America is declining over a host of trends, much of it the result of Neoliberalism and its obsession with unregulated markets and profit as the only meaningful social priority. You can open any day's newspaper, or listen to any fact-based news program -- I know they are hard to find -- and see how wrong this entire Neoliberalism premise is.
This report presents material from a new and very careful analysis of many societies, again based on facts, describing why societies collapse. Diminishing returns are the key.
Sadly, I am not sure enough Americans are up to dealing with the truth, so continued decline seems to be the trend direction. We'll know based on the outcome of the 2020 elections.
The full research paper on which this report is based can be found at: https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s41247-018-0049-0In 1988, Joseph Tainter published a fundamental study on the collapse of societies, proposing the existence of a common cause, diminishing returns, for the fact that all past empires and civilizations had eventually collapsed. Recently, myself and my coworkers Sara Falsini and Ilaria Perissi performed a system dynamics study that confirms Tainter’s ideas and goes deeper into the origins of the diminishing returns of civilizations. It was published now on “Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality“
Why do civilizations collapse? It is a question that has been haunting the nebulous entity we call “The West” from the time when Edward Gibbon published his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in 1776. The underlying question in Gibbon’s massive study was ‘are we heading for the same destiny as the Romans?’ A question that generations of historians have tried to answer, so far without arriving to answer on which everyone would agree.
There are, literally, hundreds of “explanations” for the decline and fall of empires, and the same confusion reigns for the fall of the past civilizations rising to glory and then biting the dust, becoming little more than ruins and footnotes in history books. Is there a single cause for […]
