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

Invariably, the nature of a difficult situation is that they're difficult to get out of, so we tend to be very interested in avoiding difficult situations. This is why people are so interested in avoiding climate change, rather than waiting for more real-time data about how much climate change actually sucks so they can update their Bayesian priors and "avoid climate change when it happens again."

Suppose I thought you should get some injections, and you researched it and concluded they almost certainly wouldn't benefit you, and might harm you. Would you be OK with being characterized as a weird uncle who refused to get a treatment?

We can measure global warming, it is happening, and we know what drives it right now. We should at least try to model what kind of change would fix it. Including new technologies.

Only once the resource has been consumed. And with topsoil I'm not sure you want to see what happens when food prices rise dramatically.

You say that as though it's a theorem. It's not. It's perhaps reasonable when discussing small perturbations of resources, but it's not a magical phenomena that will "just work" in a free market (assuming one even exists) at any scale.

The globe itself is finite and we have only finite time to make corrections to diminishing resources like oil. No one knows how long it will take to adapt, or what the human cost will be on the way to arriving at that adaptation. To make matters far worse, we have global warming to contend with and that's still subject to political whims and not even a concern yet for the "free market".

If you must take "the free market" as axiomatic truth, then consider also that the free market may "decide" that human extinction is the "optimal" outcome regardless of what monopolists and oligarchs say.

(My main concern with the book is the lack of references; for each chapter he provides " further reading", but I'd have preferred to see a source for each claim.)

The biggest issue is that we don’t monetize the externalities in the current state.

Even if there were an event that wiped out 75% of people, it kicks the can down the road at most 30 years due to a baby boom.

Refusing to solve the real problem is what got us in to this mess.

It’s also utterly like us as a species to think that killing 3 out of 4 people is an easier fix than just living within our means.

I guess the way forward is to build a sustainable future for everyone and their families. And to get everyone to agree it's the best way to go about things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Its somebody who instills distrust in society by taking advantage of it.

For example, if we make a back of the envelope estimate that an elite person has skills that are 10 times those of an average person (10 times smarter, stronger, more charismatic, better educated, etc.) and works 3 times longer then they could conceivably be 30 times more productive. If, to be conservative, we doubled that, then we could define greed as attempting to amass more than 60 times more wealth than the average person.

I am not sure if by technology you mean products or ideas. In case of the latter, that does not sound right. Smart driven persons do not have to be greedy in order to devote their live to something.

also, scientists, doctors, researchers, even maybe the military?, progress has been defined by a lot of different motivators than just greed i would think… (was einstein full of greed when he made his breakthroughs?)

There was a lot more to it than that, and largely speculative, but it was interesting. What if the reason we don't see alien civilizations all over our sky is that sociopathy in social animals is actually really rare or is always otherwise controlled for?

Again there is no certainty in life, but to say that this civilization is not very different than others before it is in my view ahistorial.

If traditional food sources go away and technology provides an alternative food source, that is what people will eat. Culture will follow technology, if that's what people have to do to survive.

EDIT:That mostly applies to the population in the developed world with access to capital, technology and industrial resources that we can use to adapt our food supply. Not everywhere in the world has those resources to fall back on though.

It is an interesting question if a new world war is more likely than a major cultural change in our diet.

That's basically what you're alluding to with the seaweed and food thing.

Cultural and ideological hangups will go right out the window in a hurry when there's a real crisis and a culturally incompatible solution. People aren't gonna let things truly go to shit over something as trivial as what they eat or where their water comes from.

The primary danger in the first world as I see it is from the moneyed and empowered people F-ing it over for large enough other groups to cause probems. Doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine how climate change might F-over downstate Illinois (because farms) but Chicago won't let them do anything about it because they hold all the cards and they make their money a different way. They'd probably figure it out eventually but with how unequal our society is I'm not gonna bet money on eventually happening before the shooting starts.

It's easy. It will happen. The only question is if it will take ten years or twenty.

But I do agree with you on this "ah well, we'll just..." sunshiny outlook we keep hearing.

This year they've really been pushing edible "tree shrimp" cicadas. This is the first time I've heard that they were edible, and suddenly I'm hearing about it several times a week.

Here in Sweden we eat fermented fish. Other countries eat ferment cabbage, beans, goat stomachs, or other fermented things which in my culture we would be weird to eat. I think fermented seaweed is also a thing somewhere.

There are things that could force a culture change, such as famine, war, social status signals, media, and religion to mention a few examples. Humans are social creatures, and culture is a social phenomenon, so the cause for a cultural change would likely be social in nature. I guess a societal collapse could also trigger a change in culture, or a cultural change could prevent a societal collapse. I guess it depend on how one want to perceive it, and what meaning people put into the word "societal collapse".

