Summary

A Goliath is “a collection of hierarchies in which some dominate others to control energy and labor.” Power = control * size, exercised through control of decision-making, resources, threats + violence, and information. Humans evolved as social, cooperative, and equal; “Democracy is humanity’s default political system”. Clumped, defensible, loot-able resources, status games, and the theory of scale of stress pushed societies toward hierarchy, centralization, war, and a growth mandate.

The Goliath’s curse is increasing risk of collapse due to extractive institutions: rising inequality, poor decision making, elite factionalism, weak institutions, and diminishing returns of extraction. Today’s single Goliath system is more powerful yet more vulnerable than ever: hyper-connectivity, monopolization, competitive Goliath traps, catastrophic risk, and breached planetary boundaries. Justice and resilience require open democracy + inclusive institutions, reduced economic inequality, democratic control of information, military, technology + production, and civic engagement.

“Societal collapse is mainly about the fall of great power structures”

“Many state collapses have been a net benefit for citizens”

“The darker angels of our nature are flying us towards evolutionary suicide”

Key Takeaways

Notes

Introduction

• 4 forms of power:
  • Control of decision-making (political)
  • Control of resources (economic)
  • Control by threats + violence
  • Control of information
• Power = control * size
• State: a set of central institutions that imposes rules on + extracts resources from a population + territory
• Avg lifespan: 326 years
• Goliath: a collection of hierarchies in which some dominate others to control energy and labor
• Metacrisis / polycrisis*
• Need to address the underlying drivers of arms races
• “Fundamental psychological factors and the environmental changes that allowed them to shape the world are the root causes”
• “Many state collapses have been a net benefit for citizens”
• “Societal collapse is mainly about the fall of great power structures”

1: Dawns and ends

1: Hobbes’ delusion

• The social contract: give up some liberty in exchange for protection
• Modern research shows Dunbar’s # could be up to 520
• Study: war + violence was actually exceedingly rare in prehistory
  • Discredited The Better Angels of Our Nature
• We’re naturally pacifist
• The Selfish Gene favors ↑
• Hunter gatherers sharing food as insurance policy + belonging; democracy
• “Democracy is humanity’s default political system”
• We evolved as egalitarian
• But, The Status Game now dominates (Maslow’s hierarchy)
• ↑ for reproduction
• Status = prestige or dominance
• Social, cooperative, equal; but we still hunger for status (Maslow)

2: Collapse for 99% of history

• Storytelling of imaginary communities
• Cumulative cultural evolution:
• Study: demography was why Neanderthals went extinct
  • Fragmented, isolated groupings → inbreeding, no protection

3: Complexity of society

• Unequal, hierarchical foragers
• Clumped, defensible, loot-able resources → taxes + dominance hierarchies
• War rises with unequal, sedentary, hierarchical
• War requires:
  1. Large-scale organization
  2. Ideology
  3. Create tight bonds between groups of fighters
• Complexity of society
  • Hierarchy, complexity, centralization
• Collapse: a sudden and lasting drop in societal complexity
• Civilization ↔ Goliath spectrum

4: Theory of scale of stress

• 3k years between dev’t of agriculture and states
• Status games → feasts → growth mandate
• Conspicuous consumption: ↑
• Plague
• Theory of scale of stress: increased social friction (eg. crime) ≥ proportional to scale of civilization

5: Voting with feet and fire

• Feasts + rituals legitimized elite rule
• Rising inequality → revolt, abandonment
• Pattern of organizing to prevent Goliath rebirth

6: Goliath rises

• Only 4/10 independent agriculture areas developed states / large-scale Goliaths
• Zambia & avoiding dominance hierarchies
• “Bureaucracy and administrations were a case of convergent evolution”
• Administration > intimidation (human sacrifice)
• Monotheistic religion → Goliath
  • “A hierarchy in heaven justifies a hierarchy on earth”

7: Goliath’s curse

• Why autocratic rule is favored:
  1. Wealth can easily be converted to other forms of power (and vice versa)
  2. Returns on capital tend to outpace returns on labor
• Society is ~44% to max level of inequality (improved vs origins of Goliath)
• Social capital
• More politically active societies are more resilient
• Wisdom of the crowds
  • Brier score + super-forecasters
• “Inclusive institutions make better decisions and increase social cohesion”
• Goliath’s curse: increasing risk of collapse due to extractive institutions
• Rising inequality, poor decision making, counter-dominance intuitions, weak institutions

