3 ms·

In a true collapse I’d imagine almost every aspect of life is worse than the year before which sounds measurable and detectable. But maybe a point of no return

by awb 5y ago

In a true collapse I’d imagine almost every aspect of life is worse than the year before which sounds measurable and detectable. But maybe a point of no return would be harder to detect. Like health is improving but resources are dropping to unrecoverable levels.

pilsetnieks 5y ago
Are most aspects of life better than in 2015 right now?
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  5 years seems like far too small of a window to accurately assess this. Was life better in 2010 than 2005? How about 1977 vs 1972? Or 1803 and 1798? A much longer time frame will be required to determine if life is improving over time for people or not. Possibly on the scale of generations.
- pphysch 5y ago
  In some countries
- awb 5y ago
  Compared to 2015? Yeah our technology is better, our shared knowledge is increasing, population is increasing, etc. In a collapse, I’d expect to see near 0 investment in new technology with more energy going into basic survival and trying to protect a declining population. If you think we’re in a setback, decline, etc., maybe, but when I think collapse, I think a “Guns, Germs & Steel” / Easter Island type event.
  - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
    Collapse is a process. Not an event.
    - awb 5y ago
      Sure, but you can recover from a decline, you can’t recover from a collapse. From Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse Here’s the definition: > the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence And it isn’t usually a slow process: > Societal collapse is generally quick So for Western civilization or the US to truly collapse it means a complete loss of cultural identity, destruction of the economy, no government and tons of violence. Even war torn countries rarely collapse because even if the government is removed, violence spikes and the economy stops working the people can still maintain a sense of common shared culture and identity and avoid collapse. I guess it becomes more of a rebirth or evolution at that point. I think a lot of people see 1 sign of collapse and think it’s a collapse, but it’s actually just a decline or an oscillation.
      - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
        Point taken. Collapse includes decline but decline doesn't necessarily lead to collapse. That said, collapse is really just decline that happened too fast. Decline appears to be caused by a handful of factors. In the event that too many factors are in play at once collapse becomes inevitable. You could say the the US / Western civilization is the rebirth of the Roman Empire (Rome 2.0). If you look at the historical accounting of the [1] Roman collapse it is frighteningly similar to the issues US is facing at the moment. However, it is possible that societies are doomed to the 4 stages of [2] Strauss-Howe generational theory of cyclical repetitions with an inability to ever break free of it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Demographic_dynamics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Demographi... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...
HighlandSpring 5y ago
What if we measured collapse as "proportion of population being left behind"? How have education outcomes changed past 18 months? What about specifically to the 95th percentile most/least deprived? How have health outcomes changed past 18 months? What about the quantiles? How have financial plans been affected past 18 months? How much worse off are those who already weren't that well off? How have climate change outcomes changed past 18 months? Will the recent climate action drive meaningful outcomes or is it another power/cash-grab with social utility you gotta search for? What will be the cumulative effect of all this on people's willingness to introduce human life to the planet? Human reproductive potential has been steadily declining for something like a century. Have the past 18 months been more of the usual or has the gradient been steeper? How significant of a fertility rate decline can the economic system tolerate be Basically what I'm trying to say is: as the mean changes, how are the tail ends affected? Is the tail end activity contributing to some kind of feedback loop?
- xwdv 5y ago
  I think we’ve collapsed. A lot of peoples lives are an endless hell which I see no escape from, they just trudge along because they have some hope but haven’t fully realized how screwed they are. Many people have chosen to stop working all together. Eventually they may decide to all together stop obeying laws. A Louis Vuitton store in San Francisco was robbed blind recently. For us elites life is still somewhat good, but the dominos are falling and we just haven’t been hit yet.
- nl 5y ago
  > What if we measured collapse as "proportion of population being left behind"? Well then it clearly isn't. Outside rich Western countries life is - on average - getting better. For every disaster like Syria there is are multiple quiet successes across the poorer parts of the world where millions of people get measurably better by 5 or 10%. Eg, in Nigeria, where between 2009 and 2019 average life expectancy increased by over 4 years.
mikro2nd 5y ago
To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." In other words, expect to see some things getting better while other things we've long taken for granted get worse. It all gets much patchier, the interdependencies more fragile, more brittle, until, quite suddenly, collapse is upon us. So at the same time as we're getting better network connectivity, the electricity supply is more erratic, prone to unexpected failures. Just as we're getting better vaccines, postal service is coming apart. And so on. And it's different kinds of patchiness in different parts of the globe, and the more tightly we interdepend different geographies, the more sudden and weirdly perplexing the failure modes manifest. Container shipping, anyone? It's a process, not a single inflexion point. Only somewhere deep in the future will historians put a stick in the ground and say, "There. That was where the collapse was undeniably evident."

