Crisis, collapse etc

All your base are belong to dust

October 14, 2018 — July 30, 2023

catastrophe
economics
game theory
wonk

Suspiciously similar content

Figure 1

How do civilisations pack up and call it a day in the face of a stressor? What happens then? How? And why?

See also big history, catastrophic risk.

1 Interesting collapses

1.1 Greenland Norse

Colliding crises lead to collapse thesis: Tim Folger, Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? quotes Tim McGovern: “You can do a lot of things right—you can be highly adaptive; you can be very flexible; you can be resilient—and you go extinct anyway.” Blames economic collapse due to plague, climate change affecting the harvest, increased rates of drowning in sea storms, and the loss of trade with Europe, because their extractionist economy was brittle (; ).

Alternative stressor: Greenland’s Vikings may have vanished because they ran out of water ().

2 Incoming

3 References

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Zhao, Castañeda, Salacup, et al. 2022. “Prolonged Drying Trend Coincident with the Demise of Norse Settlement in Southern Greenland.” Science Advances.