January 2024 Updates
Understanding famine and its consequences
Understanding famine and its consequences
Existential Crunch is a living literature review about societal collapse. When I read new things, which update my views, I’ll also update my posts. This post highlights updates I made to four posts. In addition to those updates, I am also happy to announce that I was invited to the “Prioritäten Podcast” to talk about my work. You can listen to the whole interview (in German) here.
Famine’s Role in Societal Collapse
My post about famine lays out the reasons and mechanisms of how famines work and why they are so difficult to stop once they have started. I have updated the post to discuss two additional papers:
“The causality analysis of climate change and large-scale human crisis” is an older paper (2011), but I still included it due to its interesting analysis. It uses large historical datasets to empirically validate their societal disruption model.
Before the new section the post discusses the different ways famine can happen, what makes them so difficult to defend against and how they interact with societies.
Famine in interaction with climate and society
We can find all those complex interactions of famine with other parts of society when we look into history. Zhang et al. (2011) tried to determine the timing of famines, climate and other large scale human crises. To do so, they built a model that looked at the timing of climate shocks and how the resulting effects rippled through society (Figure 3). They then use empirical data and statistical analysis to determine the order in what climate shocks and the societal effects happen and if this follows their model.
Figure 3: Complex interaction of climatic shocks with famine, adapted from Zhang et al. (2011).
They find a mechanism that is quite similar to what we have described here so far. In particular, they find you usually have the climate shock first, which reduces the amount of food you can produce, which in turn leads to population decline, which changes both the amount of food needed and produced. This largely matches the sequence of events discussed earlier. Therefore the paper by Zhang and co-authors nicely ties together the origins of food shocks with the resulting consequences in an empirically validated model. More concrete examples on how such a cascade plays out in our history can be found in the post about the crisis following the potato famine, as well as the in-depth analysis of the Little Ice Age.
“Re-framing the threat of global warming: an empirical causal loop diagram of climate change, food insecurity and societal collapse”: This paper uses a variety of empirical data sources to build one giant causal loop diagram which shows how different parts of the food and climate system interact to plausibly cause societal unrest or even collapse.
The model of Zhang et al. covers only the direct interactions from climate to declining population. However, if you really want to understand how things might play out it makes sense to include indirect processes as well. This massive project was undertaken by Richards et al. (2021). They built a causal-loop diagram (1) which includes the indirect effects of climate, societal collapse and food as well. As far as I know this has yet to be used for actual modeling, but I think it would be quite informative, as it contains a wide variety and quantified interactions between them. For example, they show how even quite separate societal processes like innovation, migration and consumer demand are all connected via the food system. It also highlights how central our food system is, as the central link between our climate and societal collapse. Societies can withstand many problems, but as soon as the food production stops, things break down fast.
Societal consequences of the Little Ice Age
This post discusses how much we can attribute the societal problems during the Little Ice Age to volcanoes. The main paper that I discuss shows some strong hints that societal problems do indeed stem from elevated volcanic activity, but also highlights just how difficult it is to draw firm conclusions from paleoclimatic data. To further emphasize this difficulty, I added an additional paragraph based on the study “Prominent role of volcanism in Common Era climate variability and human history”:
The difficulty in attributing volcanism to societal problems in general is also highlighted in another study by Büntgen et al. (2020). Just like Stoffel and co-authors they use big paleoclimatic datasets to draw a direct line from volcanoes to societal effects and just like Stoffel they also conclude with an “it depends”. I mention this here to highlight just how difficult it is to make clear conclusions from paleoclimatic data. The uncertainties are large and it is easy to create a narrative to your liking by cherry picking.
Participation, inclusion, democracy, and resilience
My post about inclusion and democracy focuses on historical examples on why these things matter. To give this a bit more of a theoretical underpinning, I added a short discussion of a book chapter “Diminishing Returns on Extraction: How Inequality and Extractive Hierarchy Create Fragility”.
If we want to get more theoretical, there is a recent book chapter by Luke Kemp (2023) which makes an argument for democracy as a safeguard for collapse by adapting Tainter’s theory of complexity. Kemp argues that states don’t collapse due to an increasing cost of adding complexity, but instead by diminishing returns on extraction. These diminishing returns are caused by societies not making a rational deliberation on what, where and how they want to extract resources, but are instead dictated by special interest groups. These group don’t use the state apparatus to increase overall wealth, but only their own capital. Kemp therefore proposes that the problem is not solved by finding new and better technical solutions, but by instead increasing deliberative democracy, to better account for negative feedback, redistribute wealth, and separate political power and wealth.
Is societal collapse just a random event?
In the post about the impact of bad luck for societal collapse, I had missed a paper which was published just two weeks before I made the post public: “The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies”. This paper is quite an improvement to the other ones I discussed, due to its larger dataset and more thorough analysis.
A recent paper by Scheffer et al. (2023) also improved upon the analysis of Sandberg and Arbesman and showed that bad luck is likely an insufficient explanation of collapse. Just as the studies by Arbesman and Sandberg, Scheffer and co-authors used a large dataset of the life cycles of past civilizations and then looked at which probability distribution produces the best fit. However, Scheffer and coauthors did not rely on existing datasets, but instead created their own (2). This allowed them to both collect a larger sample and make sure that they only included those data points which they deemed of high enough quality. They made sure that they only included those data points where they could clearly point to a beginning and end of a given state. In addition to creating their own dataset, they also reproduced their own analysis using data from the SESHAT database. In both cases the results were very similar. They found that the risk of collapse increases for the first ~ 200 years of the state’s existence and levels off after that. This implies that either risk rises over time, resilience declines or both. To determine which it is, they propose that future research should look at past societies and see if they find critical slowing down in their response to disturbances (3). Critical slowing down means that a system takes longer to recover from a disturbance, the closer it comes to a tipping point due to decreased resilience. They also highlight some other studies who have already tried something in this direction. Their results seem to imply that critical slowing down is happening before collapse, but we need more and better data to be sure.
Until next time
The next post will be about the importance of climate when it comes to societal collapse.
Thanks for reading! If you want to talk about this post or societal collapse in general, I’d be happy to have a chat. Just send me a mail to florian.u.jehn at posteo.de and we can schedule something.