history-society

EROI: The Number That Runs Everything In 1930, you could stick a pipe in the ground in East Texas and oil would practically jump out at you. The pressure underground was so high that the first wells were gushers—uncontrollable fountains of black gold. Drillers would cap them, pipe them,

Jared Diamond: Why Societies Choose to Fail At some point, someone cut down the last palm tree on Easter Island. Think about that for a moment. The island had been forested when Polynesians first arrived. Over centuries, the trees disappeared—cut for firewood, for construction, for the log rollers that

Joseph Tainter: Diminishing Returns on Complexity In the late Roman Empire, the government tried something desperate: it made occupations hereditary by law. If your father was a baker, you were a baker. If your father was a soldier, you were a soldier. If your father was a tax collector, guess

Every Civilization Thinks It's Special In 410 AD, the Visigoths sacked Rome. The news spread across the Mediterranean like a shockwave. St. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, captured the disbelief: "The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken." But here's the thing

The Science of Collapse What 10,000 Years of History Reveals About How Civilizations Fall—And Whether Ours Is Next The Core Insight Over the past four decades, a strange coalition has been assembling answers. Archaeologists quantifying ancient tax records. Ecologists modeling forest fire cycles. Complexity theorists running simulations of

Seshat: What 10,000 Years of Data Actually Shows In 2010, a mathematical biologist named Peter Turchin made a prediction. Based on patterns he'd identified in historical data, he said America would experience major political instability around 2020. Not because of any specific policy or leader—not because