Crumbling and crumbs

I found this New York Times Magazine article very interesting.  Not that I think our civilization on the cusp of destruction, but I know some people are thinking about it. 

The parthenon in Athens.  Bucket list item.

The article discusses why and how civilizations collapse, according to scholars who study the topic.  I won't go into the details, which are well presented in the article.  But I will talk briefly about one item that snagged my brain - the idea that a society's drive for efficiency is a cause of its ultimate crumble. 

Essentially, the argument is based on the thought that civilizations collapse because they cannot respond to stressors, such as war, famine, plague, death, drought, earthquake, etc.  The four basic horsemen, plus a few more for good measure.  The civilization cannot respond because they are too 'brittle', and break rather than bend when faced with a threat.  (This reminds me of a wonderful Aesop's fable about a willow tree and an oak tree - I'll share that in another post.)

I also enjoy a game of Sid Meier's Civilization.

Civilizations are created when people join together to solve common problems.  As civilizations grow, the law of diminishing returns applies.  More people have more problems to solve, and need/want more things to survive.  People address this issue by beginning to specialize.  Rather than making everything it needs to live, one city may specialize in producing wheat.  They trade that wheat with another city producing steel.  And another city producing cloth.  This specialization is more efficient - each city can focus their time and resources on one thing, and in total they are able to acquire more goods for less work.

However, this efficiency creates vulnerability.  If Wheat City gets hit by a plague, the wheat supply dries up for everyone.  Steelville has plenty of steel, but you can't eat steel.  So not only is Wheat City suffering, Steelville and Clothburg are too.  If each city had been producing their own wheat, then only Wheat City would be in trouble.  Also, theoretically Steelville and Clothburg could share their own wheat with Wheat City, and help them out a bit.

I just discovered Steelville is a real town.

I think I like the concept that 'efficiency is bad' in part because of my job.  My employer, the State of MN, is all about efficiency.  Do less with more.  Budgets are cut, but the level of services must remain the same.  I'm sure this is the same with employers everywhere.  I know there's a ton of people who believe government wastes money, and in many cases they are right.  But not in my small corner of state government.  The DNR lives on the tiny crumbs that fall after the big budget-eating departments (Education, Human Services, city and county aid (PTAC), etc.) are finished fighting over the bread.

The DNR is part of the tiny piece for Environment.

The article mentions that Joseph Tainter, the archeologist who literally wrote the book on societal collapse in the 1980s, is now more interested in studying sustainability.  If we focus on civilizations being able to sustain themselves, to become less brittle, to become more resilient to stress, perhaps we can avoid cataclysmal collapse.  The article also points out that not every scholar believes Tainter's ideas.  Rather, they think that civilizations never really 'collapse', they just move and change and adapt to the stressors.  That concept also has its own appeal.

Well, so much for talking 'briefly.'  I just found the whole thing fascinating.  Hopefully I didn't bore you too much talking about it.