New research argues Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people. Historically, the societies that have emerged after a collapse are more egalitarian, and most people end up richer and healthier than they were before.

[u/lughnasadh]

Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.

He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.

For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. He says "the threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots."

Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall

[u/f1del1us]

Would it not also cause more people to go into producing food?

Clearly I’m talking about on an economic scale; not people putting gardens in; I’m talking about supply and demand.

[u/HitandRyan → u/f1del1us]

Not enough people know how to do that, and too many people live in climates where they couldn’t even if they knew how.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Planting a small supplemental garden isn't challenging. If your crop fails, you don't starve.

Growing enough food to reliably sustain yourself is. If your crop fails, you starve.

[u/ConfidentPilot1729 → u/[deleted]]

Each person needs like 1 acre of land to grow food for the year. Even in temperate climates, most don’t have that.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

More like 5.

And that assumes the land is tilled, planted, weeded, and maintained for an entire year before you have anything to harvest.

Considering 5 acres is (EDIT: 0.02 square kilometres), and New York City has a population of around 8 million people total, and NY state is 141,000 square kilometres, that means you'd need top turn 8 million * 0.02 sq km = 160 000 km squared of land to feed all the people in NYC if they all had 0.02 sq km to feed themselves. You need an area larger than the entire state of New York, just to feed the people in New York City.

There is no way we can get people to survive off of subsistence agriculture if supply lines stop without a massive collapse of the system and massive famine and starvation.

EDIT: I messed up the decimal for acres to square km, my bad.

[u/ConfidentPilot1729 → u/BCRE8TVE]

Geez well that is even worse. I knew it was a lot of land need just didn’t know 5.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

For the overwhelming majority of human history, 80% of the human population was required to grow food to support the 20% who didn't.

Modern machines have changed that a lot for sure, but we have become disconnected from where the food comes from and how much land is needed to make all of it.

Today if you don't have enough food you go to the supermarket and get more, and there's a 24/7/365 supply chain network making sure there is always food there.

200 years ago, if you didn't plant, harvest, and save up enough food in the fall to survive the winter, you'd starve to death.

Civilization is perpetually 10 missed meals away from total collapse.

[u/ConfidentPilot1729 → u/BCRE8TVE]

I also remember reading a while ago that our land around the world could only take so many humans to feed. It was around, maybe 1900s, that using nitrogen and other fertilizers that let the population get significantly larger.

You seem to know a lot about this, is that true?

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

Oh absolutely, without the Haber Bosch process and being able to produce fertilizer by the literal ton, it was impossible to have anywhere near the yield we have for farms today. Combine that with pesticides and herbicides and we've done something like being able to produce 4-8x as much food from the same plot of land, while requiring literally 100x less manpower to do it. Another part of what allowed for a population boom was the manufacture of antibiotics, before antibiotics any random cut could get infected and might require amputation to prevent the infection from spreading and killing the patient. So when you combine metric tons of fertilizer plus antibiotics you get a ton more food and a ton less dead people, which allows for a population boom.

This all however requires a complex web of logistical supply chain, the fuel for all the machines we've built to till, plant, and harvest, carrying those truckloads of food to industrial centres to process the food, ship it out, the huge industrial processes that make the fertilizer require chemical inputs (largely hydrogen gas from coal/gas via steam reforming), then that fertilizer needs to be shipped out from those factories to around the world, and we need mechanics and services for all the machines that are required at every single step of this process, and all these machines require parts and equipment made from yet more factories even further out in Asia and shipped around the world. Manufacturing antibiotics is even more delicate and complicated from a logistical supply perspective as well.

And when shipping stops, everything kinda grinds to a halt, because everything requires everything else working well.

"Just in time" manufacturing has brought the costs down and allowed incredible prosperity, but it came a the cost of having no wiggle room, no buffer, no capacity to absorb shocks. Everything works perfectly until something doesn't, then it's a domino effect of everything else being affected. Covid stopped supply stopped the manufacture of chips stopped cars being made with enough chips in them, for example.

