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The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]
- Qem 3y agoRelated wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect
- simonebrunozzi 3y ago> This book is dedicated to my daughter, Donata, who hopes that the models will turn out to be wrong. This is a rather nice "dedica". Of course we all hope he's wrong.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoThis is what happened to Canada.
- paulpauper 3y agoparts of this seems like rehashed Taleb black swan. The collapse of the Dow Jones industrial index during the 2008 financial crisis. A Seneca Collapse if ever there was one (data from Dow Jones) from pg 68. This was not the case in 2000-2003 or 2021 -2022 in which the stock market fell in a gradual/orderly pattern. People who made tail-hedged volatility bets lost money due to the failure of volatility to spike. The gradual nature of the selling meant that the out-of-money puts did not profit as many assumed or hoped. Many bought into the Talab hype and lost money with this.
- refulgentis 3y agoDoes this shed any more light on whether it's valid for the author to name 2008 as a flash crisis? The taleb comparison survives on the idea that talebs thesis (long tail events are underestimated) is the same as negative long tail events happen quickly. So I don't think that sheds much light. On the financial side, those look like two arbitrarily long term periods where you couldn't 100x in O(weeks) by a long tail bet on the negative side - but alas, arbitrary. ex. stonks traded sideways in 2021 but I made an absolute fantastic amount of money in about 3 weeks in Feb/March 2020, as an accident, buying puts to poke fun at this new silly mistaken trend of thinking options were for retail investors (ah, I was so young and innocent)
- deathhand 3y agoIt's also just like any 4x strategy game. You can harvest resources and build and build but once those resources are depleted they deplete very fast because you have grown capacity for intake. I'm glad we aren't worried about peak oil anymore but the climate and food scarity is going to be the next pitfall to avoid.
- anonporridge 3y agoWhen I look at this chart, I'm still pretty worried about peak fossil fuel happening too soon. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
- Loughla 3y agoWait, when did we stop being concerned about peak oil and why?
- jes5199 3y agocombination of two things; first, we came up with new ways to get oil out of the ground, so it extended the deadline considerably. second, economic growth and oil burning decoupled, so instead of needing more and more oil we hit a steady number. hopefully, we transition off it soon. but we’re no longer thought likely to run out, even if we don’t
- vlovich123 3y ago
- Beijinger 3y agoWell, the book is copyrighted I guess, but at least his ideas are spread. Ugo Bardi is a very cool person. This is his blog: https://senecaeffect.substack.com/ https://senecaeffect.substack.com/
- patcon 3y agoI thought this was talked about in high school biology... S-curves for populations that settle. Sometimes a population goes above the carrying capacity and it crashed and oscillates until it stabilizes. Humans are in an exponential J-curve that seems to keep going, but it's just because our culture and technology continually raise the carrying capacity on an S-curve. But if we "break" either culture or tech, then the carrying capacity immediately becomes lower. And then it crashes more and becomes even lower. Etc until society rescues itself from crash in carrying capacity. So the crash is potentially harrrrrd. I recall it being referred to a J-curve crash. But maybe my high school teacher was just riffing a bit, and this isn't established understanding... When I search, I don't find this talked about online in the ways I recall from 2002 biology class haha :)
- roenxi 3y agoAn aside ... it is not safe to assume that the population stabilises. Chaotic results are possible if growth is fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map
- kylebenzle 3y agoPopulations never "stabilize" for any meaningful amount of time.
- a_t48 3y agoNit: eventually, they will.
- GolfPopper 3y agoThis sounds a lot like something I read not that long ago (it was on acoup, of course[1]) about post-Roman population density, how the carrying capacity of the Roman Empire was high because of the increased efficiency allowed by having a good transportation - classic economic specialization. But once the Empire collapsed, the specializations it enabled couldn't come back, and it took a thousand years or more for former Roman provinces to return to their Imperial population levels. 1.https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/ https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
- jes5199 3y agoI am hoping that the modern world is not one single system that can crash all at once, but is rather many systems, such that a crash leaves room for new things to grow bigger
- tehjoker 3y agoit didn't used to be, but now it is. the magic of growth and interconnection
- kylebenzle 3y agoYes, the connecting thread is the USD hegemony. Hyperinflation and eventual collapse is not only possible but has been inevitable ever since QE started. The stock market is now a farce and price is dictated by market makers, not "discovered". The housing market is nonsensical and has priced a generation out of home ownership. The US military is evil incarnate and our civil court system is based on whoever has the most money and is willing to lie wins. I'm doing everything I can to speed the collapse of a broken system and I'm sure there are many more like me. The USD and therefore the world is on a count down timer to total collapse, problem is no one knows how long we have left.
- nnx 3y ago> I'm doing everything I can to speed the collapse of a broken system How?
- oblio 3y agoBy posting that comment.
- ianbicking 3y agoThere are so many more systems than the USD. There's many more systems than money itself! There are industrial systems, food systems, logistical systems, educational systems, ethical systems, religious systems, political systems. It's naive to think all those systems are subservient to some other "master" system, or that the fragility of those systems is multiplicative instead of offering complementary strengths. It's naive because none of those systems developed dependent on the other systems, nor were they independent; they've all been developing together for thousands of years. It's like an ecosystem of systems; if one fails (such as currency) then there's a dozen or more others that are ready to pick up the pieces. And it's myopic to think currency is even one of the more important systems, as though it's somehow more important than the other foundations of human experience that led us here.
- essemharris 3y agoThis report was written by the Club of Rome, notable for having made some of the silliest predictions about population growth in the 20th century
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- perrygeo 3y agoFirst, they were not predictions, they were comparative scenario runs. Second, empirical data has tracked the business-as-usual scenarios for decades and has been independently verified multiple times by peer review. Third, they study a dynamic system that includes population and are not trying to "predict" population growth in any way. Before you call someone's work "silly", you might want to make sure you understand it at a basic level. Otherwise, it's clear who looks silly here.
- essemharris 3y agoLol their work is a massive joke across every discipline it touched. Silly is a charitable word to describe it.
- jamesakirk 3y agoEmily Dickinson would tend to disagree: Crumbling is not an instant's Act A fundamental pause Dilapidation's processes Are organized Decays — 'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul A Cuticle of Dust A Borer in the Axis An Elemental Rust — Ruin is formal — Devil's work Consecutive and slow — Fail in an instant, no man did Slipping — is Crashe's law —
- sifar 3y agoThanks, hadn't come across this one before, and I feel there is some truth to this - that when the inner processes slow down or atrophy, collapse begins. However, I think the rapid collapse probably refers to what is observable on the outside
- glitchc 3y agoThe Seneca Effect is really just a cascade fault. Not every system collapses due to a cascade fault. Death by a thousand cuts is likely just as common a fate.
- oogweii 3y agoSurprised to see terebess.hu on the front page of HN. For over a decade, it has been my go to source for books on zen.