Complex systems collapse faster
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But in the end Roman Empire did not collapse very fast, it kept existing in a different form (the eastern Roman Empire) for an additional thousand years and did not fail after all.
Roman Empire heritage is huge and spans from culture to engineering, from military tactics to religious beliefs, from political systems to law systems, even languages were heavily influenced by Latin, especially in continental Europe, and the process is still going on.
So probably it's not really that complex systems collapse faster, but that they are able to undergo to radical changes without disappearing from history.
They have the ability to reshape themselves and somewhat survive even if their original form does not.
A simpler system would not be able to do that but OTOH it would be much simpler to rebuild it from scratch or reboot/replicate it.
A single part failure can easily cause a car to become completely undrivable, whereas a surprisingly amount can go wrong with human body and it works more or less the same.
Not enough fuel and a car stops. It's completely binary, either you enough gas to go, or you can't go. For a human there is an incredible range of failure modes for not having enough fuel. Humans can survive an absurdly long time when they are 'empty' of food.
However once that human body does fail, it's over. Additionally all parts of it collapse together.
A car is more or less the sum of it's parts. You can take each individual part and take it off and reuse it, like wise each failing impacts primarily it self. The engine can go find with a flat tire, you can use the headlights on car with no gas and no wheels until the batteries fall out. When an essential component for driving the car fails, all of the other components are still useful. This also means that any piece that is necessarily for the car to drive causes complete failure for the system when it fails. But it also means you can restore the system trivially by repairing a single part.
The human body is more than the sum of it's parts. You can't trivially remove or replace parts. The upside is it is wildly resistant to failure. You can lose an eye and still see, you can lose huge parts of the brain and still function, you can damage a leg running a marathon and still find a way to finish rather quickly, the entire system can be under attack by an invader and automatically defend it self.
But there are limit and when they are cross the entire system fails completely and irreversibly. And in this sense they do collapse faster because once that limit is crossed the system rapidly starts to fail and can never be restored.
You're highly selective. Let's switch things around a bit:
Not enough oxygen and a human stops. It's completely binary. But remove the oil from a car, and it can survive an absurdly long time.
More seriously, you can in sequence replace all parts of a car and it still functions as the original one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus), but you can't do that with a human (even if cells do that in a way). This means you can have a car last 1000 years, but not a biological human.
I wouldn't call less than 30 minutes[1] "an absurdly long amount of time". I've lost a car due to all the oil leaking before. I don't even think it lasted ten minutes after the low oil light popped up (I was in the middle of an expressway), and that engine was toast afterwards. I had it pop up another time for another car and thankfully I was two minutes away from an exit to an oasis and got oil into it pretty quickly.
If you mean an EV car then that's not fair, it's not designed to use oil, that's like saying a human can survive an absurdly long time without eating dirt.
[1]: https://www.matfoundrygroup.com/blog/can-you-run-an-engine-w...
Pretty sure they were referring to storing a car for a long time (months or longer) without any oil in it. Not trying to operate the ICE car without oil in it.
Actually there’s enough evidence at this point that you can, you just have to do it on the cellular level, not tissue level, and the hardest problem for therapies in living humans is not creating cancer at the same time.
Partial reprogramming (resetting methylation status on the DNA) looks like the most important maintenance to do inside the human cells, but there are other known problems with partly known solutions.
My point was that complexity is not a single face phenomenon and can't account alone for risk of failure.
I believe we should look at why complexity is there and what purpose it serves.
Human body is a complex machine, but the fact that failure can bring it down to the extreme is because human body is fragile and once single organs start failing things cascades to the point of no return very quickly.
We are in fact not build for extreme resiliency, but for extreme adaptability (not even the most extreme nature created)
A simple system most of the times is built with simplicity in mind (sorry for the tautology) and sometimes because of simplicity is more efficient.
It can also happen to more complex systems, like for example our body which is very energy efficient at the expenses of resiliency. Klingons OTOH have two livers, an eight-chambered heart, and two stomachs. They are bigger, consume more energy and need to eat (and drink) a lot more. Redundancy adds complexity, but have its purpose.
Klingons do not exists obviously, but nuclear factories are another example of complexity serving safety, not more efficient operations.
Simpler systems usually exhibit single point of failures, like for example now with the war our very complex supply chain can shield us better from the consequences than countries that don't have them or can't afford them.
Historically they died sooner and we haven't records of their sudden fall, because they never reached the point were it mattered enough.
