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How different countries handled the pandemic

Looking at the historical data, one thing gives me hope.
The same forces that conspire to leave societies vulnerable to catastrophe can also work the other way.

	how quickly the disease was identified,
	the effectiveness of various public health measures, and
	the demographic make-up of countries (proportion of elderly and more vulnerable communities in the population, for example).

But our research has also found examples where societies were able to

For instance, during a "plague" in ancient Athens (probably a typhoid or smallpox outbreak), officials:

Even without our modern understanding of virology, they did what they could to get through a difficult time.

We see also amazing feats of engineering and collective action taken by ancient societies to produce enough food for their growing populations. Look at the

The Qing and other imperial dynasties in China constructed a huge web of granaries throughout their vast territory, supported by public funds and managed by government officials.
This required a massive amount of training, oversight, financial commitment and significant investment in infrastructure to produce and transport foodstuff all over the region.

These granaries played a major role in providing relief when harsh climate conditions such as major floods, droughts, locust invasions, or warfare, threatened the food supply.

From the end of the 1700s, many of England's farmers had seen profits diminish.
On top of this, England was right in the middle of the industrial revolution, with rapidly swelling cities filling with factories.
But conditions in these factories were atrocious.
There was virtually no oversight or protections to ensure worker safety or to compensate anyone injured on the job, and employees were often forced to work long hours with minuscule pay.

The first few decades of the 1800s saw a number of revolts throughout England and Ireland, several of which became violent.
Workers and farmers together charted their demands for more equitable and fair treatment in a series of pamphlets, which is where the period gets its name.

Many of England's powerful political elite came to support these demands as well.
Or at least there were enough to allow for the passing of some significant reforms, including

The reforms resulted in marked improvement in the well-being of millions of people in the subsequent decades, which makes this a remarkable example.
Although it needs to be noted that women were completely left out of the suffrage advances until years later.
But many commentators point to this period as setting the stage for the modern welfare systems that those of us living in the developed world tend to take for granted.
And crucially, the path to victory was made much easier, and considerably less bloody, by having elite support.

This last lesson is a particularly hard one to learn.
Unfortunately, there are many signs around the world today that the mistakes of the past are being repeated, especially by our political leaders and those aspiring to hold power.

Just in the past few years, we have witnessed:

This global polycrisis shows no signs of letting up.
If nothing changes, we can expect these crises to worsen and spread to more places.
We may discover—too late—that these are indeed "end times", as Turchin has written.

But we also are in a unique position, because we know more about these forces of destruction and about how they played out in the past than ever before.
This sentiment serves as the foundation for all of the work we have done compiling this massive amount of historical information.

Learning from history means that we have the ability to do something different.
We can relieve the pressures that are creating violence and making society more fragile.

Our goal as cliodynamicists is to uncover patterns—not just to see how what we are doing today rhymes with the past—but to help find better ways forward.

American humorist and writer Mark Twain is believed to have once said,
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

We create structured, analyzable information by surveying the huge amount of scholarship available about the past. For instance, we can record a society's population as a number, or answer questions about whether something was present or absent. Like, did a society have professional bureaucrats? Or, did it maintain public irrigation works?

These questions get turned into numerical data—a present can become a "1" and absent a "0"—in a way that allows us to examine these data points with a host of analytical tools. Critically, we always combine this "hard" quantitative data with more qualitative descriptions, explaining why the answers were given, providing nuance and marking uncertainty when the research is unclear, and citing relevant published literature.

We're focused on gathering as many examples of past crises as we can. These are periods of social unrest that often result in major devastation—things like famine, disease outbreaks, civil wars and even complete collapse.

Our goal is to find out what drove these societies into crisis, and then what factors seem to have determined whether people could course-correct to stave off devastation.

But why? Right now, we are living in an age of polycrisis—a state where social, political, economic, environmental and other systems are not only deeply interrelated, but nearly all of them are under strain or experiencing some kind of disaster or extreme upheaval.

Examples today include the lingering social and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, volatility in global food and energy markets, wars, political instability, ideological extremism and climate change.

By looking back at past polycrises (and there were many) we can try and figure out which societies coped best.

All of these cases saw people become frustrated at extreme wealth inequality, along with lack of inclusion in the political process. Frustration bred anger, and eventually erupted into fighting that killed millions and affected many more.

For example, the 100 years of civil fighting that felled the Roman republic was propelled by widespread unrest and poverty. Different political camps were formed, took increasingly extreme positions, and came to vilify their opponents with progressively more intense language and vitriol. This animosity spilled over into the streets, where mobs of armed citizens got into huge brawls and even lynched a popular leader and reformer, Tiberius Gracchus.

