Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

I listened to Organization of American Historians Talking History podcast on Collapse: How Societies choose to fail or succeed. In this podcast, Jared Diamond talked a lot about failures of societies. he listed characteristics that make societies fail. One of the big things that make societies fail is environmental problems. The societies that fail eventually go into civil war, turn to terrorist acts, or there there is mass migration away from the country. He generalized the failures of societies into four categories. The failure of societies was complicated and hard to understand. It had environment problems and population growth. The elite people of the societies insulate themselves from the rest of the population and let them suffer instead of helping out. The people in thesis societies fail because they do not repraised their core values they have. He also talks about the how societies can succeed too. He mentioned that media, television, newspaper, and books help the societies to learn from remote societies problems so they are not repeated. The successful societies also learn from past societies that made them fail they way they did and to improve on those mistakes made by the past societies.

- Justin Kwan