So complexity - I would call it complex redundancy -, which is very costly, depends a lot on the ability of gathering the resources.
Going back to the Romans, at one point they stopped making new steel and warships because the huge amount of wood necessary was not sustainable and Europe witnessed the first massive deforestation of its history.
So, before collapsing, they had to add another layer: recycling. Which can be simpler as a process but also requires a longer chain of supply.
Add to that the will of their enemies to conquer them, the lost knowledge on how to reboot failing systems because they were so old that people took them for granted and things can go south pretty rapidly, but that's not an inherent property of complexity, but of fragility.
The Universe is immensely complex, but I believe it's still going strong after 13 billions years from its birth.
When I say that we are fragile I mean that we physically are.
One Mike Tyson's punch in my face and there's a good chance I'll suffer grave damages or worse.
An hippopotamus would probably not even feel it.
The Roman empire in the West was rather slow to collapse, even the fact that it survived the crisis of the third century [0] speaks more to its resilience than fragility. As late as 460, Western Roman commanders were able to subdue hostile barbarians and reattach their territories to the Empire proper [1].
The Roman empire in the East, as you notice, survived for another thousand years.
If the author wanted an example of an empire that collapsed really fast, it would be the USSR. That was indeed rather fast. In 1985, Moscow controlled not just the USSR itself, but several important European satellite states east of the Elbe, plus it held a lot of sway in the developing world. Six years later, the empire was gone. Not even Western Kremlinologists expected such a fast unraveling of the Soviet system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
he mostly explained large vs small systems, and didn't really qualify complex systems, until the very end.
a better explanation would be military vs democratic systems, the military being the simplex one, with straight hierarchies. the democracy with various complex interlinks, feedback loops and control mechanisms. Military is like a company, need to grow fast, and dies fast. commands need to spread fast.
See https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691121178/ev...
> Ugo Bardi is professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a full member of the Club of Rome, an international organization dedicated to promoting a clean and prosperous world for all humankind, and the author, among other books, of The Seneca Effect (2017), Before the Collapse (2019), and The Empty Sea (2021).
For instance, due to advances in technology, many aspects of our current modern global society depend on the availability of Cobalt as a component in battery tech. This is a relatively rare element, with concentrated extraction.
Lots of things in modern society depend on having small, cheap, powerful batteries. Lots of systems are built upon systems which have that dependency. This creates a single point of failure which can have reverberating effects throughout the whole system.
I suppose the more complex and interconnected a system is, the more likely it is that you have many of these weak points floating around.
That said, this doesn't stop someone from designing a complex system which cannot tolerate failure: it's just it'll tend to fall apart as soon as they start to put it together (and they'll either learn quickly how to make it tolerate failure or it'll never get off the ground), it won't generally run fine for a long time and then implode suddenly.
But when these feedback loops break, for whatever reason-- reaching the limits of the elasticity and controls, for instance-- they tend to abruptly de-compensate and fall apart.
This looks sudden: more and more slack is being taken up, until the actual compensatory mechanism is exhausted, and then smack, it's all over.
It's like when you get hypothermia, and then vasoconstriction to maintain core temperature stops... and you start shedding lots of heat through your skin, and shivering ends... then you feel hot and want to take off your clothes. Your body is doing many different kinds of things to try and fight getting cold, and once one falls apart "because it's too cold" -- the rest fall like dominoes.
So I don't buy into the complex system collapse faster idea. I would say that if you were to look at a simple system and and a [working] complex system the simple system is going to collapse faster in case of a failure, while you may not notice failures as a complex system works around them). What the author here observes is the catastrophic collapse in the late stage of the system where something leads to the almost simultaneous collapse of multiple subsystems.
Here is one of my favourite writings that ties complex systems with failure: https://how.complexsystems.fail/
And then A fails, but hey, it's still running great!
And then C fails. And the system collapses, because A, B, and C all failed. And everybody thinks that it collapsed quickly, because nobody thinks of the collapse as starting when B failed.
TL;DR: A complex redundant system can run for a long time in a partially-failed state. If you measure only from the start of full failure, you can miss how long the collapse took.
In the current form, I feel like the highest efficiency solution maker (or maybe the one in second place) is usually trying to do extremely low licensing with the idea of winning the whole market. That's great in terms of efficiency and actually lowers complexity but means monoculture with exactly identical dependencies.
For me, the word “complex” complicates the assertion without adding much value.
