On the surface this just looks like a click-baiting article which points to some models that may determine the survival or collapse of society. I don't have too many problems with these models, and they can be quite useful when determining policy. However two lines in the article stuck out like a sore thumb.
All societal collapses over the past 5,000 years, Motesharrei writes, have involved both “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity” and “the economic stratification of society into Elites (the rich) and Masses (the poor).”
This is an absurd generalization. For example, I'm quite sure the Persian Empire didn't collapse from the overuse of resources by elites, but rather due a shocking military campaign led by a certain young Macedonian man named Alexander.
Other examples include the Roman Empire. In the West this certainly was a factor, but also the advances of barbarians including Huns, Visigoths and Ostragoths led to the fall of the West. The fall of the East was motivated by several factors including primarily the Fourth Crusade, which established the oddity known as the Latin Empire, from which the Eastern Roman Empire never recovered. This study falls into the same trap that many others do, in that they try to ascribe the fall of societies to a single cause.
Though science should theoretically save us, history has only shown technology to bring us closer to collapse.
WHAT?! Societies have used the advancement of technology as building blocks to increase population (through agricultural and medical advances), expand borders (through military technology) and streamline the efficient running of a society (through the printing press, computers and the internet etc.). This seems like an absurd reversal of the fedoratheist "Science is all good, all hail STEM!" position. Both are just as wrong as each other.
Why does this article has such awful generalizations? let's have a look.
the study, written by mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis along with a team of natural and social scientists, explains that the nature and structure of modern society was doomed from the start.
Ah yes. A mathematician did this. Unfortunately determining the course of the history of modern society requires far more than a few equations. The most glaring example is mathematics' ability to determine human agency, which is one of the important factors for change in human history. How does the mathematician propose to solve this imaginary, inevitable societal collapse?
“The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth.”
Hey these aren't bad ideas for humans to pursue. Unfortunately in this context it just looks like a misuse of history under a veil of mathematics to promote a liberal agenda.
I should also note that this violates the Ninth Circle of Bad History, by trying to reduce history into a deterministic series of mathematical equations.
Or did you just pull that "example" out of your ass? 
@ Obama for bringing oil subsidies up constantly on the campaign trail. That niqqa really don't care.