by awb 5y ago

pilsetnieks 5y ago

Are most aspects of life better than in 2015 right now?

bart_spoon 5y ago
5 years seems like far too small of a window to accurately assess this. Was life better in 2010 than 2005? How about 1977 vs 1972? Or 1803 and 1798? A much longer time frame will be required to determine if life is improving over time for people or not. Possibly on the scale of generations.
pphysch 5y ago
In some countries
awb 5y ago
Compared to 2015? Yeah our technology is better, our shared knowledge is increasing, population is increasing, etc. In a collapse, I’d expect to see near 0 investment in new technology with more energy going into basic survival and trying to protect a declining population. If you think we’re in a setback, decline, etc., maybe, but when I think collapse, I think a “Guns, Germs & Steel” / Easter Island type event.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Collapse is a process. Not an event.
  - awb 5y ago
    Sure, but you can recover from a decline, you can’t recover from a collapse. From Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse Here’s the definition: > the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence And it isn’t usually a slow process: > Societal collapse is generally quick So for Western civilization or the US to truly collapse it means a complete loss of cultural identity, destruction of the economy, no government and tons of violence. Even war torn countries rarely collapse because even if the government is removed, violence spikes and the economy stops working the people can still maintain a sense of common shared culture and identity and avoid collapse. I guess it becomes more of a rebirth or evolution at that point. I think a lot of people see 1 sign of collapse and think it’s a collapse, but it’s actually just a decline or an oscillation.
    - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
      Point taken. Collapse includes decline but decline doesn't necessarily lead to collapse. That said, collapse is really just decline that happened too fast. Decline appears to be caused by a handful of factors. In the event that too many factors are in play at once collapse becomes inevitable. You could say the the US / Western civilization is the rebirth of the Roman Empire (Rome 2.0). If you look at the historical accounting of the [1] Roman collapse it is frighteningly similar to the issues US is facing at the moment. However, it is possible that societies are doomed to the 4 stages of [2] Strauss-Howe generational theory of cyclical repetitions with an inability to ever break free of it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Demographic_dynamics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Demographi... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...

HighlandSpring 5y ago

What if we measured collapse as "proportion of population being left behind"? How have education outcomes changed past 18 months? What about specifically to the 95th percentile most/least deprived? How have health outcomes changed past 18 months? What about the quantiles? How have financial plans been affected past 18 months? How much worse off are those who already weren't that well off? How have climate change outcomes changed past 18 months? Will the recent climate action drive meaningful outcomes or is it another power/cash-grab with social utility you gotta search for? What will be the cumulative effect of all this on people's willingness to introduce human life to the planet? Human reproductive potential has been steadily declining for something like a century. Have the past 18 months been more of the usual or has the gradient been steeper? How significant of a fertility rate decline can the economic system tolerate be Basically what I'm trying to say is: as the mean changes, how are the tail ends affected? Is the tail end activity contributing to some kind of feedback loop?

xwdv 5y ago
I think we’ve collapsed. A lot of peoples lives are an endless hell which I see no escape from, they just trudge along because they have some hope but haven’t fully realized how screwed they are. Many people have chosen to stop working all together. Eventually they may decide to all together stop obeying laws. A Louis Vuitton store in San Francisco was robbed blind recently. For us elites life is still somewhat good, but the dominos are falling and we just haven’t been hit yet.
nl 5y ago
> What if we measured collapse as "proportion of population being left behind"? Well then it clearly isn't. Outside rich Western countries life is - on average - getting better. For every disaster like Syria there is are multiple quiet successes across the poorer parts of the world where millions of people get measurably better by 5 or 10%. Eg, in Nigeria, where between 2009 and 2019 average life expectancy increased by over 4 years.

mikro2nd 5y ago

To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." In other words, expect to see some things getting better while other things we've long taken for granted get worse. It all gets much patchier, the interdependencies more fragile, more brittle, until, quite suddenly, collapse is upon us. So at the same time as we're getting better network connectivity, the electricity supply is more erratic, prone to unexpected failures. Just as we're getting better vaccines, postal service is coming apart. And so on. And it's different kinds of patchiness in different parts of the globe, and the more tightly we interdepend different geographies, the more sudden and weirdly perplexing the failure modes manifest. Container shipping, anyone? It's a process, not a single inflexion point. Only somewhere deep in the future will historians put a stick in the ground and say, "There. That was where the collapse was undeniably evident."