Crisis, collapse etc

All your base are belong to dust

2018-10-14 — 2023-07-30

catastrophe
economics
game theory
wonk

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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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