Eventually, this fighting spiraled into full-blown civil warfare with highly trained, well-organized armies meeting in pitched battles. The underlying tensions and inequalities weren't addressed during all this fighting, though, so this process repeated itself from about the 130s BC until 14AD, when the republican form of government came crashing down.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things is that inequality seems to be just as corrosive for the elites themselves. This is because the accumulation of so much wealth and power leads to intense infighting between them, which ripples throughout society.

In the case of Rome, it was the wealthy and powerful senators and military leaders like Julius Caesar who seized on the anger of a disaffected populace and led the violence.

This pattern also appears at other moments, such as the hatred between southern landowners and northern industrialists in the run up to the US civil war and the struggles between the Tsarist rulers and Russia's landed nobility during the late 1800s.

Meanwhile, the 1864 Taiping rebellion was instigated by well educated young men, frustrated at being unable to find prestigious positions in government after years of toiling away at their studies and passing the civil service exams.

What we see time and again is that wealthy and powerful people try to grab bigger shares of the pie to maintain their positions. Rich families become desperate to secure prestigious posts for their children, while those aspiring to join the ranks of the elite scratch and claw their way up. And typically, wealth is related to power, as elites try to secure top positions in political office.

But it wasn't only these celebrities who broke the rules trying to secure their children's future. Dozens of parents were prosecuted for such bribes, and the investigations are still ongoing. This scandal provides a perfect illustration of what happens when elite competition gets out of hand.

In the UK, you could point to the honors system, which generally seems to reward key allies of those in charge. This was the case in 2023, when former prime minister Boris Johnson rewarded his inner circle with peerages and other prestigious honors. He wasn't the first prime minister to do so, and he won't be the last.

One of the really common historical patterns is that as people accumulate wealth, they generally seek to translate this into other types of "social power": political office, positions at top firms, military or religious leadership. Really, whatever is valued most at that time in their specific society.

Donald Trump is only one recent and fairly extreme version of this motif that pops up time and again during ages of discord. And if something isn't done to relieve the pressure of such competition then these frustrated elites can find masses of supporters.

Then the pressures continue to build, igniting anger and frustration within more and more people, until it requires some release, usually in the form of violent conflict.

Remember that intra-elite competition usually rises when inequality is high, so these are periods when large numbers are feeling frustrated, angry, and ready for a change—even if they have to fight and perhaps die for it, as it seemed some were when they stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

So vital public goods and welfare programs, like initiatives to provide food, housing or health care to those in need, become underfunded and eventually cease to work at all. This exacerbates the gap between the wealthy who can afford these services and the growing number who cannot.

My colleague, political scientist Jack Goldstone, came up with a theory to explain this in the early 1990s, called structural demographic theory. He took an in-depth look at the French Revolution, often seen as the archetypal popular revolt. Goldstone was able to show that a lot of the fighting and grievances were driven by frustrated elites, not only by the "masses", as is the common understanding.

As my colleagues and I have pointed out, this is disturbingly similar to trends we are seeing in the US, the UK and Germany, for example. Years of deregulation and privatization in the US, for instance, have rolled back many of the gains made during the postwar period and gutted a variety of public services.

Meanwhile in the UK, the National Health Service has been said to be "locked in a death spiral" due to years of cuts and underfunding.

All the while, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer. According to recent statistics the richest 10% of households now control over 75% of the total wealth in world.

A shock to one of these systems almost inevitably reverberates into the others. The war in Ukraine, for example, has affected global food supply chains and the price of gas across the world.

Researchers at the Cascade Institute, some of the leading authorities working to understand and track our current polycrisis, present a truly terrifying (and not exahuastive) list of crises the world is facing today, including:

Even environmental threats have been a challenge that humans have had to deal with. There have been ice ages, decades-long droughts and famines, unpredictable weather and severe ecological shocks.

The "little ice age,", a period of abnormally cold temperatures that lasted for centuries from the 14th to early 19th centuries, inflicted mass devastation in Europe and Asia. This poor climate regime caused a number of ecological disasters, including recurrent famine in many places.

During this period, there were major disruptions in economic activity exacerbating food insecurity in places reliant on trade to feed their populations. For example, Egypt experienced what academics now refer to as a "great crisis" in the late 14th century during Mamluk Sultanate rule, as a plague outbreak combined with local flooding that ruined domestic crops while conflict in east Asia disrupted trade into the region. This caused a major famine throughout Egypt and, eventually, an armed revolt including the assassination of the Mamluk sultan, An-Nasir Faraj.