2: Imperial march and fall

8: Gang warfare

• Military strongman → state ~100% of the time
• “Warlord-ism, statehood, and organized crime all had similar ingredients”:
  • Hierarchy that coercively extracts resources
  • Territory, population
• Competition over lootable resources
• “War of the few against the many” - small group of men making a power play during collapse
• War / violence (threat, enemy)
  • Increases coordination within the group
  • Authoritarian impulse: makes us more susceptible to domination
• Dark triad:
  • 1% in general population
  • 3-21% in CEOs (spectrum, not binary)
  • 25% in prisons
• “Politics doesn’t select for those who are the most virtuous or competent or who will wield power best; it selects primarily for those who are the best manipulators and negotiators, and are willing to invest the enormous amount of time and effort (and often relax their morals) necessary to achieve status”
• Absolute power corrupts absolutely
• Evolutionary pressure / arms race to the bottom ↑

9: Broken bronze

• Bronze Age conquerors had little control over far-flung territories
• Empire = state (controversial take)
• Two key death spirals of ↑:
  1. Drought + rising inequality → rebellions + invasions
  2. Earthquake storm

10: Shattered obsidian

• Energy ROI: to produce
• Dropped in Maya during drought
• Inequality
• Trade dependency
• War
• Written language constrained to elites
• Difficulty of one kingdom trying to control many

11: China rise and fall

• Mandate of heaven
• No full societal collapse - 2k+ years straight of imperial rule
• Longest rules correlated with weakest empires
• Status competition between aristocrats and gov’t officials
• Frequent civilian uprisings
• Climate → dynastic collapse (mandate of heaven)
• Collapse rises as more elites make a play for political power
• Structural demographic theory: status plays amongst elites, gov’t officials
• Corruption
• Elite migration: shifting location and/or allegiances to stay in high-status positions
• Societal collapse doesn’t last

12: The falls of Rome

• Only empire to span Europe
• Rome was a pyramid scheme of conquer and use new warriors to conquer neighboring land
• Oligarchy → monarchical dictatorship
• Corruption, costly military, less plunder + booty, lower silver yields
• Climate + disease
• Benefits of conquest tend to dry up over time
• Imperial overstretch: ↑
• Elite factionalism
  • Principally a battle for status
• Diminishing returns of extraction:
  • Overarching cause of Rome and Han dynasty collapses
• Benefits of collapse:
  • Better diet, less disease (less crowding, more diverse diets)
  • Healthier habits, more free time
  • Wealth equality

13: Fear the rise

• Common view of progress as technological advancement
• Tech can be lost during collapse
• 3 aspects of a flourishing life:
  • Welfare / prosperity
  • Health / life
  • Happiness
• “The average citizen living under a state would’ve seen little improvement in welfare in the 6k years up to 1700”
• “Most people are sadder and smaller than their Paleolithic ancestors”
• The Black Death:
  • Western Europe with inclusive networks became more equal
  • Eastern Europe (eg. Russia) became less equal
• Rome fractured into competing European states
• Colonialism + imperial expansion: British empire largest to have ever existed
  • Decimation: lost ~10% of the world population in the process

14: Colonization and collapse

• Why Cortez won: guns, germs, steel
• Aztecs
• Lots of false narratives ↑
• Exploited pre-existing divisions in local tribes
• Native elites assisted with own subjugation
• Babies, bombs, bacteria, barbarism → why Goliaths won
• Best equipped for war > maximizing welfare of society

14: Collapse in the modern world

• Nation: a group with a claim to common ancestry
• Unequal pay: global north vs south: 87-95% less, even when equally skilled
• Single Goliath system: every country is now capitalist (IMF, World Bank, WTO)
• Surveillance capitalist network
• Elites educated in the same institutions
• All top 100 law firms headquartered in London + New York
• Violence controlled by US; China + Russia to a lesser extent
• State death: 50 / 202 states since 1816 no longer exist
  • Seems to be coming to an end (only 5 since WWII)
  • Norm of territorial integrity
• The world is accelerating
• Resilience → anti-fragility
• Inverted U curve of happiness as Goliath progresses over 5k years
• ↑ 2 reasons:
  • Massive increases in energy capture
  • Collective action
• ↑ unions, public health movements, expansion of the vote, anti-colonial movements

3: Endgame

16: Mors ex machina

• Cobalt, coal
• Global catastrophic existential risk
• Many interrelated drivers of ↑
• EMPs
• Nuclear de-proliferation
• Disease dev + research
• Bioweapons
• AGI / ASI: timeline uncertain
  • Stop AI
• AI will take our fate out of our own hands

17: Gaia vs goliath

• Forever chemicals / novel entities: eg. PFAS long-term health effects
• We’re fundamentally constrained by the climate
• Climate and collapse have been strongly linked historically (Rome, Mongolians)
• 30M → 2B people living in 29C+ climates by 2070
• 9 planetary boundaries: estimated thresholds where we leave the safety of Holocene-like conditions
  • Past 6, 4 are high-risk
• 10,000x higher extinction rate
• Economic growth vs climate change: decoupling
  • Would need to be 10x faster in developed countries

