Going overboard shouldn't mean collapse but readjustment by simplification. Unless the entire system instantly rely on any newly introduced complexity at a structural level?
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episo...
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair, "I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked" (1935)
Switching to even a simpler insurance would still require rewriting all of that.
See climate change. It's bee long and drawn out and the major hallmark of this issue is a huge amount of resistance from anyone who would benefit more from the status quo.
I what we see in the climate change debate projects onto all sorts of other issues. People are short sighted and stubborn.
I'm starting to believe that maybe a sufficiently advanced AI should overthrow humanity.
I suppose in many cases if you overshoot it's not possible to go back to slightly below the equilibrium, but rather the overshoot causes some non-linear/exponential/whatever effect that causes a substantial drop (e.g. a collapse). See Lotka-Volterra model for a simple example.
If you look at the last ~10,000 years of history, arguably you can see that. The cycles are longer than you might think, though.
I think technology really throws the cycles for a loop, though. I'm a big fan of looking at history, and an even bigger fan of not thinking that we're just so special that we're specially immune to history or the forces that it shows exist, which history shows is a popular delusion and is very alive and well today. On the other hand, I think the last 200 years of technology is a fundamental shift, too, and while history never truly repeats itself, I think there's good reason to think that we now more than ever can't just take past collapses and expect them to match what is currently happening.
People have not necessarily fundamentally changed from historical people, but the relationships between people definitely have, and that's probably going to have some sort of effect. I don't mean anything like "Facebook is a big change", either. I think the most important change is massive speed change in both communication and travel. I think we're well past the point where quantitative change becomes qualitative change there.
I also want to say I'm not necessarily making utopian predictions; I'm just not sure the old disasters are inevitable. In particular I think that in the 21st century there's a not unreasonably chance that, say, the United States Federal government could completely collapse (for the sake of argument, imagine a nuke taking out the whole of Washington DC), but the modern speed of communication could result in effective, functioning emergency governments arising in just a year or two instead of decades. (Probably based on existing state governments, but I'm not sure the US as a whole would reform necessarily. Pieces of it, probably, but I'm not sure the whole would.) If swift collapse is matched by swift reassembly of other governments, will we necessarily see decades or centuries of a "dark age"? If the reassembly can occur before all the technical knowledge dies off?
On the other hand, new nightmare scenarios are on the table too; for instance, "one world government" will always be tempting (because the Powers that Be who think they will be in charge will always push for it), but the possibility that it could create total correlated economic failure across the entire world would be the biggest catastrophe in human history, and the benefits of it basically can't possibly outweigh this possibility. I suppose that'll be a Black Swan relative to the people pushing for this, though for me I consider it so obviously inevitable based on history that it probably isn't one for me.
Anyways, the upshot is that while history has things to teach us and we are well-advised to learn as much as we can from it, I also believe that in certain fundamental ways we are breaking new ground, with all that implies.
That's what for-profit science, marketing, and fads do for you...