I prefer, “Systems fail faster as the number of modes and points of failure increase.”
I think this is a very good judgement.
It's a lot easier to deplete resources than to allow them to retain their value, or with even more difficulty achieve growth..
Sometimes things really fly off the shelf (viral) but mostly it takes a lot of work with a focused mindset for growth to be initiated to begin with and continue to take place for any length of time.
For a large multi-generational system like that the tremendous strength required to get it flying and keep it going will often have to result in some remarkable upward momentum.
The initiative required can sometimes be lost over one or more generations and the average person may not notice as the upward momentum alone prevents things from faltering immediately.
Until it's too late because the collective talent's focus needed to be retarding collapse as soon as the elusive initiative was lost, but that event did not register against the macro upward momentum still remaining.
So the whole thing comes crashing down while presided over by those who seemed OK at stewarding upward trends, while they were actually not capable of continuing the mindset or making equivalent contributions over one or more generations, and completely out of their element when downward pressure arises that would otherwise be overcome.
We still don't know what actually happened, but the scholars studying it are discovering piece by piece that it was a "perfect storm" and no single event can be assumed as the root cause of the collapse.
The most interesting part of it, for me, is that it was a cascade failure caused by "globalization" of the times.
Maybe if we really understand what happened it can help us prevent a collapse of our current society (assuming it's not already too late)
It intrigues me that growth is one of the goals of sustainable development (the 8Th), when we have a group of brilliant MTI scientists warning of its limits since the 1970s.
At a time when all we hear about is hyper growth, I hope the work of Jay Forester and Donella Meadows is revisited by new engineers. It's time to question the goal of the system.
[1] https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/21...
Most causes in the list are just idiotic, so it doesn't matter. There are a few that are more convincing than "sexuality" TBH.
Anyway, yes, the article and everything around it is just weak, malthusianism all over again. The first wtf for me was the "every civilization has fallen, why not ours". Exactly, why not? Don't they see any difference? And did all previous civilization fall for the same reasons?
Maybe they fell because "complexity"... come on.
I think the list is on alphabetic order.
Regardless of the reasons above the real problem is that we are putting all the eggs on one basket. When we listen to Elon Musk saying we need to be an interplanetary society we think "the guy is right", but we have difficulties on accepting that having a single global economy is dangerous.
Resilience is the new buzz word but anti-fragility is what we should strive for. Nassin Tabel give Switzerland as an example. Again you see the pattern, instead of one big and fragile system you have 26 cantons with some degree of independence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome#Critics
TLDR of the criticism is their reasoning is amateurish and do not reflect reality, reflect professional norms, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0
I suppose any complex system has dynamics like that, more capacity to absorb load, but then a faster collapse when capacity is surpassed.
Hemmingway's Laws Of Motion applies:
”How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
”Two ways,” Mike said. ”Gradually and then suddenly.”
Put a bit differently by the economist Rudiger Dornbusch:
”The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”
lifted from:
https://conversableeconomist.com/2015/01/17/the-hemingway-la...
As is, worth noting that human’s analysis of complex systems is very limited and likely will never realistically be of any truly significant state prior to the collapse of humanity; no formal proof of this myself, but to me, it is clear relatively speaking humanity’s cognitive capacity, observations of universe large, small, over time, etc — are extremely finite.
While it’s possible I have misunderstood the claims made by the seneca curve, the core issues I take are that:
— most man made complex systems likely do follow the seneca curve, though in my opinion, so do most man made systems, not just complex ones.
— many organic systems though do not follow this pattern. For example, the human body reaches peak complexity, that is full development, early in the average life span, then slowly decays and is very resilient to failures within its system.
Guess not having read the original research, to me the seneca curve feels like both literal & semantic cherry picking.
________
As it relates to the narrow topic of civilizations covered by the article. Yes, humanity has created & labeled various civilizations, but if an alien race was observing humanity, would they really see any meaningful use to these labels in understanding humanity? If not, I would argue neither should humanity and that the true concern should be the collapse of humanity, Earth as we know it, etc.
My recent example is Novell Networks that peaked in like 1995 but didn’t die until 2014. It took almost two decades to actually collapse.
If humans actively modelled decay in their society, their civilizations would last as long as ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt was conquered by Romans aka outside forces. Meanwhile the Roman empire collapsed from within.
