Preface. One reason Paris is such a lovely city is that it was built to human scale, with buildings of five stories or less, because that was about as high as people were willing to climb, so not surprisingly, rents were highest on the first floor. This post discusses tall buildings in light of the coming energy crisis. We really shouldn’t be building any more of them…
Preface. This is a book review of both “Secular Cycles” and “War & Peace & War”. I recommend reading “War & Peace & War” first, then the more difficult “Secular Cycles”.
Turchin has found patterns in the rise and fall of many nations. Although there are variations in outcomes given the geography and culture of a nation, on average a nation’s cycle occurs over centuries with stages of expansion and integration followed by stagnation, crisis, conflict-ridden depression, ending in collapse. He has a book on modern society and collapse that utterly misses our fossil-fueled civilization, but still the factors he writes about will also play a role as energy declines and climate changed + lack of fossil pesticides and fertilizers reduce crop production. There is a list of 210 reasons why the Roman empire failed, which I try to cover at this website which ultimately is about the collapse of our one-time fossil-fueled richest-most-complex society that has ever or will ever exist.
Homer-Dixon has come to similar conclusions, and his key findings also discuss the role of resources and violence better than Turchin does.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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History will never be a precise as physics
Turchin assures the reader he doesn’t expect the use of scientific methodology and data will ever make history as clear as physics, but it enables him to back up his theories with strong evidence.
It can’t be physics because social systems are too complex, single individuals can affect the whole system, outside armies invade, there’s climate change, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the chaos of interactions between of fathers-and-sons cycles plus all of the above factors and trends. That makes it hard to predict what will happen very far into the future.
The Crisis phase / State Breakdown
Although Turchin’s theory is meant for agrarian societies, I think it’s clear where industrial civilization is within the cycle. Sure, an industrial civilization is bound to collapse differently than an agrarian one given the many unique factors of our one-time only fossil fueled society.
At the start of the crisis phase, when the state collapses, the elites have very high levels of corruption. Sounds like our times too, huh.
Having read a great deal about this topic in general (see my amazon book list Fraud & Greed: Wall Street, Banks, & Insurance book list), it seems pretty clear that we are on the verge of a crisis phase. The wealthy are trying to blame the government (like they always have), make billions off of defense, Medicare, and other government contracts, have gotten their taxes dramatically lowered, and the distribution of wealth has never been more unfair in our nation’s history. When you read the details of other past nations in these books, you can see that the same tactics were used in previous secular cycles.
Short summary of a typical cycle:
The main factors of Turchin’s theory
How this unfolds and how long the phases last depend on many other factors. If there’s a frontier with more land, or nations to be conquered next door, the nation can continue to expand. During a crisis though, outside nations may take advantage of the state’s weakness and invade, quickly bringing on collapse.
At the bottom of the cycle, the best farm land is abandoned
Turchin mentions that the best farm land is abandoned, such as the bottom land of valleys with the richest soil. This happens because starvation and disease drive people away from cities and towns out into the countryside looking for food. Farmers have to contend with that, plus gangs trying to force them into slave labor, and local and external armies fighting and pillaging. So they flee and the land lies fallow. Food is mainly grown during these unstable times near towns and fortified areas where lookouts can spot attacking brigands and sound the alarm.
If you’re ever unlucky enough to be alive during a crisis phase, you’d want to live in a town large enough to defend nearby farms, but not so large the population has gone past carrying capacity. Isolated farms are vulnerable to invasion and plunder.
Disintegrative Trends: The Crisis and Depression phases
Competition between groups
One way of looking at history is competition between different groups, with those who have the highest level of cooperation having an advantage over other groups. Ethnicity and religion are very important to creating in and out groups as well as cohesion. Other groups might be divided by language or dialect. Differences can also be what race you are, what rituals you engage in, or your appearance: clothing, tattoos, hairstyle, etc.
Imperial nations have high levels of cohesion, especially at the edges of the empire where conflicts are greatest.
Secular Cycles take place over two to three hundred years. Within the same nation, different regions can be in different phases.
A more detailed list of the phases derived from the table at the end of Chapter 1 in Secular Cycles:
Expansion Phase (growth)
Stagflation phase (compression)
Crisis Phase (state breakdown)
Depression
Farmers and nomads hate each other and always will: Russia vs the Tatars.
Since the beginning of agriculture, nomads have seen farmers as cowards doing women’s work, and stole their grain and captured farmers to turn them into slaves. For example, in 1521 the Crimean Khan Mohammad-Girey invaded Russia with 100,000 men and captured 300,000 people and killed another half a million at a time when there were 7 million people in Russia. And of course, farmers thought the nomads were uncivilized murderers.
