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My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

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Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#191

Post by bmitc »

mythrwy wrote: post #180
bmitc wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think the Mayans ran out of anything. Neither do I believe the Romans ran out of anything. Is this true? I thought it was drought and deforestation and over-farming that sped up the Mayan decline and that soil erosion and exhaustion and agricultural decline aided in the fall of Rome. https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/0...

Rome got much (most?) of their grain from Egypt (which renews fertility due to annual flooding) and the cause of the Mayan collapse is unknown but I highly doubt it was primarily scarcity driven. Societies collapse from social factors, not just resource scarcity and social factors are in my opinion a more common cause. War, internal conflict, and political instability. And my favorite theory, the rise of parasitic an…

That link appears to disagree with you regarding the Mayans and even points out that ecological issues can fuel and exacerbate social, political, and cultural problems. Of course these things are multifaceted but it seems obvious that a multidimensional domino effect can occur when kick started by ecological issues. Look at what happened with COVID. Gun and ammunition purchases were off the charts, increases of homicidal crime, civil unrest, unemployment, etc. Such a "simple" thing as a virus destabilized society in multiple ways. Just imagine if it was food and resource scarcity.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#192

Post by pottertheotter »

seibelj wrote: post #89
chestertn wrote: post #60

When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me. I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting…

The Austrian view of economics (and of human philosophy), when I finally sat down and read through the material, made so much sense to me and deeply affected me. It clarified several things I had been feeling about the world that I couldn’t fully comprehend, and made me feel much less stressed and more content. The Malthusian (doom scrolling) impulse is stronger than ever. I feel happier not subscribing to the “end o…

What part or version of the Austrian school? Mostly I hear of people who subscribe to anarcho-capitalism, which I think is a pretty terrifying view, and I've never understood how people get there.

It reminds me of a lot of theory papers you see in the likes of the Journal of Finance where they start by saying, "This is how x works (given this large list of constraints or ignoring this large list of variables)" which makes it completely unrealistic.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#193

Post by swader999 »

phkahler wrote: post #121
School-Cotton wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was an attempted coup in the US No there wasn’t. A rowdy protest is not “an attempted coup”. All actual institutions behaved according to the law.

>> A rowdy protest is not “an attempted coup”. Oh is this referring to the so called "insurection"? That was like a mild protest compared to other recent ones.

The only ones creating trouble were the fbi informants that were there as agitators. Why haven't these people been charged yet? The rest were let and even motioned in. They took a tour and left peacefully when asked.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#195

Post by runeks »

senkora wrote: post #156
seibelj wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Austrian view of economics (and of human philosophy), when I finally sat down and read through the material, made so much sense to me and deeply affected me. It clarified several things I had been feeling about the world that I couldn’t fully comprehend, and made me feel much less stressed and more content. The Malthusian (doom scrolling) impulse is stronger than ever. I feel happier not subscribing to the “end o…

Do you have any recommendations on what material to read?

This Wikipedia page on Carl Menger’s “Principles of Economics” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Menge... says:

> Ludwig von Mises called the book the best introduction to the Austrian School of economics

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#196

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

According the the wiki article, world3 is too general to be realistic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3

> But those of us who knew the DYNAMO language in which the simulation was written and those who took the model apart line-by-line quickly realized that we had to deal with an exercise in misinformation and obfustication rather than with a model delivering valuable insights. I was particularly astonished by the variables labelled Nonrenewable Resources and Pollution. Lumping together (to cite just a few scores of possible examples) highly substitutable but relatively limited resources of liquid oil with unsubstitutable but immense deposits of sedimentary phosphate rocks, or short-lived atmospheric gases with long-lived radioactive wastes, struck me as extraordinarily meaningless.[7]:168

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#197

Post by snowwrestler »

lmm wrote: post #174
jcranmer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually). That's true only if you define Peak Oil so unusually as to make it true. The concept behind Peak Oil is that in the (near [1]) future, the available supply of oil will fail to meet the total demand for it, and then we'll be stuck in a world where there is forever an inability to get the…

AIUI US oil production actually did peak at more or less the originally predicted time, and the 1970s oil crisis was a reflection of that. Obviously it didn't result in the total collapse of civilisation, but it wasn't totally insignificant either.

U.S. oil production has gone up so much since the 1970s that in 2015 Congress removed the crude oil export ban they put in place in 1975.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#198

Post by themodelplumber »

tanbog4 wrote: post #185
cjohnson318 wrote: post #163

I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Another implicit assumption is that we'll be able to move forward unilaterally with such a solution, instead of it becoming a political football until it's too late to do anything, like climate change. A lot…

It's not that silly to model as historically that has also happened. To use the "peak oil" example this work also influenced, the technology of fossil oil reserves was a response in part to "peak whale" (not a joke). The main source much commercial 'oil' for things like Street lamps in the 1800s was whale blubber. As whales got overfished fossilised oil reserves were developed and not only took over those markets but…

Sure, sure...and someday they'll be paying households to provide the cities with electricity! :-)

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#199

Post by agsamek »

xxpor wrote: post #183
webinvest wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I watched a cspan question and answer session and one dinosaur-aged Republican representative from West Palm Beach Florida sounded so backwards. He was saying that we shouldn’t transition to green energy because of all the coal miner jobs that will be displaced by green energy jobs. It seemed like he was just being difficult or corrupt because Florida doesn’t even have any coal mines or coal mining jobs! Also, i…

US Supreme Court. And there's a very good chance the entire world look different if Gore won. There may have not been a 9/11, for one. There would have certainly not been an Iraq war.

For sure. Obama played kindly with Putin, no worries about Ukraine invasion in Europe. He prevented a global conflict for sure, thanks to his kindness and openness /s

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#200

Post by jinguang »

现实的变量因素太多的。不起眼的因素可能成为决定因素；自我觉得重要的因素，在疫情的现实下也变成无足轻重了。所以这类预测噱头大于实际。不过我觉得资本主义社会崩溃的概率更大。
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