This is an interesting insight but I wonder if it is sort of an observational artifact. A complex social system that has developed formidable power, like the Roman Empire, probably has the ability to pull itself out of most tailspins if its superior resources are directed in a retrospectively-optimal way. So whenever you see a collapse of such a formidably powerful system, you'll see ways in which it could have averted the collapse, and attribute its decline to not doing those things.
Retrospectively optimal control isn't possible in general, so this insight might not be as useful as it sounds.
If civilization survival were as simple as KISS, we probably wouldn't struggle with it as much. We need smart, strategic complexity, and humans are limited in their strategic smarts.
The industrial revolution was great for humanity for well over a century. The standard of living in industrial countries advanced farther and quicker than ever before. But that same industrial activity had long term effects that we (as a society) are only just starting to accept and are still in disagreement about how to handle.
We have a cognitive bias that undervalues “negative design” — removing things from a design — and so our social structures ratchet towards more complexity until they break.
We encounter that in software or mechanical design as well.
We have a "cognitive bias" (fear) against relinquishing control. Therefore our social structures ratchet towards more bureaucracy and rigidity until they snap. A skidding car, careening this way and that, needs the driver to stop over-steering. Alternately pulling the wheel the wrong way in a desperate frenzy to take control is the problem.
Many things just work out when you take your hands off the levers. But we also have a political and commercial class who are way too proud to do so. That would seem to invalidate their "scientific management" ideology [1]. The Wizard of Oz would be exposed as a fraud.
I think what's going on in the digital realm shows we've already entered that phase of overcompensation, because so many technologies simply go against common-sense survival instinct, and we seem stuck in cycles of solutionism, adding ever more layers of sticking plasters to fix the stuff we broke last week. We know we are building dangerously brittle and irresilient systems such as a "cashless society". It is this fetish for control that contains the seeds of breakdown.
[1] pretty much the thesis of Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over...", "The Trap" and "Hypernormalisation"
For example, suburban sprawl tries to cover up the negative yield of suburban roads, at some point growth is no longer possible, suddenly, the negative yield of underutilized and overbuilt infrastructure rears its ugly head. The local government is now bankrupt.
It is also the same with capitalism. We need endless growth of the population and the economy. To paper over the fact that each individual ages and their body decays over time, the same applies to a lot of physical capital which rusts, rots or decays in another way. The moment growth stops you will have an aging population, your short lived physical capital will disappear.
The ancient Egyptians understood decay, that is why they tried to make their civilization immortal, that is why they invested in extremely long lived capital, capital that survived four thousand years. The pyramids.
This is a fascinating concept and I'd like to learn more.
[1] People systematically overlook subtractive changes. Adams, Converse, Hales & Klotz. Nature, 592, 258–261 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03380-y
Take a look at capitalism. It's predicated on competition in which the company that can expand the fastest, grow the fastest, wins and eats the other companies. And profits must increase every year or else capital just packs up and goes somewhere else. It's great if you want development at maximum speed. But not so great if you grow so much you threaten the earth you live on. But, our whole society is structurally unable to do anything else than this. Faced with economic problems, the only answer our system can give is to double down, do more capitalism faster and more aggressively. The bigger the problems, the more we double down on what worked before. Not the best idea. But since power and wealth in our society comes from holding capital, and since holding capital only brings you that power and wealth if it can move and grow- that means to do anything else than double down would require all the people to hold power and wealth in our society to lose that power and wealth. They'll see any threat to their power as a more immediate problem than global warming, which is slow moving and will affect everyone else first before they suffer at all.
Close the loopholes. Implement negative interest on cash. Break up monopolies. Tax land value. If there are no god like safe havens of capital that no actually productive investment can win against, the pressure to do the impossible will greatly diminish.
A similar trend was observed with Myspace and Facebook. Myspace was doing well all the way up to early 2008, 4 years after the creation of Facebook, which was already becoming quite popular, but then in late 2008 Myspace suddenly became worthless.
A similar 4 year lag time is observed with the iPhone and the sudden decline of Research and Motion.
In both of those cases a switch of sorts was suddenly flipped.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rise-of-Netflix-and-Fall...
The problem with all the cases you mentioned (and the current fight of Facebook/Meta vs Tiktok) is that the established entity has become entrenched in its ways and too unflexible to adapt, so competitors exploit the weakness and eventually take over.
It's happening right now with Facebook/Instagram and Tik Tok.
If you want to read about the collapse of complex societies from an actual anthropologist, I recommend Joseph Tainter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collaps...
