The five signs, per the video, are: (1) climate change, (2) environmental degradation, (3) inequality and oligarchy, (4) complexity, and (5) external shocks of some sort.
While the video describes the climate change as "global" it doesn't have to be global. For instance, the Chaco Canyon culture collapsed because of drought but there is no evidence that it was global in nature.
Environmental degradation includes things such as loss or decline in soil quality due to farming and/or irrigation, pollution, loss of vegetation, and so on. A good example of this is Mayan civilization that had cut down so much forest land that they were having difficulty getting the wood for the fires needed to make the plaster with which they coated their stone structures. Their collapse is also believed to be related to a loss of nutrients in the soil due to over farming.
Inequality and oligarchy essentially results in an impoverished citizenry with little investment in the continuation of the nation. In fact, the need for cheap labor generally leads to a nation being replaced by a country with a polyglot of peoples. In the Roman Empire, this shows up with the many small farmers throughout Italy being replaced with large plantations owned by the extremely wealthy and worked by slaves. The result was the creation of a welfare state and moral decadence.
Complexity refers to how that term is used by Joseph Tainter. As the complexity increases (i.e., cost or energy input goes up) the state will eventually reach a point where it encounters negative returns (i.e., the cost or energy input is greater than the benefit derived from a particular law or bureaucracy or military) and this makes the system unstable and prone to collapse. Which leads to the final point.
An external shock to push everything over the edge. Frankly, the external shock could be climate change or environmental degradation. But climate change or environmental degradation also leads to the negative returns on complexity. Sort of an egg and the chicken argument. But external shocks could also be war or disease or economic collapse.
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Okay. . . . where's Kamala on the list? (now I have the right post)
ReplyDeleteShe fits under the decadence category.
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