18: The Death Star syndrome

• We’re more powerful, yet more vulnerable than ever
• Hyper-connectivity: eg. cyberattacks, COVID, Evergrande / world trade
• Interdependence: ↑ good for small shocks, bad for big shocks
• More monopolization, concentration
• Moral hazard: ↑ too big to fail
• Poly-crisis

19: The rungless ladder

• Sword of Damocles: “power sits in the dark shadow of precariousness”
• Extremes, not averages, are the source of risk (The Black Swan)
• Fat tail distribution of risk
  • Eg. +/- $10k vs $1M Russian roulette
• Solar geo-engineering
• ↑ mitigates hazard without addressing the causes of the risk
• Technogical complexity + dependency
• The larger the welfare state, the more dangerous the collapse

20: The roots of our endgame

• Not individuals, eg. big oil and carbon footprints ($100M PR campaign)
• “The reality is a mere handful of corporations, countries, and militaries are responsible for creating the great majority of catastrophic risk - shrouding their activities in secrecy to avoid scrutiny and undermining efforts to regulate them”
• The agents of doom: big tech, the fossil fuel industry, and the military industrial complexes
• ↑ in turn driven by larger incentives
• 70+ projects explicitly trying to build AGI
• Root causes:
  • Secrecy, threats
  • Corruption, lobbying, profiteering
    • Revolving door
• Lack of whistleblower protection in AI
• SB-1047
  • AI risk assessment for large models, whistleblower protection
  • Threat of mass exodus of AI firms
• AI arms race
• Tragedy of the commons typically doesn’t occur in small communities
• Game theory doesn’t explain ↑ individuals, but does large orgs
• Strongest status seekers selected for in gov’t
• “Dominance hierarchies have had ideologies which justify universal expansion”
• ↑ Competitive Goliath traps:
  • Arms races
  • Races to the bottom
  • Status races using conspicuous consumption

21: The fates of Goliaths

• Expert average: ~1/3 chance of global collapse
• US “thermonuclear monarchy”
• The great compression: leveling of wealth as unions peaked after WWII
• Democracy → autocracy over the past 15 years (71%)
• Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos
• Elite factionalism, capture of politics
• Evolutionary suicide: “short-term adaptation leads to long-term extinction”
  • Eg. cancer
• Research productivity is dropping at a rate of 50% every 13 years
  • Low hanging fruit
  • Research materials more expensive
  • Political: incumbent suffocation
• Future shock, technological singularity
• Silicon Goliath: “data is a crucial new lootable resource”
• Mass surveillance capitalism
• How to tame the global Goliath:
  • Resources: make resources less lootable: privacy laws, antitrust, anti-corruption
  • Exit: Increase exit options: favors democracy; migration rights, labor mobility, platform interoperability
  • Technology: use tech to scale democracy and oversight: civic-tech platforms, deliberative assemblies, open ledgers/audits, radical transparency by default
  • Knowledge: understand how Goliaths emerge and avoid traps
• 3 likely paths:
  • Self-termination
  • World in chains
  • Shackled Goliath

22: After the fall

• Drake’s equation:
• Fermi’s paradox: ↑ why is intelligent life so unlikely?
• Minimum viable population: 50, 500, 14,000, 44,000
• Theil + Altman NZ property
• Lesson: invest in people > places

23: Justice and resilience

• Citizen jury = proper democracy
• EO Wilson’s fundamental problem with humanity:
  1. Paleolithic emotions
  2. Medieval institutions
  3. God-like technology
• Open democracy + inclusive institutions
  • “Harness our collective intelligence”
• “The darker angels of our nature are flying us towards evolutionary suicide”
• Suggestions:
  • Wealth tax, progressive tax
  • Crack down on corruption, including legal bribery
  • Give people a genuine, direct say in gov’t and workplaces thru open democracy
• Skill vs luck
• Technological process ≠ progress
• Need new social structures

Epilogue: slaying Goliath

• Climate: stay within planetary boundaries
  • Carbon tax, other externalities
  • Accept no infinite growth
    • Drop GDP as measure
• Control / slow AI
  • Properly compensate people
  • Data privacy
  • Cap the size of compute clusters
  • Labor unions
  • Regulate
• Get rid of nuclear stockpiles
• Democratize political power
  • Avoid adverse selection of dark triad
  • Constantly cycle thru citizen physical assemblies
  • Find experiments in democracy
  • Worker cooperatives
• Reduce economic inequality
  • Progressive taxation
  • Wealth taxes
  • Corporation taxes (global coalition + penalize tax havens)
  • Global minimum wage
  • Comprehensive debt jubilee
• Democratic control of info, military
  • Antitrust
  • Make power structures more transparent
  • NDAs
  • Protect + empower whistleblowers
• Democratically control tech + production
• “Don’t be a dick”
  • Don’t work for agents of doom
  • If you’re at the top, make more democratic
• Civic engagement
• Don’t be dominated