It's an interesting topic but the examples included are really weak.
That's only true if you characterize Blockbusters reason to exist as "distributing videotapes/dvd via physical stores" rather than just "distributing media".
Netflix also began in the physical media space but was able to pivot to streaming, helped along by their pre-existing remote business model.
Blockbuster tried to get in on the streaming game but it was a behemoth that couldn't swiftly disentangle itself from its old business model, helped along by several bad bets. So, it limped along for years past it being needed until it disappeared practically overnight.
You might think that this outcome was inevitable but that just means you've already taken it as a given that hulking, complex enterprises can't shift their main operating principles on a dime given a massive change in conditions.
Human grown societies tend to under-invest in redundancy, for the sake of more growth, so our societies end up rather brittle. But their complexity is not itself to blame, in my view.
The reforms in the 3rd century were not just an increase in taxes, but a restructuring of society to keep the army strong. Price controls were placed on goods to make sure that people and the state would always have reliable access to goods. Tax collection on private property was formalized and made much higher. Peasants were bound to the land to make sure they always were able to produce. This makes sense based on the view the Emperor had of the empire: an empire is like an army, so this strict control should boost resilience and redundancy.
The tax collection was incredibly onerous and led to a lot of small estates going under. The price controls didn't work at all, in part because it didn't understand that price differences can be caused by things other than greed. The remaining landowners increasingly pulled out of the money economy and the cities and instead focused more on their own estates and the newly bound peasants. It is often stated as the starting point of feudalism, and ultimately did more to weaken the empire's structure than sustain it.
When you ask for redundancy, it's important to think about what kind of redundancy you want, and who it serves.
Well, of course that's the case. Though I must say, none of the things you listed sound like redundancy to me. They sound like an illustration of the fact that a complex system has a lot of ways to fail, and the result of a certain action can be hard to predict.
The article doesn't really drive at this though - it seems focused on irresponsible use of resources. TBH the article's whole thesis strikes me as a bit weird.
Also, I bet any serial entrepreneur can explain why we tend to invest in growth over redundancy: we don't even know the names of those who didn't, because they died in the cradle.
Human designed systems tend to be less redundant and comparatively fragile by contrast.
At a guess, I'd think the difference is to do with the shape of the fitness landscape. If things are failing, or getting attacked and disabled all the time, robustness will result. Whereas a rare but serious failure is much less likely to be manageable.
Then again, perhaps evolution / god is just a better designer than us!
I do think this is the part of the equation that is left out by the "precautionary principle" types.
Complexity can be fragile or it can be stable. A system with redundancies and ways to adapt can be quite complex and yet stable. And many, many simple systems collapse quickly, for instance most start-ups. It's just not as noticeable as a huge system collapsing quickly.
It also suggests a kind of simplistic mathematical analysis which doesn’t sound super insightful or accurate. Otherwise, Asimov’s psychohistory could already be a thing, if it was possible to mathematically model with accuracy the behaviour of societies.
> Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence.[1]
Is a star topology wih 50 nodes more complex than a star topology with only 5? To me, there are concerns of size and scaling, but not complexity only given that as a problem. And according to Wikipedia, the difference in leaf nodes wouldn't increase complexity.
But that's exactly what the article is calling complexity, more nodes in a star topology!
And then it calls other things complexity that make even less sense:
> Blockbuster, too, was a network: one formed by the links that the company had with its customers [star topology again, like I pointed out above]. But by the early 2000s, those links started breaking down: The company was losing customers because its business model had become obsolete [and not because the business was too "complex," so let's blame complexity].
Maybe complexity works differently in physical chemistry. Maybe that just doesn't translate well outside of chemistry. I don't know. I just don't get it.
I remember reading that currently there is a movement take intuition of of complexity and transform it into a formalism. If you squint it looks like it's possible, however this isn't always true.
For example the term "life" can't really be formalized because the intuition encompasses a set of things that are over complicated and even blurry at times. It's a loaded word that spawns philosophical debates and nobody realizes they're debating about a poorly defined arbitrary concept. It could be that "complexity" is the same thing... personally it doesn't look that way to me, but I'm not sure.
???
'Gold' is not 'money'. We just use it as such.
We can use anything.
If there is 'less gold' to go around, we can just value it in higher denominations, i.e. deflation.
Of course that can have practical problems, and an expanding economy, you generally want more 'currency' ...
