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Depends on you age, current situation, and responsibilities, IMO there is little *blanket* advice that one can give, but here are a few general observations:

1) IMO, betting on a sustained collapse of a modern industrial society is to be betting against pretty steep odds. It didn’t happen here even during the Great Depression, and it hasn’t happened anywhere else in a modern well-organized society since World War II. It’s one thing to take prudent and relatively inexpensive steps to be able the tide yourself over a few weeks of disruption in distribution systems, it’s quite another to start planning your entire life in such a way as to survive the far less likely event of general societal collapse - especially is as it is extremely expensive and disruptive for most people to attempt this, and since it’s hard to determine in advance exactly what sorts of challenges you will be facing.

In this regard it’s worth considering the experience of Japan and Germany toward the end of World War II: it’s easy to imagine various kinds of collapses of modern infrastructure, but few of them even approach the scale and duration of the Allied bombing campaigns in the closing years of World War II. These societies were under intense economic stress, but social cohesion and central control and command of the economy and society persisted until the very end in areas not under Allied occupation.

2) Keep in mind that the future is largely unknowable, even to those more intelligent and better informed than most readers here.

Late last summer I had lunch with a former CEO of a major corporation, an individual who has made three separate fortunes, and an extremely intelligent and well-informed man with the global economic perspective. We were discussing the question of individual investment, and I asked him if a market were almost every asset class appeared to be overvalued he saw any bargains at the moment. His reply was he thought that likely non-banking financial stocks were at or close to their bottom.

As it turned out of course this asset class was on perched on the brink of what was to be precipitous loss of value over the next six months; it was literally about the worst asset class in which one could possibly have invested at that moment.

Which is why this man - with a net worth greater than all but a few tenths of a percent of Americans, who could afford to gamble substantial amounts of money if he wished - has the vast proportion of his wealth conservatively deployed across a wide range asset classes and economies, and does his “gambling” with the assets in a 401(k) plan funded years ago when he was first starting out in someone else’s employee, and containing assets not much greater than my own.

I doubt he it is happy about the results of that strategy, but what I have lunch with him next summer, and I ask him, I’m virtually certain that he’ll say that given the difficulty of predicting the future this was likely the most rational investment choice, and that he hasn’t much altered it.

3) With this in mind, other than such obvious strategies as paying down high interest rate debt if you can it’s very difficult to know what one can do in unsettled economic times that would not be generally good advice at any time.

To some extent you can protect a portion of your wealth against inflation by holding hard assets and by investing in inflation protected asset classes such as inflation linked government bonds, however it’s much harder for average individuals to protect themselves against deflation except by having little personally guaranteed debt - the problem there is that almost all substantial lending for the purchase of assets such as a personal residence to fund the growth of a small businesses requires a personal guarantee. Unfortunately there are few small businesses that can be successfully grown to a reasonable size on cash flow alone, meanwhile the people “underwater” on their mortgages are getting a highly unpleasing lesson in the realities of indebtedness in a deflationary housing marker.