What an expert on societal collapse says about our current moment

A Q&A with Professor Daniel Hoyer of SoDy

Welcome to Vignettes, our weekly cabinet of curiosities. Here you’ll find unexpected facts, intimate portraits of interesting people, interviews and more.

Vignettes is for paid subscribers—thank you for your support! If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, what are you waiting for?

---

Tyler Merbler from USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For someone who specializes in societal collapse, Daniel Hoyer is surprisingly jolly. 

Hoyer is a computational historian and complexity scientist. For more than 10 years, he’s worked at the Seshat Databank, where he serves as Senior Research Associate and Managing Director. Sesaht is famous for seeking to formalize historical knowledge, using empirical data from throughout history to test big hypotheses around social complexity: the role of religion, how technologies evolved and how crises unfolded.

But in 2018, “disappointingly late,” Hoyer says, he began to feel that this historical research had contemporary implications. “We were so focused on the past, it took a while to be like, oh wait, some of these patterns sound familiar,” he tells me. Hoyer began to consider ways that that historical data could help inform policy decisions and potentially help to avert different crises or collapses. From there, he founded SoDy, an organization that seeks to show “how long-term societal dynamics shape the different possible futures that lay ahead of us.”

Hoyer sat down with Stranger’s Guide for a wide-ranging conversation, touching on the Mayans, the Roman Empire, the Qing Dynasty and more, to explore just what the past can tell us about the instability of our current moment. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Stranger’s Guide: The website for your organization SoDy leads with the line: "Past is Prologue, Past is Prediction, Past is Potential." But you use past events stretching back thousands of years—to the Romans, the Aztecs and various other periods of history that feel very far away—to offer strategies for navigating present geopolitical situation. What can these different times tell us about our current national or international moment?

Daniel Hoyer: The thing that always strikes me is even though there are differences in technology and scope and scale, there's a lot that comes with being humans living among groups of other humans. The need to cooperate, to grow together, to produce stuff to feed and shelter yourself and your family—these are all core concerns shared everywhere. And the ways that people solve those problems and the challenges are not as diverse as you think. The Aztecs had exactly the same kind of issues that we do. Every Chinese dynasty did too. This is really the heart of my work right now, trying to look at these periods of crisis, look at how societies solve these challenges, and accomplish wellbeing for their citizens or not.

Pretty much everywhere we've looked, you see these dynamics: There are periods we call integrative phases where societies are developing, they're growing, things are going well. They're establishing their institutions. The substance of them is different, but at its heart, it is governments coming together. It is rules, regulations, customs, cultures coming together to allow people to cooperate. It's not always super equitable. There's a lot of hierarchies, there's a lot of inequalities involved. But generally, this is a period where things are working more or less well enough for everyone that people are happy enough that they're willing to live within it.

Often what happens is, as hierarchies get established, as people become settled in their positions of authority and as populations continue to grow, you see a lot of pressure start to build. It puts downward pressure on what you might call wages or distribution. Labor becomes cheaper and easier to exploit. This is the overproduction problem. There's some inequality. It's not terrible right now. But [elites say] we're going to use that to give our children just a little bit more or have a little bit more security, or make sure we're taking a little bit more of the pie. 

SG: What about leaders during these periods? I've heard you talk about “elite overproduction.” Why does having too many elites contribute to crisis?