Tatar warriors – perhaps 80,000 of them plus 200,000 horses — typically penetrated a settled area up to 240 miles, spread out up to 36 miles, turned around and systematically swept through taking back any booty, animals, and people they could capture. Resistors were killed.
Russian peasants learned to create fortified defense lines of small military towns, and trees were cut to create obstacles. Each was felled so it landed to the south, and their fallen branches were intertwined so the horsemen couldn’t penetrate them. While the invaders spent hours untangling them, the defense forces got ready. The trees also made it harder for the Tatar retreat with all the loot, cattle and captives, giving pursuers enough time often to rescue them. Grasslands were also burned so the Tatar horses had nothing to eat. Beyond this first line of trees was an even more massive defensive line that stretched over 600 miles built by tens of thousands of people.
Peasants in Russia kept settling beyond the defense lines. They all demanded their defense, and boundaries kept growing outwards. Mongols crushed Russians when no collective defense emerged, eventually an “us vs them” glued by Christianity led to collective action, the willingness to endure hardship and do the right thing became deeply ingrained.
Other motivations were getting to loot, or being paid in cash, grain, or land for fighting, and punishment for not fighting. It also helped that at the frontier edge, an egalitarian way of life was common, there weren’t large differences in wealth. Cooperation is not all “sweetness and light” – there has to be policing and punishment. (pp 41-45).
The dividing line between the Russians and Tatars was religion, not ethnicity. About 17% of 17th century Muscovite gentry were Tatars – but they were Orthodox Christians not Muslims, so they were accepted. (p 54)
Miscellaneous notes
Tribes in Europe and Middle East often had separate “chiefs” for military, religion, and the economy. To take on a neighboring empire, someone had to assume all 3 roles to unify tribes in the region. This happened various ways, i.e. in Germany, the cult of Odin gave military chiefs religious legitimacy, in Arabia, religious leaders gained military power (p. 96).
Aristocracies broke into factions, which led to civil war and armies plundering cities, then plague killed a third of the people – only nomads escaped. When people are exposed to years, decades, of chaos, they yearn for stability. Any message of hope, even if only a better afterlife, is attractive. Monotheistic religions satisfy that need, which is why Muslims were able to unify tribes in Arabia. Mohammed was one of over 6 monotheistic prophets. The sudden appearance of prophets in bad times happened when people were ripe for their appearance. Polytheism can’t unite people, because accepting the Gods of the “lucky” tribe isn’t something freedom loving tribespeople want. One of the functions of religion is “us versus them”. Converting to Islam meant submitting to God, rather than a particular leader. Islam welcomes all, regardless of social status or tribal origin. (pp 97-99)
Machiavelli taught rulers to be feared more than loved, and that people were motivated solely by desire for gain and fear of punishment. His ideas were at odds with the prevailing wisdom. P 108-109
Adam Smith was the founder of the “greed is good” philosophy that every one of us is pursuing our own interest and that will eventually be good for society too. And there are many other “rational choice” types of ideas out there, Turchin thinks that cooperation can’t be brought about by force, and no one would pay taxes, there’d be a war of all against all if these ideas were correct. He points to evolutionary biology and kin selection, which favors reciprocal altruism.(111-113).
He cites several studies that point to trust and moral punishment being hard-wired in our brains. The capacity for cooperation exists, Machiavelli was wrong. The good guys pressure the “knaves” and “free-riders” to cooperate, like in WW I women put white feathers on men who hadn’t joined the military yet. (120)
Group Selection. Not many examples in non-humans. We are different because of thought, communication, culture. Cultures with harmful practices are weeded out in group competition – warfare may be one of the most important forces of group selection (p. 127).
Spartan men trained to fight from age 7 onwards away from home. They enslaved the Messenians to grow food and do other chores so they could dedicate themselves to fighting. But the Messenians kept revolting and finally succeeded when Sparta faltered. Rome on the other hand, welcomed those they conquered (164-5).
