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

bbc.com

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

#51

Post by ravenstine »

BurningFrog wrote: post #26

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…

You aren't wrong, but I'm not sure civilization collapse or decline is the same thing as doomsday. The article does conflate the two ideas through climate change.

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

#52

Post by muzani »

BurningFrog wrote: post #26

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…

The topic is the end of a civilization, not the world. Plenty of civilizations have collapsed in the last 20 centuries, but it depends on how you define a collapse.

The fall of the Roman and Aztec empires would be the benchmarks. Would we also consider the more recent Nazi Germany or Ottoman Empire falls as collapses?

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

#53

Post by Nursie »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #36
BurningFrog wrote: post #26

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…

I think many people can see a kind of broken-ness to the world, and long for a world that isn't broken. I think that might be the basis for your observation - people kind of hope for an end, in the hope that what follows will be better.

Unfortunately what comes after a fall is almost always worse. Human societies seem to fix themselves best through slow improvement, revolutions create power vacuums and people that fill those vacuums are usually bad news.

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

#54

Post by hindsightbias »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #44
quickthrower2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it’s the opposite - everyone expects things to go on as they are. At least in stable countries. We are hard wired not to expect the world to end.

Agreed. By the way, is there any sort of memoirs from ordinary people before WW2? Like did people at the time see it coming 1 years, 5 years etc. before?

Roosevelt and Churchill certainly saw it coming.

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

#55

Post by ceilingcorner »

eplanit wrote: post #33
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…

As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever les…

We are already in a low-level Civil War and have been for quite some time. The important thing to understand is that digital / media / information warfare will be the future of warfare, both in the US and abroad.

Why? For better or worse, the average person in America is lazy. Arguing online is easy, but actually engaging in kinetic warfare over a sustained period of time is extremely difficult. Even the minor conflicts that erupt at protests are tiny and irrelevant compared to an actual civil war.

There's also not much money to be made in actually destroying things, as compared to drumming up outrage (which is how the media, large and small, Alex Jones to CNN, makes its money.)

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's basic geopolitics. Every large state does this to each other. The US to China, China to the US, US to Russia, Russia to US.

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

#56

Post by dQw4w9WgXcQ »

eplanit wrote: post #33
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…

As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever les…

Yea that's not a conspiracy theory at all. CCP/Russia most definitely have heavily targeted campaigns to sow disunity via the whole "USA is a dumpster fire" and "we're so divided" nonsense all over social media sites like FB/Twitter and Reddit. Of course Reddit being Reddit and so forth you get regular Americans gobbling it up and amplifying. Even worse when late-night hosts with big audiences do it. The strength of the United States is literally its motto - "e pluribus unum" - of course foreign countries want to oppose that.

What's annoying to me is having to lead coworkers though a rational thought exercise about "do you really think we're divided? as compared to what? how exactly do you measure division?" and so forth just to get them to admit it's mostly some generalized feeling and not some rationally considered measure.

I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this. Americans love a common enemy, and if they caught wind of how much they are truly being manipulated it might shift the narrative. Maybe that would embarrass too many citizens to realize the stuff they mindlessly parrot is largely a planted narrative.

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

#57

Post by labster »

thwor234234 wrote: post #25

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 m…

Worst case scenario we have a few hundred years of coal remaining. But fortunately in most developed nations, population is decreasing when you exclude immigration. As we improve standards of living, population will fall to more manageable levels. We are smart enough to escape the Malthusian trap.

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

#59

Post by no_wizard »

vkou wrote: post #42
no_wizard wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. The power of a sovereign to directly tax, and indirectly inflate its currency says otherwise. You also need to quantify what it means for the economy to 'run off state subsidies'. There are particular sectors of the economy that are subsidized in China. The rest stand on thei…

The 51% ownership clause is a subsidy. Chinese government still subsidies construction industry and the manufacturing sector, as well as tech[0]

At least 3% of the entire state budget is dedicated just to subsidies, this does not include tax breaks or other special incentives and this has been growing steadily[1][2]

[0]: https://www.uscc.gov/files/000566

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/initial-us-c...

[2]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade-war/China-corporate-su...

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

#60

Post by wyager »

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…

The quote you inlined strikes me as total nonsense.

First, there is no local mechanism by which having too small of a fraction of the total wealth that exists everywhere will cause a group to “crash”. Groups “crash” (assuming a sane interpretation of that word) usually due to local effects, like not having enough money to buy food, and not because they’re poor compared to someone else somewhere else. Obviously relative poverty could inspire a political movement or something, but I’m not seeing the “crash” here.

Second, power law distributions for wealth are natural, seem to have existed for all of civilizational history, and are arguably the only kind of stable equilibrium state that is possible with current technology.

Third, the appeal to greenhouse gas emissions seems less like part of a coherent economic argument and more of an irrelevant appeal to the idea that wealthy people (90% of Americans, in this case) are bad because they do wealthy people stuff like enjoy abundant food and energy.

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