The Future Threats Lab and the Fairness Foundation are pleased to host Dr Luke Kemp for this discussion of his provocative new book, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. In this riveting history of humanity, Kemp reveals the pivotal role of inequality in provoking societal collapse, and considers the implications for our own increasingly unequal societies.

For the first 300,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilizations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change. As we congregated in the first cities, began to rely on lootable resources and developed more powerful weapons, small groups began to seize control of valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more hierarchical forms of organisation. Goliath-like states and empires – with vast bureaucracies and militaries – carved up and dominated the globe.

Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now face a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last.

What lessons can we learn from this radical retelling of history for our current, fragile political moment, in the UK and beyond? Join us for a thought-provoking (and hopefully not entirely pessimistic) conversation about the risks posed by inequality in Britain today to our society, democracy, economy and environment and what we can do about them to avert disaster.

Luke will be joined by Dr Danny Sriskandarajah, CEO of the New Economics Foundation, in a conversation hosted by Dr Jeni Mitchell, director of the KCL Future Threats Lab, Will Snell, CEO of the Fairness Foundation and Lord Victor Adebowale CBE, Chair of the NHS Confederation.

This is the third of an ongoing series of events hosted by the Inequality Knocks Project, a collaboration between the Future Threats Lab, King’s Policy Institute and the Fairness Foundation.

About the speakers

Dr Luke Kemp is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and the author of Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. Luke looks at the past (civilization collapses) and future (climate change and emerging technologies) to guide policy in the present. 

Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah has been Chief Executive of NEF since January 2024. His previous roles include CEO of Oxfam GB, Secretary General of CIVICUS, Director of the Royal Commonwealth Society, Interim Director of the Commonwealth Foundation and various posts at the Institute for Public Policy Research. 

Dr Jeni Mitchell is a lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, specialising in future war studies, space studies and the evolution of rebellion. She is founder and co-director of the Future Threats Lab, a King’s research group that takes a human-centric approach to the most dire threats facing humanity and its habitats. She is also an associate of the Freeman Air and Space Institute and the King’s Wargaming Network. 

Will Snell is Chief Executive of the Fairness Foundation. After working in the civil service and for a range of non-profits in the international development sector, he set up Tax Justice UK in 2017 and then launched the Fairness Foundation in collaboration with Julian Richer in 2021, becoming its founding Chief Executive. 

Lord Victor Adebowale CBE became Chair of the NHS Confederation in April 2020. Before this, he was Chief Executive of Turning Point, a social enterprise. He is a Non-Executive Director of the Co-Operative Group, Collaborate CIC, Nuffield Health, Visionable and Leadership in Mind. He is also the Chair of Social Enterprise UK. Victor served for six years as a Non-Executive Director on the Board of NHS England. He has chaired a number of commission reports into: policing; employment; mental health; housing and fairness for The London Fairness Commission; the Metropolitan Police; and for central and local government. He was awarded a CBE for services to the unemployed and homeless people and became a crossbench peer in 2001.