Catastrophe, social collapse, and human extinction

The main reason to be careful when you walk up a flight of stairs is not that you might slip and have to retrace one step, but rather that the first slip might cause a second slip, and so on until you fall dozens of steps and break your neck. Similarly, we are concerned about the sorts of catastrophes explored in this book not only because of their terrible direct effects, but also because they may induce an even more damaging collapse of our economic and social systems. In this chapter, I consider the nature of societies, the nature of social collapse, and the distribution of disasters that might induce social collapse, and possible strategies for limiting the extent and harm of such collapse. Before we can understand how societies collapse, we must first understand how societies exist and grow. Humans are far more numerous, capable, and rich than were our distant ancestors. How is this possible? One answer is that today we have more of most kinds of ‘capital’, but by itself this answer tells us little; after all, ‘capital’ is just anything that helps us to produce or achieve more. We can understand better by considering the various types of capital we have. First, we have natural capital, such as soil to farm, ores to mine, trees to cut, water to drink, animals to domesticate, and so on. Second, we have physical capital, such as cleared land to farm, irrigation ditches to move water, buildings to live in, tools to use, machines to run, and so on. Third, we have human capital, such as healthy hands to work with, skills we have honed with practice, useful techniques we have discovered, and abstract principles that help us think. Fourth, we have social capital, that is, ways in which groups of people have found to coordinate their activities. For example, households organize who does what chores, firms organize which employees do which tasks, networks of firms organize to supply inputs to each other, cities and nations organize to put different activities in different locations, culture organizes our expectations about the ways we treat each other, law organizes our coalitions to settle small disputes, and governments coordinate our largest disputes.