How can one analyze this? Actually reaching the stage of some essential resource exhaustion leads to war, starvation, or other event that causes the society to

How can one analyze this? Actually reaching the stage of some essential resource exhaustion leads to war, starvation, or other event that causes the society to no longer exist, and thus you are left with survivorship bias by studying the ones that remain. But also, merely surviving is not the problem trying to be avoided. It’s all the decrease in quality of life on the way to adapting to the scarcity of the resource (which very well could mean thinning the herd) that is the issue.