Goliath's Curse
Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse is a 2025 non-fiction book by scholar Luke Kemp. A historical study of the collapse of human societies from the Bronze Age to the Modern era, the book analyses 324 case studies of regimes and empires that fell apart.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2025–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
Indeed, this is the main hard problem of human societies. It's great that we can now put a name to the issue and there is more and more awareness of it. It's also refreshing to see human history being examined through that lens, like in Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath's_Curse
- On that second point - I can strongly recommend the book Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp:
- Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp covers it pretty well I think.
- The book is Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp. I am hopeful for this one, most generalizations about collapse are not very good, they rely on avoiding the details of history and instead make sweeping generalizations.
Collapse is one of those tropes that is poorly treated, popular among people who aren’t interested in the details of history and only some grand lesson or some justification for some feeling in their gut about impending doom.