... but you can just as easily say '1 ounce of Gold' is '1 plot of land' ... and then make it worth more.
Or use salt. Or silver. Or whatever.
And oddly, the Roman Empire took forever to really come undone.
Imagine borrowing $300k for a house denominated in gold and then the price of gold doubles. Now you owe $600k even though you haven't agreed to this amount in the original contract. You have taken something less valuable and now you are returning something more valuable. In any other business context one would expect to get paid for providing this service. The illogical nature of gold demands compensation instead, as the lender could just do nothing with his gold and get the same benefit despite the fact that doing nothing is actively harmful to the economy.
Ancient Egypt simply used grains as money. You deposit the grains at a local grain bank, get a clay tablet in return. They never had a "not enough" money problem. Because borrowing grain and returning it in pristine condition was actually considered the service it is. If the lender does nothing, his grains will spoil in front of his eyes.
Except in this case the author didn't even bother to pick the right time, instead opting for some quote "A few centuries" before the "rapid" descent. Most empires last only a few decades.
I immediately have 2 questions:
- how to make a positive feedback loop for self - can positive feedback loop be sustained indefinitely
I think our design thinking is lagging. We need to work on that front.
Does it always reduce to resource optimization versus resiliency tradeoffs?
The corollary to this might be that linearly increasing complexity requires a non-linear amount of input energy. That’s consistent with what we’ve seen from human civilization development and evolutionary development.
As complexity increases so do unknowns. As in, if X and Y changes what happens to Z or Q for that matter.
Futhermore, as complexity increases, often historically so does hubris.
Look no futher than the current state of the world and say The Fed.
Are we not then therefore in a very slightly downward slope towards absolute annihilation and collapse?
If a tertiary goal is to have job security, designing a more complex system could be in your favor.
Uh, what about India?
All organised systems (anything that we would describe as a system as opposed to random or chaos) require additional energy inputs to maintain organisation over and above those energy inputs required for performing input-output function. Maintenance requires work.
All life on Earth depends on the thermodynamic gradient supplied by the Sun being appropriately steep enough for that additional organisational margin to be provided within tolerances, but not too steep to make everything excessively random, or too shallow to stop stuff moving.
Failing to provide that extra margin of energy for organisation for any part of the functionality of a system results in breakdown and halting.
E.g. Quite a lot of the extra margin of human organisation energy is provided via being omnivores _at the top_ of the food chain. If all the plankton and birds and bees die -> Humans don't get enough food -> Disorganisation -> Dead humans.
It is possible to build forms of organisation that are inherently unstable outside of limited tolerances. Stepping outside of those tolerances exponentially raises the extra costs required to maintain organisation. Needless to say Nature doesn't keep many such systems around, if any, particularly when under significant stress. They get weeded out fast.
The extra kicker in human economic organisation is money as a mediator for controlling energy allocation. Organisations retain function if they can afford to support the additional cost of being organised. Within monetary systems, profits have to remain high enough to pay off loan interest and support organisation. But... If people without enough jobs or money starve -> The latent labour pool dies -> No support for growth, no maintenance -> breakdown. So the labour force loses a margin of value-add generated in order to support organisation. The hidden labour force that is Nature loses out once human economies/populations grow too fast or too large. So modern humans do this "supporting organisation" without considering Nature as part of the organisation, and frequently fail to support the labour pool properly.
Obsolete monetary/value system designs are a big problem.
Globally, monetary systems to support sustainable societies should provide for: equilibration against destructive monopolies - especially at the ForEx level; enough liquidity - supplied through limited liability loan failures under capitalism - to meet aggregate interest on loans and organisational costs AND latent labour pool support; maintenance of key functional inputs, like food, sunlight,...; and zero cumulative pollution;
Why shouldn't every viable economic or social unit operate monetarily locally according to Kirchhoff's current law, if money is an adequate proxy for energy? Why do we not price in the extra energy input Nature requires to remain coherent and still balance supply and demand?
Humans previously kept building inherently unstable civilisation structures with inherently unstable monetary systems that cannot cope with externally imposed constraints arising. They kept failing to preserve and maintain the inputs sensibly, and they designed monetary systems that are typically destined to create and exarcerbate those failures.
They could collectively: stop breeding like rabbits; design better monetary systems; stop shitting on the environment.
All of it is technologically feasible already. How much of that is politically feasible right now? People are holding people back by being people. Wicked problem. Difficult to handle kindly.