France and England medieval times: the top 20% owned most everything and benefitted the most from overpopulation: grain prices were high, labor cheap, land rental prices high, manufactured goods cheap since labor was paid so little. The rich spent money on imported luxuries, more churches, etc. (216-28)
Wheel of fortune: too many nobility – their numbers rose faster than the rest of the impoverished population. More people could become noble than historians realize – a city merchant often bought land with his wealth which allowed him to become a noble. Peasants could too by lending money, buying more land, hiring more labor and so on. Nobles sank back to being small farmers when they ran out of money to live the good life. In one case where nobility numbers rose over 40%, the oppression of peasants to maintain their lifestyle was enormous. When the peasants rebelled, this usually ended in peasants being hung by the thousands by the nobility. (218-222)
The rich escaped plagues by going to their country estates. The best place to be was far from roads, have a water supply from a well, and lots of wine. In England 8% of the wealthy died from plague, lesser nobles 27%, and 40% of the general population. (222)
After the plague die-off, the worst hit then were the low and middle landowners who used hired labor to farm their large properties. Laborers insisted on more money, but didn’t get it, because the landowners had armed retainers who forced peasants to accept low wages, captured runaway serfs, and made examples of them. But eventually after enough rebellions and runaway serfs, the wealthy started to lose money having so few employees left (223).
The only way to get money was to attack other nobility, so they preyed on each other, and the social fabric unraveled in feuds and private wars. (224)
Violent crime rose between 1350 and 1450 due to huge numbers of destitute, but armed and dangerous nobles, who fought duels, ambushed each other, and this upward cycle of violence led to nobles becoming the criminal underclass.
In agricultural societies, the rich always get richer. Consider this, let’s say everyone is equal in generation 1, all have the same amount of land. But some have more children. If just the first-born gets all of the land, then there are a lot of kids with no property. If the land is divided among all the children, it won’t take many generations for there to be too little land to feed a family and many people without any property at all. Meanwhile, the rich only marry the rich, increasing the amount of property they own, and they don’t have to do any work at some point, because they can hire the landless so cheaply (p 263).
Of course, in the beginning the rich have a hard time earning any income from the poor – there are so few poor, and you have to pay workers high wages. If the peasant doesn’t like the work, they can afford to buy land of their own. Once the population goes up, the rich only need to pay the workers enough so that they don’t starve. Where money is required to pay taxes, farmers either have to sell their land to feed their family or starve. Wealth concentrates. The rich use their income to buy more land. The poor often use land as the collateral to borrow money to get past a bad season – if there’s another bad year, then they lose their land (264).
Therefore – within just one generation inequality will occur unless no private property is allowed or there is no inheritance. (265).
Other ways landowners grew richer were death taxes, so that when a peasant with land died, the lord got the best beast (perhaps the ox used to plow the land), the parish priest got the 2nd best animal, and if there were no oxen left, the son couldn’t plow his fields (267). So he probably left for the city and abandoned his land.
Even though we abolished slavery long ago, it has effects to this day on “social capital”. The more virulent slavery was in a region, the less civic the state is today. Even in the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “As one goes farther south, one finds less active municipal life; the township has fewer officials, rights, and duties; the population does not exercise such a direct influence on affairs; the town meetings are less frequent and deal with fewer matters.” Turchin then goes on to explain in greater detail why slavery was so corrosive and the way that the wealthy also divided free men from slaves to prevent any kind of networking and eventual rebellions, and how slavery was a key factor in the decline of the Roman and other empires – after all, part of what holds a society together is group cooperation and equality – slaves can’t be included in that. (294-5)
Some ideas to think about
There are new factors to consider in an industrial society cycle.
There has never been a civilization that totally depended on oil for transportation and fossil fuels in general to grow food and do all the other work of society. It used to be people and animals and wood. The planet had reached the limits to growth at about a billion people. Fossil fuels have temporarily expanded carrying capacity to around 7 billion people, by far the largest overshoot in all of human history.
And it’s not just resources. The Limits to Growth model and other economists have written how it doesn’t matter if there are more resources left to exploit, once the financial system collapses, the credit to finance such enterprises doesn’t exist and collapse ensues. Worse yet, the easy resources are gone requiring spectacularly expensive projects to get at the remaining low-grade ores and remote fossil fuel resources. Most people who study both ecology and finance believe there is a Perfect Storm of factors arriving around the same time, which will exacerbate and exaggerate each other into a potentially fast crash, faster than previous agrarian cycles.
But as Turchin points out, different regions of a nation can be in different phases. San Francisco, California, with the central valley nearby that feeds one-third of America, with the nearby Oakland deep water port to continue trade with the rest of the world, especially Asia, might do better than parched Phoenix or the ten states dependent on the Ogallala aquifer, which is within a decade or two of drying up across large areas. Until the next earthquake along the Hayward or San Andreas, which is past due. All the freeways and airports are on land-fill and will be destroyed. If this happens after the oil shocks have begun and the financial system or energy resources to rebuild aren’t there, millions will move to the central valley, joining those from the parched Southwest and freezing midwest.
