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Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

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Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#21

Post by ncphil »

TheBlight wrote: post #10
mikewarot wrote: post #6

Of course we are, this too shall pass. There is a constant struggle to keep things afloat, people seem to forget that at times, especially the rent seeking class who place little to no value on infrastructure, both physical and societal. If we get another FDR style reset, things should be good for a generation or two, if not... the horrors of history will rhyme once again. Edit/Update: The New Deal provided a social…

FDR's initiative didn't provide any reset. WW2 was responsible for that.

Are you really so sure of that?

I'm old enough to have known a lot of people who lived through the Depression _because_ of FDR's programs. Whether the New Deal alone could have saved the country is literally academic to the tens of millions who were saved by jobs in the CWA, WPA and CCC, or the relief provided by the FSA, SSA and economic aid to businesses under the NIRA. It seems unusually cold hearted for any historian or economist to ignore the tremendous suffering those measures spared so many, just because they didn't meet some theoretical threshold for full recovery.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#22

Post by ineedasername »

TheBlight wrote: post #10
mikewarot wrote: post #6

Of course we are, this too shall pass. There is a constant struggle to keep things afloat, people seem to forget that at times, especially the rent seeking class who place little to no value on infrastructure, both physical and societal. If we get another FDR style reset, things should be good for a generation or two, if not... the horrors of history will rhyme once again. Edit/Update: The New Deal provided a social…

FDR's initiative didn't provide any reset. WW2 was responsible for that.

The two are not mutually exclusive: FDR put the US on the path to active assistance & becoming one of the allied powers. It is also a path that might have been impossible if not for the social & jobs programs keeping people afloat in the years before that.

A more complete collapse might have rendered the US too damaged to focus any effort outside of itself. As it was, many people opposed entering the war on precisely those grounds-- that the US should deal with its own internal problems rather than those a continent away. FDR plowed through those objections, and incidentally sparked the economic recovery fueled by massive industrial mobilization.

Whether or not you agree with FDR's handling of the Great Depression, you cannot separate that from the course of events that shaped the outcomes of WW II (both good and bad)

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#23

Post by Aeolun »

TheBlight wrote: post #10
mikewarot wrote: post #6

Of course we are, this too shall pass. There is a constant struggle to keep things afloat, people seem to forget that at times, especially the rent seeking class who place little to no value on infrastructure, both physical and societal. If we get another FDR style reset, things should be good for a generation or two, if not... the horrors of history will rhyme once again. Edit/Update: The New Deal provided a social…

FDR's initiative didn't provide any reset. WW2 was responsible for that.

WW3 then? I’d rather attribute it to FDR I think.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#24

Post by no_wizard »

anovikov wrote: post #13

I don't think there is any problem with inequality. Inequality may be increasing within individual countries, but it's decreasing worldwide because of decreasing inequality between countries. Similarly, i can't see a problem with East/West divide. "Eastearn" civilisations are rising only as long as they adopt Western principles. It's not as much of a disadvantage of a Western civilisation, it's simply that it's losin…

I think this ignores a few realities:

1) the largest of the economies rising in Asia, being China, is funded in large part by state subsidies to this day. That won’t last forever. Few wholly Chinese companies that weren’t in Hong Kong before China took it back over have proven they can compete without these subsidies either.

2) As a result of the above, for instance, free market isn’t really “free” and I argue this about USA and EU too, yes, but China still requires that companies be 51 percent Chinese owned by default, hardly free enterprise compared to western economies all other things being equal. At least if I do business in USA or EU I don’t have to cede 51 percent of my companies ownership in that country to do business

3) globally a lot of critical natural resources are dwindling or being threatened due to climate change, depletion / overuse or just plain waste. Helium, for instance, was already a shortage pre pandemic, and is truly non renewable[0]. Oil, natural gas, and other critical resources are also reaching critical threshold levels

4) no country is immune from inequality issues, after all China, Japan and Korea have many historical examples of uprisings and civil unrest due to inequality

5) importantly, the USA is not a democracy, it’s actually a democratic republic

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775554343/the-world-is-consta...

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#25

Post by thwor234234 »

I don't think we appreciate the difficulties of a post-Peak-oil world.

For the latter part of the past-decade Hubbert's theory was rubbished because of new supplies from fracking and tar-sands, but the basic hypothesis: that there is a finite supply of cheap oil remains.

There is little doubt that this resource will run out soon, putting an end to cheap transport, cheap agri (fertilizers, mechanization), and pretty much everything else we take for granted in the new 'modern' world.

It's unclear how the world can support 10B population in this scenario, even taking into account the developments in electric and hydrogen vehicles etc. In fact, one wonders if the first world will be worse off because of its extreme reliance on this.

This is a far bigger reason for the eco push, much more so than Global Warming IMO.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#26

Post by BurningFrog »

I'm an amateur historian at best, but I'm not aware of any era that has not expected the world to end soon.

The Christians have done it for 20 centuries now, as one example.

During my life, it has always been a common expectation, though the expected cause has shifted a few times.

My hunch is that maybe we're hard wired to expect the world to end, for some undiscovered reason.

Again, I remind you of my amateur status!

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#27

Post by no_wizard »

99_00 wrote: post #20
no_wizard wrote: post #8

Perhaps not entire civilization collapse, pending nuclear arsenals unleashed, but I think we are edging ever closer to massive social upheaval, what shape of this I am unsure about. To quote an adjacent article that was mentioned in this one: How Western Civilization Could Collapse > Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the e…

>Eventually, the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough What does it mean for the "working population" to "crash"? In the West and the rest of the world, those with the lowest income have the highest birth rate. So it can't mean a decrease in population due to low birth rate.

In context this means political and economic crash, where the poor / working class lose their shirts in an economic upheaval (of which we’ve had at least two in my lifetime, the 2008 crash and the previous dotcom bubble). Unemployment at high levels etc. think 1930s depression

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#29

Post by edgyquant »

bluejekyll wrote: post #11

“By 476, the empire’s reach was zero.” I stopped reading right here. The Western Empire fell in 476 (for many reasons). The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) lasted until 1453. Even that isn’t a perfect way of articulating it, given the continued influence of the Catholic Church had well into the 1500’s (Luther). In some ways one could argue civilization has never ended, but paused in different areas of the wor…

Further. The empire ending didn’t mean civilization did as the Kingdom of Italy continued to exist and the empire was simply replaced with German kingdoms.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#30

Post by [deleted] »

anovikov wrote: post #13

I don't think there is any problem with inequality. Inequality may be increasing within individual countries, but it's decreasing worldwide because of decreasing inequality between countries. Similarly, i can't see a problem with East/West divide. "Eastearn" civilisations are rising only as long as they adopt Western principles. It's not as much of a disadvantage of a Western civilisation, it's simply that it's losin…

[deleted]
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