scheidel termed the "Four Horsemen" - warfare, revolution, state failure and pandemics - as violent resets.
The goal isn't to argue that any particular level of inequality inevitably leads to collapse, but to understand how changes in inequality interact with other risk factors.
Interesting read. However, I’d like to offer a different perspective:
1. State capacity today is arguably at an all-time high. We’re seeing unprecedented levels of taxation, regulation, foreign military interventions, and public debt. We’re also seeing a debacle in civil rights; the covid lockdowns, prosecution of dissident voices, and a militarized police. The modern state is larger and more involved in society than ever before.
2. Neoliberalism didn’t emerge in out of nothing, it arose out of the inefficiencies and failures of the Keynesian interventionist model. In fact, many neoliberal reforms were initially implemented by Labour or left-leaning governments who saw them as necessary responses to economic stagnation and crisis. Some examples are New Zealand, Sweden, China, Singapore, Denmark, and America with Jimmy Carter.
3. Inequality, in my view, is natural and historically the norm. For most of human history, inequality was a given. What changed the world wasn’t a push for perfect equality, but the Industrial Revolution, which, despite high inequality, brought about the greatest leap in human living standards. It’s often said that someone living in 1850 had more in common with someone from the year 0 than with someone in 1900, due to the sheer scale of technological change in those 50 years. I believe something similar is happening now. Despite inequality, advances in technology, especially AI, may bring about such radical progress that a person born in 2000 might have more in common with someone from year 0 than with someone in 2050.
1) Depends a bit how you define state capacity. I see it more as the ability of state to accomplish major projects. Neither regulation, nor taxation nor public debt have anything to do with this. Military interventions and prosecution goes more in the direction that I am thinking here, but what I am actually aiming at here is the ability both built things in the world and be able to implement policy. And I think states are often pretty bad at that.
2) True, but not really related to the argument. Neoliberalism was implemented to solve problems in the past, but this neither means that it was the best possible tool at the time nor that we could not something different and better in the future.
3) Only because something has happened in the past does not make it good and something we should continue doing it. Diseases are natural, but I still would rather not have any. And yes the industrial revolution brought prosperity, but only after pushing them way down at first. And my argument here is it seems high inequality is one of the best predictors of collapse. We can now try to reduce it and thus make better living conditions for most people on Earth, while also reducing the chance of collapse. Seems like a good deal to me. AI might change things, but these arguments are based on lots of extrapolation of current trends. This might be the future or it might not. If AI really changes everything, it does not matter what I do no, so I might as well work towards reducing inequality. However, if it does not pan out the way a simple extrapolation would predict, we would have wasted years or even decades if we don't start to act now.
Your description of Teotihuacán seems to diverge from my understanding of it, and I wonder why. You wrote: "Teotihuacan [...] was much stronger than its surrounding cities and therefore did not need to result in large-scale warfare and it also experienced neither revolution nor state failure"
Did Teotihuacán not do large-scale warfare against neighbors? Here are some examples I found on a cursory search:
- 378 CE conquest of Tikal
- 4th century CE military control over Kaminaljuyú
- Teotihuacan may have been involved in conflicts with Cholula
- Some scholars argue that Teotihuacan may have launched military campaigns to secure trade routes or resources in Zapotec
- Teotihuacan likely engaged in military campaigns against rival city-states in the Basin of Mexico, like Cuicuilco
I think I just phrased this too vaguely. I did not want to make the point that Teotihuacán never did any warfare, but that it did not have to result to long-term, large-scale warfare, because it was just much more powerful than its neighbors. Yes, it conquered Tikal, but as it was so much more powerful, the conflict did not last that long. The conquest of Tikal probably only took a few weeks and for war to change the equality in your society it needs to be very involved and take longer.
To your second point, yes the city did fall, but the argument is that it archived low inequality without a revolution or state failure being responsible for the low inequality, not that the low inequality made it forever resistant to collapse.
I look into issues of inequality and social collapse in a US context, but go much deeper, having developed a rough sense on how this happens and how one can address it (it's not easy).
I start with Turchin's secular cycle as the framework around which I build the model. My take is a bit different than his (I see 3 cycles; he sees 2).
