> …civilization collapse has been highly overrated… Yep, I wouldn’t even begin to advance a collapse hypothesis until a solid 7 generation trend has been estab

> …civilization collapse has been highly overrated… Yep, I wouldn’t even begin to advance a collapse hypothesis until a solid 7 generation trend has been established. However, the common assumption amongst contemporary policy makers is stagnation == collapse. So it is useful to observe for such data. I don’t buy into that narrative, nor the “stagnation is fine” story, either. I simply don’t have sufficient data to evaluate what demographic stagnation over a few hundred years or even a millennia means at this time. I will point out however: for many tens of millennia, our species teetered on a knife’s edge of viability, with an asymptotically curved growth rate that might as well have been stagnant. One hypothesis I’m exploring is demographic stagnation is a no-op in the presence of any species-wide median increase in cognitive density.