How Civilizations Collapse, And Why Ours Is Starting To

History’s Great Mistake, And How We’re Making It All Over Again

Image Credit: Oxfam

When you look around our world, what do you see? Here’s what I see: a civilization in decline, hurtling towards collapse. If you think I’m kidding, well, hold on, because I’m about to make my case.

The economist in me, when he looks at our world, our civilization, sees one in a particularly perilous plight. We face a lack of what are called global public goods. Now, the world’s better economists have spent the last, oh, two decades calling for more of them — I’m about to explain — and yet you never hear from them, because they’ve been effectively blacklisted from media. So the warnings of minds like Thomas Piketty or Joe Stiglitz or Amartya Sen — the greatest economists of their generation, and of our time — have gone ignored.

Which is how we ended up here. Where’s that? Facing a dire lack of global public goods — which is getting a lot worse, faster. And that, my friends, is a classic, ancient, time-honored formula for, well, civilizational collapse.

What’s a “global public good”? Easy. Here’s one: public health. We used to have it before…the pandemic. We used to be making progress. Now, life expectancy is in decline for the first time in modern history, more or less, and it’s hardly going to stop, because while there are plenty of foolish people who buy the myth that “Covid’s just the flu!! Not even the flu!” you should know by now that in fact it causes damage to everything from heart to lungs to brain to blood vessels, which gets worse every time you get it. So much for global public health.

Watched “The Last of Us” yet? Or played it? Why is it so eerie and poignant? Because, well, its a story that lingers right there on the edge of possibility, haunting us. Covid of course is just the first major pandemic that’s a result, even if “indirectly,” of climate change — increased zoonotic flow between humans and animals. Animals are fleeing to the poles to escape a warming planet, in a migration unseen since epochal deep history, all at once — and as they do that, rubbing shoulders with us, new diseases cross over. We know that from research, too — pandemics are expected to increase in probability as climate change accelerates.

Where does that leave…us? As in…our civilization? We used to expect a shining future of a thing called advances in global public health. We took it for granted that this public good would just keep getting…better…and benefiting us all. But now? That great, centuries long trend is going into reverse. And yes, while there one day might be veritable scientific miracles like the breakthrough which reversed aging in mice…the question then becomes…who’s going to be able to afford it?

Let’s talk about another example of a global public good. How about….water? Maybe you read the story about the town in Arizona that’s…run out of water. The nearest municipality refuses to supply it with water anymore, and that’s for a very simple reason: there’s not enough of it to go around anymore. But that’s a trend that’s hardly going to stop at this town. The town is the canary in the coal mine. The Colorado River’s in historic, breathtaking decline that you can literally see — and it’s just a question of time when towns further in will dry up, too. And yet the Colorado River itself is just an example of a civilization scale mega-problem, perhaps the most basic there can be. Climate change is taking the planet’s supply of fresh water with it.

That should make you shudder, if you think through the implications.

How about another one? What’s almost as basic as…water? How about…knowledge? I discussed recently another bit of research that showed knowledge itself is in decline. Scientific breakthroughs have slowed down dramatically — the chart looks a lot like any other form of collapse. We could think of that as “high” knowledge, if you like. Meanwhile, the average person, these days, is just as likely to believe in every form of lunatic conspiracies or political fanaticism or outright Big Lies…even if they’re reasonably educated…as to be, well, a sane, thoughtful person who’s capable of being part of civilization. That’s “low” knowledge, and that’s in a state of shocking decline too, as people’s minds are turned into mush by spending too much bathing their sorrows in the tears of misogynistic manfluencers or bigoted demagogues or hate preachers or what have you. Knowledge itself appears to have gone into sharp decline in our civilization.

Now. What’s behind all this?

Before I answer that question, though, I want to give you a little bit more context. When we look at history, and think about the question, “why do civilizations collapse?” the answer more or less always appears to be: a lack of public goods. When I say always, I mean always.