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 (Dugmore et al. 2001; Dugmore, Keller, and McGovern 2007).

Alternative stressor: Greenland’s Vikings may have vanished because they ran out of water (Zhao et al. 2022).

2 Incoming

3 References

Colander, Goldberg, Haas, et al. 2009. “The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of the Economics Profession.” Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society.
Dai, Vorselen, Korolev, et al. 2012. “Generic Indicators for Loss of Resilience Before a Tipping Point Leading to Population Collapse.” Science.
Diamond. 2004. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Dugmore, Keller, McGovern, et al. 2001. “Norse Greenland Settlement and Limits to Adaptation.” In Adapting to Climate Change.
Dugmore, Keller, and McGovern. 2007. “Norse Greenland Settlement: Reflections on Climate Change, Trade, and the Contrasting Fates of Human Settlements in the North Atlantic Islands.” Arctic Anthropology.
Efferson, Richerson, and Weinberger. 2023. “Our Fragile Future Under the Cumulative Cultural Evolution of Two Technologies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Gonza, and Ellerman. 2019. “Worker Ownership and the Current Crisis.” In Sukobi.stabilnost.demokratija?
Holling. 2001. “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems.” Ecosystems.
Kemp. 2025. Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.
Maher, and Baum. 2013. “Adaptation to and Recovery from Global Catastrophe.” Sustainability.
Palen, and Anderson. 2016. “Crisis Informatics—New Data for Extraordinary Times.” Science.
Pershing, Alexander, Hernandez, et al. 2015. “Slow Adaptation in the Face of Rapid Warming Leads to Collapse of the Gulf of Maine Cod Fishery.” Science.
Pezzey, and Anderies. 2003. “The Effect of Subsistence on Collapse and Institutional Adaptation in Population-Resource Societies.” Journal of Development Economics.
Sornette. 2003. “Critical Market Crashes.” Physics Reports.
Tainter. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies.
———. 2006. “Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse.” Annual Review of Anthropology.
Vojtko, and Cisár. 2020. “Bitcoin in a Time of Financial Crisis.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3557575.
Willis, Narayanan, Boudreaux, et al. 2024. “Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment.”
Zhao, Castañeda, Salacup, et al. 2022. “Prolonged Drying Trend Coincident with the Demise of Norse Settlement in Southern Greenland.” Science Advances.