(2024-04-09) Jehn What Factors Allow Societies To Survive A Crisis

Florian U. Jehn: What factors allow societies to survive a crisis? This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here.... From time to time you come across a paper that blows you away with the amount of work it must have needed to create it and the fascinating insights that can be gleaned from it. For me the preprint “All Crises are Unhappy in their Own Way: The role of societal instability in shaping the past” by Daniel Hoyer et al. (2024) is such a piece of work. They have built a new dataset on top of the Seshat history database (Turchin et al., 2019) (1). Their new data is meant to capture the majority of big crises from the beginning of recorded history until around the beginning of the 20th century

When we talk about the history of our species, often grand narratives are used.

Some famous examples include:

• Steven Pinker’s argument that violence has been decreasing for millennia
• Joseph Tainter’s theory of diminishing returns of complexity
• Peter Turchin’s secular cycles, also described in an earlier post.

Other examples, which cannot be attributed to a specific person:

• The major world religions exist to provide a social glue that makes interaction of individuals outside of their direct kin possible
• Over time societies built institutions, which allow them to control crises better.
• Greater crises lead to greater transformations and reforms.

Hoyer and co-authors think that all of those are potentially the product of cherry picking. We therefore need a big dataset, which contains as many crises as possible, as well as events that could have become a major crisis, but didn’t.

To create a big dataset about crises, you first have to define what you mean when you are talking about crises. The definition used by Hoyer et al. is: “We define crisis as a period of high societal stress and risk of systemic dysfunction - in effect, times when signs of unrest, institutional failing or decline, and/or socio-political instability appear on the rise compared to previous generations (until roughly 50 years earlier).”

They acknowledge that crisis is not the best word for this as it is more concerned with the time before, after and during what we usually see as a crisis, but think that we don’t have any better, so they stick with it.

here are some examples:

• The times of troubles in Russia
• The French Revolution
• Fragmentation of the Mughal Empire
• Meiji Restoration in Japan

They end up with 250 cases, from which they used 168 in their final analysis, as the rest did not have enough data available to be reliable. Scale wise, these entries could relate to everything from a city state to a global empire... between the Bronze Age and the early 20th century

Based on this massive dataset, Hoyer et al. do a wide variety of analysis with the data. This is mostly simple correlations and descriptive statistics

There is no typical crisis

While around 50% of the crises end in some kind of civil war, there are a lot of other outcomes which can also also be observed (Figure 1). These outcomes are also often combined and a crisis can have a variety of different outcomes at once. Quite relevant to this living literature review, only around 5 % of crises result in some kind of collapse.

While the intensity of the crises seems to roughly follow a normal distribution (3), the distribution of the extent of reforms centers around 0, meaning that for the large majority of crises no reforms were conducted afterwards

the likelihood of reforms remains relatively constant throughout a polity’s lifetime.

As stated above the extent of reforms does not correlate at all with crisis severity. However, there are a variety of other factors that increase or decrease the level of reforms. One important factor is revolution (4). If a revolution happened, in 65% of the cases reforms followed, while if no revolution happened, reform only followed in 23% of the cases.

The administrative complexity of a state is another important factor. Higher administrative complexity tends to hinder reform efforts, with the idea being that the intricacies of highly specialized bureaucratic systems can impede the implementation of new policies and structures. Conversely, polities with smaller geographical size and lower administrative complexity show more reforms.

Which attributed historical narratives hold up?

• Violence has decreased over human history (Steven Pinker): Hoyer and coauthor’s data does not support Pinker’s claim that violence has declined over the long run: the severity of crises has not decreased over time. Pinker’s hypothesis may still hold true, but must be qualified with the acknowledgment that it may not necessarily indicate a more peaceful era overall, but rather only a decrease in violent deaths amid ongoing crises.
• Complexity has diminishing returns (Joseph Tainter)... does not invalidate the theory of diminishing returns of complexity
• Secular cycles (Peter Turchin): The idea of secular cycles or any cyclical approach to history cannot be validated with the data here

Which unattributed...?

• Religions as social glue: This hypothesis seems to be true, but only to a small extent.
• Building institutions helps to survive crises: seems to indicate that somewhere in the space of hierarchies and state capacity there is a somewhat optimal range for reform and resilience, but from the paper it does not become clear where exactly this range might be.
• Greater crises lead to greater transformation: This historical idea seems the most clearly false

Why are some crises worse than others and why do some crises lead to reform?

• The size of the external shock:
• Elite behavior: The response of elites varies significantly even to similar crises. Hoyer et al. illustrate this with the case of the Black Death and how elites in both Egypt and England reacted differently
• State capacity: As mentioned above, the more state capacity you have the more you can prepare for crises and the quicker you can move resources once the crisis happens
• Revolutions: One of the most fascinating results of this study is that revolutions seem to be one of the major drivers of reform. However, as there is no connection to the size of the crises, this seems to imply that the best way to push for reforms is to make a revolution, but somehow manage to keep the revolution under control, so it does not spiral into big turmoil.

the team around Hoyer also plans to extend the timeline of the dataset until today.