One-third of the world's exports of chilis, tomatoes, and cucumbers goes through the country. The Netherlands also exports one-fifteenth of the world's apples.

Aside from that, a significant portion of Dutch agricultural exports consists of fresh-cut plants, flowers, and flower bulbs, with the Netherlands exporting two-thirds of the world's total.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands

It's simply one among many possible resolutions to soil erosion. There need not be a single solution. Soil erosion won't kill all traditional farming practices, and vertical farms can simply make up part of the difference (and progressively more if soil erosion isn't tackled directly).

> Likely, the places that are unaffected by climate change are going to be so expensive that most of the people fleeing the effects of climate change will not be able to relocate there.

We may or may not have refugee crises driven by climate change. There is simply no way to estimate these likelihoods.

> The Comprehensive Tech model is far fetched because it requires planning, cooperation, commitment, and sacrificing short term gains for long term stability--basically all of the things humans are terrible at.

You just described that regulations require demonstration of any new development's water access for 100 years, which is exactly the kind of planning, cooperation, and commitment you said we need. Clearly we are capable of it when necessary.

Regulations have certainly gotten a bad rap over the past few decades with the push for deregulation, but the worse the situation gets due to lax regulations, the more this will change.

Your conclusion is based on the naive assumption that circumstances don't change people's behaviour and so the past couple of decades will predict the next century, but history doesn't support this argument. Cultural views on nearly every issue have changed dramatically in each generation.

The most antifragile system we know is the earth's biosphere and its component ecosystems. By reorganising it for our industrial processes, we have made it pretty fragile and we will be experiencing the results of that (in the form of more droughts, storms, temperature swings etc.) increasingly if we keep it up.

Adopting the stable world scenario would be accepting that we need to limit our use of the world's resources and give back a lot of land and ocean use to the natural ecosystems that gave us those resources in the first place -- rewilding large portions of the earth. This is about the only reasonable suggesting for antifragility I could conceive of, making it basically the same thing as the SW option.

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

There are two general approaches that lead me there: the utilitarian and the ethical.

The utilitarian approach: I see lots of government interventions that, while allegedly well-meant, end up causing more harm than good. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff for a couple of examples of clearly economically counterproductive policies that governments nevertheless engage in again and again; lots more are less clear but just as bad. Some of these are due to special interests somehow convincing the government, or voters, that the policy is net beneficial or virtuous or something, when it actually enriches the special interests at the expense of others. Some terrible policies are just due to naivete or lack of caring—and those who suffer from the policies not being a sufficiently well-organized political force to stop it. Others have more complicated explanations.

The common thread I see is, these are policies imposed by force on nonconsenting people. (The "social contract" theory is a rationalization that doesn't pass basic scrutiny. When a person opposes a policy and votes against it, and then 60% of the other inhabitants vote in favor of it, you can't meaningfully claim that the person has "consented" to the policy; that's not how contracts work. It's even less tenable when the votes are for politicians, who make decisions years later on issues that didn't exist at the time the votes were cast.) When those policies cause suffering to some people, it doesn't matter—they can't do anything about it, so the policy remains. Well, occasionally the suffering group is better at politics than whoever created the policy, but often they're not.

A question is, if these policies are so good, why do they have to be imposed by force? After all, if, for example, a policy would benefit three people by $100 worth and harm someone else for $50 worth, one could arrange for the three to each give, say, $30 to the fourth person, and then it would be +$70 for each of the three and +$40 for the fourth—i.e. it's net positive to everyone, and then it could be done voluntarily. (It might not happen in practice due to transaction costs, or if someone else holds out for a better deal, but one would expect something like it to happen eventually.) Every net-positive policy could be implemented voluntarily. The only policies that absolutely require force are those that are net-negative. Sounds like an excellent heuristic for policies to forbid. Only allow policies that are voluntarily agreed to by everyone involved.

Transaction costs are not zero (although technology tends to reduce them), and there are some things where a force-based approach looks simpler and more workable. And there are certainly hard problems—how to fund public goods and what to do when someone doesn't want to pay, how to have a stable society with multiple competing private police forces. Various people have proposed solutions; I suspect that at least some of them could be made to work tolerably well, and I think experimentation plus further technological development will make some of them clearly better than state-based alternatives.

I wouldn't advocate tearing down every government in the world today to switch to anarcho-capitalism. I do think it's a goal they should all approach, and that many of the paths in that direction (i.e. reducing government interventions) are obviously net-positive. (There do exist some policy kludges to make other policies less harmful, and if you canceled the kludges but kept the original harmful policies, you could be net-negative; you do have to be somewhat intelligent about it.) Some problems might not have anarcho-capitalist solutions that could be implemented today; some might never have them, I can't rule out the possibility. But I suspect it can be done; and anyway, if we only manage to cancel 95% of harmful government interventions and conclude we can't remove the last 5%, that'll still be a great achievement.

