The impact of aging societies on societal stability and potential collapse is a complex and contentious topic among researchers and policymakers. While it is true that many developed countries are seeing an increase in the proportion of elderly people in their populations, attributing societal vulnerability solely to aging can oversimplify the issue.
According to an analysis of hundreds of pre-modern societies, societies, and political structures, like the people they serve, appear to become more fragile as they age. A new study with global implications provides the first quantitative support for the theory that the resilience of political states declines over time.
The causes of societal collapse have been extensively researched and range from conquest and coups to earthquakes and droughts. According to this new study, pre-modern states faced an increasing risk of collapse within the first two centuries after their formation. The study identifies several mechanisms that may be responsible for these aging effects. Some of the mechanisms, such as environmental degradation and rising economic inequality, are still in operation today.
According to SFI External Professor Tim Kohler (Washington State University), the findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlight the importance of understanding internal processes that may contribute to the demise of states.
Over the last two millennia, ancient Chinese states or dynasties had an upper limit of longevity of around 300 years. There are numerous explanations for this middle-school textbook knowledge in China, but no consensus has been reached.
Chi Xu
“We tend to concentrate on external drivers such as drought or catastrophes. Yes, these have a role, but often they are just triggers that are effective, or not, depending on the internal dynamics of particular societies,” says Kohler.
How states and great powers rise and fall has been an enigma that has puzzled historians for years. In this study, the researchers looked at this question from a new angle, by analyzing longevity in 324 pre-modern states spanning five millennia.
“This approach is commonly used to study the risk of death in aging humans, but nobody had the idea to look at societies this way,” says SFI External Professor Marten Scheffer (Wageningen University), lead author of the study.
In humans, the risk of death doubles every 6-7 years after infancy. Few people live for more than 100 years because of the exponential process. The authors demonstrate that it differs for states. Their risk of extinction rises sharply during the first two centuries, then levels off, allowing a few to live much longer than usual.
They discovered a similar pattern all over the world, from pre-modern European societies to early American civilizations to Chinese dynasties.
“Over the last two millennia, ancient Chinese states or dynasties had an upper limit of longevity of around 300 years. There are numerous explanations for this middle-school textbook knowledge in China, but no consensus has been reached,” says co-author Chi Xu of Nanjing University in China. “Perhaps the answer is underneath the global pattern of human civilizations — what happened in ancient China is a perfect reflection that all societies will age and become vulnerable.”
Today’s societies differ greatly from the pre-modern states studied by the authors. Nonetheless, humans should not expect modern societies to be immune to the mechanisms that have driven the waxing and waning of states for thousands of years, according to Scheffer.
“Mechanisms that destabilized past societies remain relevant today,” she says. “Indeed, perceived unfairness and scarcity exacerbated by climatic extremes may still drive discontent and violence.”
Current threats to global society make these findings especially relevant, according to co-author Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter.
“As our society enters a climate and ecological crisis of our own making the evidence that it is getting less resilient just increases the systemic and existential risks we are facing,” he said. “A glimmer of hope is that some past societies pulled through crises and lived much longer — but they had to reinvent themselves in the process.”