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-american-secular-cycles
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-critical-review-of-end-times-by
Inequality leads to elite overproduction, rising political tensions (measured by the PSI indicator) which eventually leads to crisis, and some sort of resolution, which often involves violence.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-current-crisis-era
Inequality is the key way the secular cycle can be tracked. I have a cultural evolutionary model for income inequality in the US since 1913.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
Cultural evolution is a second major tool I use for this work
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-cultural-evolution-works
This structural take indicates that politics is a central driver of the cycle. For this I use Stephen Skowronek's Political Time model.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-a-political-dispensation
Anyway would like to discuss this more with you
Very interesting topic! Thanks a lot for sharing this articles.
By the choice of the picture do you mean that inequality is an issue for a planetary society to address the way it is adressed by local societies? Or that the french society needed to better integrate the muslim algerian group to be part of french society so that inequality would be solved? There are fascinating equations to be hypothetically solved in either questions for that to become, or have become a reality.
To be honest my thinking was much simpler here. I just thought the picture nicely symbolized inequality by contrasting normal people in the front with the rich looking coastline.
But yes inequality definitely has a global component and if we want a more peaceful time on this planet having less inequality between countries seems like a helpful ingredient.
That is a very interesting breakdown of the topic as a whole.
What do you make of economic equality in terms of Russian stability?
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/12/russia-economy-difficulties?lang=en
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.13196
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/risks-russias-two-speed-economy-2025
I fear I am not well read enough about the Russian economy to say something super insightful, but generally it seems to me that the Russian economy has massive problems due to the war (and before) and at one point something will break, the tricky question is what exactly and when. But from the things I have read it often reads to make like the Russian economy is acceleration towards and cliff and when it gets there, this will be a massive event.
Thank you for your thoughts.
How do you "make sure no one is left behind?"
I do not really think that is possible. Every non-Hunter Gatherer society over the last 10,000 years has had rampant inequality. It is not clear that there is an alternative.
And based on your description Blanton et al. (2020) has nothing to do with levels of inequality.
You state that it is about "equitable practices - like fair taxation, limits on leadership power, and impartial courts - generally achieved higher citizen welfare."
Equality and the practices that you mention above are completely separate topics. Admittedly, I have not read the article. I am only relying on your summary.
The reason why I bring up the point is because I recently published articles that have exactly the opposite view:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/is-inequality-the-key-problem
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-achieving-equality-is-an-impossible
The "make sure no one is left behind" is more meant as an aspirational goal. Sure, you can never guarantee that everybody is taken care of, but there are clearly different ways possible on how much safety nets and redistribution a society provides for their citizens. Like Norway and the United States have a very different approach here to just make one example.
"Equality and the practices that you mention above are completely separate topics". I don't think so. If you want to do any economic redistribution you need fair taxation and fair taxation is only possible if you keep special interests in check, for which you need limits on leadership power and impartial courts.
Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.
Ok, I will not get fixated on the title, but there is a much bigger issue.
I think that you are missing my point.
You are mixing up policies with outcomes. Equality is not just the output of policies or institutions. Nations with identical policies and institutions can have very different levels of Equality, and vice versa.
None of those things (fair taxation, limits on leadership power, and impartial courts - generally achieved higher citizen welfare.) create Equality.
All modern and agricultural societies have very high levels of inequality, so how could Inequality be a key factor in collapse? There is simply not enough variation.
If we had many societies with Equality, then we could test your hypothesis, but there are not.
Just to use your examples, it is not clear that Norway is significantly further from collapse than the United States despite different levels of inequality.
The USA has more progressive taxes than Norway, and it is not clear that there is much difference on the other dimensions. I lived in Denmark so I am very familiar with the Scandinavian tax and social welfare system.
Iceland and Switzerland, for example, has a much smaller welfare state and lower taxes than Norway, and similar levels of Inequality.
I think that your moral dislike of Inequality is distorting your objectivity on the impact of Inequality on social collapse.
Historical and archaeological research actually shows significant variation in inequality levels across societies and times. For example, as discussed in the post, Teotihuacan maintained a Gini coefficient of 0.12 - far lower than modern societies. The comparative study of Egypt and England's responses to the Black Death also reveals how different institutional responses led to divergent inequality trajectories.
The core argument isn't that all inequality leads to collapse, but rather that rapid increases in inequality, especially when combined with elite capture of institutions, can make societies more vulnerable to other destabilizing forces. This is supported by research like Blanton et al. (2020) showing how elite abandonment of societal obligations often preceded collapse in premodern states.