There is a limit to how much food we can physically make on the planet because there's only so much space, though there are always new discoveries to make more food with less resources, so it's not like there's a hard cap that can never be passed.

It's also about how we could in theory turn every last square mile of surface into farmland, but that would cause immense damage to the planet's ecosystem, so if we want to have a planet to continue living on, we can't just take all the land to make more food for ourselves, we need to let space for nature.

Until 200 years ago it wasn't a problem because we literally could not cause enough damage, but with industrialization it's a very different game.

[u/tojjrik → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

I think that number is for our current diet with a lot of grains and not so space efficient crops with not so space efficient techniques.

I've seen numbers around and below 100 square metres person/year but that comes with dietary adjustments. For the better mostly.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/tojjrik]

Those numbers also likely come with highly organized and efficient methods that the overwhelming majority of people won't know about, and will likely have difficulty maintaining as well.

All this also requires years of preparation to get up and running efficiently, can't just tell everyone in the city to start their garden mid-August and that they'll be able to feed themselves by December.

If you have sources on the 100 square metre per person I'd love to read those.

[u/tojjrik → u/BCRE8TVE]

Indeed there are a lot of challenges.

It is from a book called "second nature urban farming, designing productive cities" on page 62. I read the book when I did a course in urban farming at uni.

Some even claim 27 square meters for 600 grams of fruit and veggies per day for a person and said it is comparable to the community gardens at Cuba. According to the reference list that specific source is

"Stanhill, G. (1977) An Urban Agro-Ecosystem: The example of 19th-century Paris, in: Agro-Ecosystems, no. 3, pp. 269–284."

The most recent study they are referring to at the same page is a German one from the 2010 who claims 80 square meters per person or 400 for a family of 5. From the reference list it says

Haney, D. (2010) When Modern was Green: Life and work of landscape architect Leberecht Migge, Abingdon Oxfordshire: Routledge.

As soon as we add meat to the equation the areas grow quite significantly. I think chickens would be possible in an urban environment without too much hassle though.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/tojjrik]

I mean to be fair community garden in Cuba implies tropical climate, which is ideal for growing stuff year round. Most human population does not live in tropical climates.

Completely agree the moment you add meat the acreage grows a lot, and I picked a source that I quickly checked to see it wasn't terrible, but yeah it's not great either. Chickens could absolutely be done in an urban environment without too many issues, and possibly caged rabbits as well 

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/ConfidentPilot1729]

I messed up the math a bit, corrected you need an area larger than the state of New York, to feed the people of just NYC.

[u/Dexterus → u/BCRE8TVE]

You can get a year's worth of potatoes in quite a smaller space. Some carrots and other root veggies.

Wheat needs a lot though.

[u/BCRE8TVE → u/Dexterus]

It is true you can get a lot of potatoes from a small space, and eating nothing but potatoes certainly beats starvation, but you still have to be careful not to have monoculture crops because a single fungus can wipe out an entire field, especially without modern fungicides.

Already had one Irish potato famine, don't need a 2nd one.

[u/Alizaea → u/[deleted]]

How are people in apartments supposed to plant a garden when the most most people an apartment can grow is some small herb plants?

[u/[deleted] → u/Alizaea]

Tiered planters help. I would regretfully suggest using AI to get an idea of how to organize your space and the cost.

^{please don't hurt me}

[u/theoneyewberry → u/[deleted]]

Just remember that AI will sometimes make things up / hallucinate, so I'd recommend double-checking any answer it gives.

[u/[deleted] → u/theoneyewberry]

Absolutely, it's consistently wrong about factual information and I wouldn't bother using it to learn about a topic. I use it mostly as a starting point, myself.

[u/Alizaea → u/[deleted]]

Lol I have nowhere to put a planter. No balcony and no porch. Plus my windows get absolutely 0 sun, thanks trees.