Tipping Out of Trouble: How Societies Transformed and How We Can Do So Again Marten Scheffer Cambridge Univ. Press (2026)
What connects the collapse of Late Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean some 3,000 years ago, the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century, the societal and economic reforms of the US progressive era in the 1890s to 1920s, and falling fertility rates around the world today?
According to complex-systems researcher Marten Scheffer in his book, Tipping Out of Trouble, they are all examples of tipping points. Current societies have a crucial, diminishing chance to learn from them how to tip the world towards a sustainable, rather than dystopian, future.
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Tipping points have received substantial attention lately in research, the media and books. The focus has been mainly on environmental tipping points, in which gradual changes in conditions, such as rising atmospheric temperatures, reach a point at which parts of the Earth system irreversibly shift to a fundamentally different state. Two books published last year, Earth-system scientist Tim Lenton’s Positive Tipping Points and Am Kipppunkt, written by German journalists Toralf Staud and Benjamin von Brackel, deal with such ‘negative’ tipping points, as well as positive societal ones that might counter them.
Scheffer’s focus is squarely on past societal transformations, and on seeking out similar dynamics that might be at play today. His starting point is what he calls ‘the trouble’, which includes not just the environmental crisis of accelerating climate change and loss of nature, but also a rise in social tensions and inequality. Scheffer links this societal crisis to neoliberal ideas proposing smaller governments and deregulated markets that have gained traction globally since the 1970s. Noting that a “fundamental shift of scale is needed” in efforts to tackle climate change and nature loss, he asks what we can learn from past transformations, because “humanity has tipped out of trouble many times before”.
Drivers of change
To explore this question, Scheffer takes readers on a tour of societal transformations — collapses of ancient civilizations, modern revolutions and reforms and more-recent shifts in norms, such as smoking bans. He is a knowledgeable guide and writes in a conversational tone, sharing excerpts from his extensive scientific career. He argues that the nature of all these changes means that tipping points are the “universal phenomenon” behind them. Once a system threshold is breached, changes become self-sustaining and cause a substantial shift in that system’s state.
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The evidence Scheffer presents is often circumstantial, and he recognizes that it’s easy to oversimplify real-world dynamics. In most cases, the abruptness of the shift is central to his argument. But tipping dynamics are only one reason for shifts in complex systems; they can also be due to abrupt forcing factors, be reversible and even just be the product of random variability. The abruptness of some transformations is also debatable. For instance, after the United Kingdom formally abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, it took the best part of a century for other nations to do the same and for the practice, as well as the forms of forced labour that replaced it, to end. Similarly, some evidence suggests that the Late Bronze Age collapse was a more piecemeal transition than was previously thought.
Scheffer also suggests that critical slowing down — a phenomenon in which the resilience of a system measurably decreases before a big shift — could be a ‘smoking gun’ for a transition becoming a tipping point. As an example, he discusses evidence of gradual changes in societal resilience that seem to precede the Ancestral Pueblo people mysteriously abandoning settlements in what is now the southwestern United States several times in the centuries up to 1300.
Cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people were mysteriously abandoned several times.Credit: Peter Unger/Getty
Scheffer proposes many positive feedback loops that might have driven tipping points in this and other cases. But the presence of such effects is no guarantee of tipping dynamics, and many of the proposed feedback loops remain hypothetical. Moreover, in some situations, resilience can be lost without the system reaching a tipping point, and a tipping point can occur without early warning signs.
As the late evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin observed, “it seems impossible to do science without metaphors”, but we must consider the problems such figures of speech might bring — especially when they add conceptual baggage that alter our expectations of reality. In the case of tipping points, the concept has acquired, for many people, a sense of inevitability as it has traversed from social to natural sciences and back again. Scheffer mirrors this view, describing societal tipping points as “accidents in waiting” after which “there will be no way to stop the transformation”.
But there is a difficulty in comparing a tipping point in, say, the melting of an ice sheet with a societal one. The first situation is mostly deterministic and irreversible once the system has passed a specific point; even the most extensive geoengineering scheme would struggle to stop a collapse once under way. By contrast, societal predictions are subject to the messy complexities of human agency. Potential societal and technological revolutions can and have been thwarted in the past. It is easy with hindsight to see societal transformations as inevitable and presaged by early warnings, but we run the risk of falling prey to a form of survivorship bias by failing to recognize all the shifts that didn’t happen and losing sight of the many other futures that might have been possible.
