Closing The Collapse Gap: The USSR was better prepared than the US (2006)

I've read some of his books (The Five Stages of Collapse, e.g.) and there's a lot of food for thought.

He's now spending his time designing and building "unsinkable" houseboats.

His thinkpieces, which in the past were quite worthwhile, are now behind a paywall at

We live in a more complex society and countries need each other more than before. Communication is cheap, transport is cheap so it makes sense to rely on other for your own need.

So, this lack of preparedness is true for USA, but also for many countries in Europe, and Asia. The more complex the society the more fragile it is to disruption.

Is it solvable? Yes. Local renewable energy is a good example of reduction on distribution complexity. There is more knowledge involved, but there is less countries participant in the complexity.

To stop believing in politics seems worse advice ever, thou. It seems more a receipt for collapse than a solution to be more resilient.

> "Took 10 years to recover"

Has Russia recovered? That also needs more probe. To be better that you were 10 years ago is not synonym of being recovered. Russia is just less chaotic, maybe.

Was there anything to recover? Sure they beat everyone to space but the economy wasn't exactly roaring. My family tells me you didn't really have any kind of choice when you lined up to "shop" for groceries, and you had to know someone from the store to get anything good (better meat, rare sweets like jam) before stocks ran out.

That's arguably something else to consider in this comparison. Yes we may have a further distance to go to recover to the US historic norm, but even under a collapse we may be closer to ensuring basic survival and even comfort than immediately post collapse Russia.

I would agree that the (East German) state and government was entirely unprepared for its own collapse.

But maybe the people were better prepared because they've been living at the brink of collapse for most of their lives. Shortages of one sort or the other were a normal occurance, you learned quickly to not depend too much on the state, but on family and other people. So when the state "disappeared" people more or less just went on with their business.

And at least in the GDR there was definitely a growing feeling that this couldn't go on for much longer during the 80's, which may have created a "subconscious preparedness".

And of course the "collapse of the GDR" wasn't an "apocalypse-style collapse", but in typical German fashion it was happening very orderly and predictable once the ball was rolling. And (here's a controversial opinion) even though many people had their lives turned upside down in the 90's, lost their job, had to emigrate into the "Golden West", even with all that... being poor in the reunited Germany still was a better life than being "rich" in East Germany (whatever that meant, because there was not much to buy for money anyway).

I'm not sure how people in "the West" would have dealt with its own collapse if the sides had been reversed. Maybe we'll learn in the near future though.

2. The military boondoggles have continued uninterrupted since the collapse of the USSR almost regardless of who is in charge. G.W. Bush ran on a platform of not getting involved in foreign entanglements the way Clinton did, then Obama ran on a platform of not getting out of the entanglements that Bush got us into!