Luke Kemp works at the Center for the study of existential risk at Cambridge University, the kind of place that works out how close humanity is to killing itself and what the strategies might be for avoiding this. In his new book, Goliath’s Curse — Pst and Future of Societal Collapse, he makes a brilliant case for the role of elites in hastening the end of empire. But how did empires and even states come about? Are they a natural state of human development? Not so, says Luke, and points to the fact that throughout history empire collapse was actually a good thing for most people, and that it was usually triggered through elites hogging resources and accumulating more an more wealth at the cost of everyone else. There are certain echoes with the present here, and our conversation pivots from the distant past into the not so distant future.
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