The ethical approach is this: The non-aggression principle. Physical force is immoral unless it is used to defend against or punish the aggressive use of force. You do need a concept of property and a notion of what counts as "force", but that's basically it; I think an ethical system has to be a Schelling point, which everyone might agree to without needing to communicate let alone negotiate, and I haven't encountered anything else nearly as good as this one. Anyway, it follows that all government interventions either involve aggressive force, and are thus immoral, or else they could be implemented by private parties.

Now, ethics aren't necessarily to be obeyed absolutely. Pretty much any ethical system will tell you that murder is wrong. But you can imagine scenarios where, say, someone with godlike foresight perceiving what Hitler was going to turn into when Hitler was still a child, and deciding to kill him first. (Somewhat more realistic are trolley problems and organ donor problems. Also genuinely realistic is a whistleblower engaging in stealing, lying, and possibly worse behaviors to exfiltrate the data. If the data is important enough, how far do you go?) My take is, the law must forbid such things—the law must be ethical—but individuals might rationally decide to step outside the law in extreme circumstances. When they do, they should bear in mind that (a) they now have no right to complain when good people use force to stop or punish them, and (b) ethical violations generally have bad second-order effects ("So, does that mean the guy with five healthy organs should expect the doctor to try to murder him, and therefore he should incapacitate the doctor first and skip town?"); but it's not impossible to conclude that breaking the law is still the best approach.

So, it's possible that a grossly unethical legal system—one which routinely violates the non-aggression principle—is the best choice in a tough situation. (Earth is a tough situation.) But there'd better be a damn good reason for each violation—which I expect there usually isn't. The violations should be scrutinized, and unjustified ones should be eliminated, as quickly as possible. We probably won't eliminate everything—any more than we can bring the murder rate to zero (and the most salient proposed societies with zero crime are dystopias)—but, again, every step in that direction is a good one, so let's go as far as possible.

The term doesn't make much sense, it was likely coined by people who do not understand our economic system. Capitalism never went away, it's the dominant system we live in now and have for centuries. There isn't anything "neo" about today's capitalists.

As for some of the promoters of Austrian school teachings I agree with you they aren't the most charitable types, however the theory itself just looks at the economic system the way it works - there's actually less social judgement in Austrian school thought than other economic schools. Which is why it's less popular. A rational and neutral approach when it comes to macroeconomics does not have mass appeal.

Individuals are motivated primarily by self-interest. Within a family people are strongly charitable, within a neighborhood (tribe) somewhat helpful, and beyond that altruism cannot be relied on to power the system forwards. Any system that relies on people to be altruistic to strangers is doomed to failure. Instead, you should create systems where people, by acting in their own self interest, help the larger society.

Capitalism is emergent phenomena - where you ban markets, they spring up organically. This occurs even in the most socialist / communist systems such as Cuba and North Korea. Markets allow people to agree voluntarily to prices based on their own subjective opinions of value.

Within any society that isn't forcing everyone to be perfectly equal by threat of death, differences in wealth naturally emerge. Over time they become pronounced. It is impossible to end inequality without coercion - some people naturally value their leisure time over being productive, and it is unfair to coerce someone to artificially reduce their productivity. There is no such thing as economic equality in any meaningful sense, only equality under the law.

Societies have collapsed for reasons other then resource scarcity. In fact I'd say more often they collapse for reasons other then resource scarcity.

I don't think the Mayans ran out of anything. Neither do I believe the Romans ran out of anything.

My guess? The professional political/priestly/mid-level manager class gaining self serving control and cannibalizing productive (and competitive) capacity is a very common cause of collapse.

We see it on a smaller scale in companies real time.

However we are releasing an excess amount that had been trapped and removed from that cyclical process, adding more energy into the system than its natural equilibrium usually takes.

Not only may you be right, you are in fact guaranteed to be right. Of course, predicting exactly when things go wrong is another ballgame altogether.

Edit: the downvotes on HN are becoming so reactionary lately, it feels like it's slowly turning into reddit. Or maybe people just aren't familiar with Poincaré recurrence, etc.?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon#Maya_reference...

There is just one inscription predicting that a particular god would do something (that's not clearly understood) at that time. Charles Mann suggested that it could be just as plausible to interpret the "investiture" when this god comes to Earth as a kind of party or celebration, and not a cataclysm.

Well, we see people and even political groups laughing at the idea of a virus outbreak that kills 100k even today, isn't it?

Now picture it without the benefit of hindsight.

Why did western society failed so hard at containing the virus when countries like South Korea were already leading by example at the start of Q1 2020.

