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I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There

• themodelplumber 6y ago
  > In the last three months America has lost more people than Sri Lanka lost in 30 years of civil war. If this isn’t collapse, then the word has no meaning. Phew. It seems like there ought to be some measurable "collapse models" out there, and if not, maybe we ought to build one, just in the name of helping _any_ nation come up and out faster. (BTW when I think about collapse, I do tend to think in terms of finality, so there's one data point of wrong-headedness, I guess) And if a new model needs to start with "how many people died recently" then that's fine. But people new to the topic might be excused for bringing up contrary ideas like the transient aspect of a novel-mega-killer virus hitting a one-of-a-kind US presidency, or they might bring up AAPL's recent stock split, or who knows what else. Anyway, for those reasons I think it'd be nice to work from a model of some kind, and maybe it already exists. Heck, sometimes it's nice to even work with multiple models and combine leverage points. Thanks for posting.
  • jfim 6y ago
    The HANDY paper was written a few years ago: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.02.014 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.02.014 It talks about how the carrying capacity of nature and inequality can lead to systemic collapse, but that societies can achieve a stable equilibrium state as well.
• chrisjs96 6y ago
  The US and the world isn't as bad as it seems. It's only news and social media that makes it feel that way. With the rise of global news networks in the 70's and 80's it's made the world smaller but more connected. Making everything seem worse than it is. It's actually better than it has ever been. At least pre covid