The relationship between specific policies and inequality outcomes is complex and not deterministic. Rather than argue for any particular policy approach, the key insight from historical examples is that societies have multiple paths to manage inequality. They can either proactively reform (as suggested by Schmidt & Juijn 2024), or risk facing what Scheidel termed the "Four Horsemen" - warfare, revolution, state failure and pandemics - as violent resets.
The goal isn't to argue that any particular level of inequality inevitably leads to collapse, but to understand how changes in inequality interact with other risk factors.
Interesting read. However, I’d like to offer a different perspective:
1. State capacity today is arguably at an all-time high. We’re seeing unprecedented levels of taxation, regulation, foreign military interventions, and public debt. We’re also seeing a debacle in civil rights; the covid lockdowns, prosecution of dissident voices, and a militarized police. The modern state is larger and more involved in society than ever before.
2. Neoliberalism didn’t emerge in out of nothing, it arose out of the inefficiencies and failures of the Keynesian interventionist model. In fact, many neoliberal reforms were initially implemented by Labour or left-leaning governments who saw them as necessary responses to economic stagnation and crisis. Some examples are New Zealand, Sweden, China, Singapore, Denmark, and America with Jimmy Carter.
3. Inequality, in my view, is natural and historically the norm. For most of human history, inequality was a given. What changed the world wasn’t a push for perfect equality, but the Industrial Revolution, which, despite high inequality, brought about the greatest leap in human living standards. It’s often said that someone living in 1850 had more in common with someone from the year 0 than with someone in 1900, due to the sheer scale of technological change in those 50 years. I believe something similar is happening now. Despite inequality, advances in technology, especially AI, may bring about such radical progress that a person born in 2000 might have more in common with someone from year 0 than with someone in 2050.
Hey there. Thanks for your comment.
1) Depends a bit how you define state capacity. I see it more as the ability of state to accomplish major projects. Neither regulation, nor taxation nor public debt have anything to do with this. Military interventions and prosecution goes more in the direction that I am thinking here, but what I am actually aiming at here is the ability both built things in the world and be able to implement policy. And I think states are often pretty bad at that.
2) True, but not really related to the argument. Neoliberalism was implemented to solve problems in the past, but this neither means that it was the best possible tool at the time nor that we could not something different and better in the future.
3) Only because something has happened in the past does not make it good and something we should continue doing it. Diseases are natural, but I still would rather not have any. And yes the industrial revolution brought prosperity, but only after pushing them way down at first. And my argument here is it seems high inequality is one of the best predictors of collapse. We can now try to reduce it and thus make better living conditions for most people on Earth, while also reducing the chance of collapse. Seems like a good deal to me. AI might change things, but these arguments are based on lots of extrapolation of current trends. This might be the future or it might not. If AI really changes everything, it does not matter what I do no, so I might as well work towards reducing inequality. However, if it does not pan out the way a simple extrapolation would predict, we would have wasted years or even decades if we don't start to act now.
Your description of Teotihuacán seems to diverge from my understanding of it, and I wonder why. You wrote: "Teotihuacan [...] was much stronger than its surrounding cities and therefore did not need to result in large-scale warfare and it also experienced neither revolution nor state failure"
Did Teotihuacán not do large-scale warfare against neighbors? Here are some examples I found on a cursory search:
- 378 CE conquest of Tikal
- 4th century CE military control over Kaminaljuyú
- Teotihuacan may have been involved in conflicts with Cholula
- Some scholars argue that Teotihuacan may have launched military campaigns to secure trade routes or resources in Zapotec
- Teotihuacan likely engaged in military campaigns against rival city-states in the Basin of Mexico, like Cuicuilco
Did Teotihuacán not experience revolution nor state failure? I might be misunderstanding, but the city did fall and it seems to be typically considered to have been caused by internal strife or even class war. See for example: https://www.smh.com.au/world/class-war-brought-down-the-ancient-teotihuacan-civilisation-according-to-study-20150320-1m3gh2.html
I'm not a historian and could just be wrong, but there seems to be some discrepancy or misunderstanding here.
I think I just phrased this too vaguely. I did not want to make the point that Teotihuacán never did any warfare, but that it did not have to result to long-term, large-scale warfare, because it was just much more powerful than its neighbors. Yes, it conquered Tikal, but as it was so much more powerful, the conflict did not last that long. The conquest of Tikal probably only took a few weeks and for war to change the equality in your society it needs to be very involved and take longer.
To your second point, yes the city did fall, but the argument is that it archived low inequality without a revolution or state failure being responsible for the low inequality, not that the low inequality made it forever resistant to collapse.