The situation around global warming would be a lot different if the environmentalist Al Gore hadn’t lost to conservative George Bush. The election hinged on a narrow Florida Supreme Court decision of 5-4 over the votes and controversial butterfly ballots. Based on that decision, Bush won the USA presidential election by only 537 votes. The 3rd party spoiler effect from the Green Party was also to blame since Florida isn’t yet advanced enough to have ranked-choice voting.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic...

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-virus-ou...

The unit was disbanded. Agree or disagree why it was disbanded, nothing was created to replace it. This is one of many examples of how things were/are worse than they needed to be.

It was a regression from a unified pan-continent society to isolated tribes. How advanced those tribes were is hard to say because most didn’t write things down.

As far as I know what followed Rome was a period of unrest and lessened commerce. From that aspect at least it was “worse”.

The only sudden collapse that's possible is the result of a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills most of the major cities on Earth - but the risk of that has steadily decreased sine it's peak around the 60s-70s.

A long, slow multi-generational decline however is quite possible for a place like the US though: the US has an ideological bent that allows it to decide to sacrifice it's own citizens, and that's been growing stronger. Increasing rates of crises due to climate change could definitely lead to some new generational poverty, but that's the point: that's a "collapse" in the true Roman sense, and definitely not in the "I'm going to survive it in my fortified bunker" sense. It's more Americans losing their houses and discovering what it's like to be poor when the bailout money is "efficiently" managed.

If you might get hit by a car tomorrow, why bother with anything at all?

We assume the best and keep going. Make contingency plans.

To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February:

> In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-produ...

The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries.

And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.

Peak oil, is correct is some sort of technical sense, but continues to be consistently misforecast due to underestimating both technical innovation and exploration. Cost-effective reserves grew much faster than depletion, and now we also have alternatives and increased efficiencies that have reduced/flatlined consumption even as feasible capacity continues to increase. That doesn't mean there isn't some finite limit (and even if there wasn't, that we wouldn't want to limit CO2 regardless) but that the modeling process is just too simple.

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 necessary oil. In this model, it's great to be an oil supermajor holding one of the last great reserves of oil--you can basically charge what you want for it, and so it's worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get it.

An alternative model for the future is that the demand for oil peaks before the supply is. In this model, that same oil supermajor is now in a terrible position, and shelling out hundred of billions of dollars for new reserves is a stupid idea. In essence, from a planning perspective, this is the exact opposite of what Peak Oil predicts.

The current trends seem to indicate that it's the second scenario that is going to come true, not the former situation. Combined with the fact that more specific predictions about when it will happen have continuously failed to come true, it's hard to find much about Peak Oil thati sactually correct.

[1] The imminence of the catastrophe of peak oil is usually highlighted by its prophets, but it has been generally less assumed by planners working under its assumption, so it's debatable to what degree the imminence is a critical prediction of the theory. Whatever the case, nearly every single prediction of when the peak would occur has already been passed without that peak having happened.

And there’s value in questioning our (often unexamined) beliefs. But taking it too seriously, thinking that you’ve got it figured out and that others are fools for not listening to you — well… Maybe you would have predicted the meteor to the dinosaurs, and maybe they would’ve been fools for not listening, but there was also very little any of them could have done to change the outcome.

Pick your favorite civilization collapse story. What would you have done, at that time, to change it?

One could argue “at least I would’ve seen it coming.” That’s true; be informed. But I object to the idea that everyone is generally foolish for not taking these concerns seriously. The concerns are mistaken far more than they’re correct.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...

reforestation is booming, not to discount how devastated green heavy regions like the amazon are

That being said, I'm a doomer but because AI.

Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.

Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?

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

It is actually the only thing that keeps me up at night. I am crew on a lifeboat and need to live within a certain distance from the boathouse, otherwise I would move tomorrow. The RNLI is too important a part of my life to leave behind otherwise. I may be able to afford some land higher up (60m+ in the future).

> I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways).

I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe. If we're talking about a situation where people are physically (violently) competing for resources, then I'd be in the same boat as everyone else (by design, I'd add - I have no desire to be the lone survivor behind a fence or whatever while other families starve).

> I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)

Thanks! It actually happened because I gave up on living in a city. Certainly, there's a lot of people I knew in SF/Bay Area, London, and Dublin who could do what I did overnight (probably even as a side project), but don't, so I don't think funding is the limiting factor for most.

I hope things work out for you. I know it's trite to say online, but if you decide to do it, it's certainly a path you can take. It will involve sacrificing other paths not taken, though - the bill for opportunity cost escapes no-one.

A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves.

This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive.

The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.

As the article you linked points out, Egyptian and Greek civilizations were affected, but apparently there were other strong civilizations that were doing exceedingly well at the time at the expense of Egypt and Greece.

That's my point. Certainly, from any one perspective, societies can collapse, but that's just a localized problem. Never have we seen humanity suddenly thrust wholesale into some fantastical dark age.