Humans are too erratic and short-sighted to grow a society beyond a certain point. The Mayans over-logged and caused erosion and landslides, dooming their big

Humans are too erratic and short-sighted to grow a society beyond a certain point. The Mayans over-logged and caused erosion and landslides, dooming their big cities. Over and over again, they'd rebuild and do it over, with identical results. They even knew it was going to happen(?) but hey! live for today. Rome expanded until they couldn't communicate to the reaches of their civilization. Their reach literally exceeded their grasp. They collapsed when they couldn't keep order. Many empires were built on the charisma of one person (Alex the G, Ghengis the K etc). When they died, fragmentation and retrenching, human grasping for power, infighting and war. Today? I think we've optimized our productivity to reach the most people with the least cost. But the free market means, any destabilization (cargo ship stuck in a canal, disease keeping people from work for months etc) and it shows how fragile it is, with economic turmoil and collapse of whole industries. Just like the Mayans, we've had collapses before. Being more educated we put in place rules (banking, finance, limits on borrowing etc) that helped, but then a generation later abandoned them as 'too restrictive'! And, you guessed it, collapse again. And again. Until we create a person or institution with some kind of authority and foresight, we little short-sighted humans will build fragile towers that inevitably collapse at the first gust of wind.