How will most American households owning guns affect collapse? In the past, if the elites and state were united, they could crush peasant rebellions. But now that just about anyone and everyone will be armed, how will that play out? Are the Hells’ Angels going to enslave people?
If there are places that do well, will they be swamped by refugees? Or will various levels of government and citizen roadblocks prevent massive migrations towards food and away from no-longer fixable natural disasters?
We aren’t going to invent our way out of our situation with Fusion power or some other fossil fuel alternative, it’s too late to scale up. But I do have hope that the ingenuity locally will help some regions suffer less. I can imagine thousands of bicycles carrying goods around cities in light-weight aluminum trailers and all sorts of other small scale projects and victory gardens, sharing of cars and tools – but the problem is that you would have wanted to start doing this a long time before collapse, whether panic and fear and distrust will prevail if this all happens in sudden oil shocks is a big question. I would guess that large cities won’t cope well, though they have the population and weaponry to commandeer whatever they want from the surrounding areas nearby. Think twice about living near a large city once the oil shocks come.
If China collapses inwardly, that will be a huge sigh of relief for Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the west coast of the United States, to name just a few nations. But they’ve stolen billions of dollars worth of research and the actual design plans for building undetectable submarines, a Blue Water navy, and just about anything else you can think of via cyber attacks or private companies and our government. The Chinese have caught up to us, giving us less of an advantage than we’d expected. They have enough cyber traps embedded in our infrastructure to take down our electric grid and other infrastructure without even firing a shot…
Preface. We eat so many potatoes I thought it interesting how future oil shocks may reduce potato crops. Potatoes are very “oily” needing a great deal of diesel fuel over their life cycle of planting, harvest, delivery to sorting, grading, and shipping operations. Not to mention electricity (2/3 generated by coal and natural gas in the U.S.) to operate equipment, cool potato cellars, process and package product indirectly. Natural-gas fertilizers and petrochemicals are needed as critical inputs for crop production
The Russian/Ukraine war has already lead to rising oil & potato prices, and with peak oil likely in 2018, this will only get worse. Preppers: Think about stockpiling potato chips NOW
Preface. Joseph Romm writes that the exponential growth Ponzi Scheme is consuming the resources of the next 100 billion people. Our children and grandchildren. And I’d guess for anyone under 60 years old today with peak oil likely to have happened in 2018. We’re out of time. Speed limits are still 80 mph in Nevada…
Romm’s post was originally at http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/08/ponzi-scheme-madoff-friedman-natural-capital-renewable-resources/ but has vanished from the internet and lives today only here. Romm has written a great deal about the crisis we’re in (though from a climate change, not energy decline point of view). I first discovered him after reading “The Hype about Hydrogen”, which should have ended all the false hopes about this zero-energy resource, yet the hype continues today.
The second article estimates we’re using up $7.3 trillion of free natural resources a year. Hell, it’s probably a lot higher than that. I hate to use dollars, especially now that we are printing trilllions and seems like we could forever… But as the money / energy transition proceeds, digital and paper money will be worthless, energy worth everything. The point is that all political parties want the endless growth Ponzi scheme, no matter what the price of pollution and destruction. Even the so-called Greens do, but with Green growth.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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By “paying ourselves” with the wealth from future generations — indeed, from the next 50 generations and next 100 billion people to walk the earth — we cleverly took advantage of victims not yet born, those not able to even know they were being robbed.
Madoff is reviled as a monster for targeting charities. We are targeting our own children and grandchildren and on and on. What does that make us?
Yes, homo “sapiens” have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations. Yes, we are all in essence Madoffs (many wittingly, most not) or at least his most credulous clients.
“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.
In our Ponzi Scheme, investors (i.e. current generations) are paying themselves (i.e. you and me) by taking the nonrenewable resources and livable climate from future generations. To perpetuate the high returns the rich countries in particular have been achieving in recent decades, we have been taking an ever greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources (especially hydrocarbons) and natural capital (fresh water, arable land, forests, fisheries), and, the most important nonrenewable natural capital of all — a livable climate.
The system is destined to collapse because the earnings, if any, are less than the payments.
Usually, the scheme is interrupted by legal authorities before it collapses because a Ponzi scheme is suspected or because the promoter is selling unregistered securities. But in this Ponzi scheme, the authorities (i.e. world leaders, opinion makers, the cognoscenti) haven’t been doing much interrupting over the past two to three decades since, unlike a typical Ponzi scheme, they are heavily invested in the scheme and addicted to the returns!
By enriching those who did the most plundering the most, we enabled them to fund lobbying and disinformation campaigns to convince substantial fractions of the public and media that there is no Ponzi scheme — that global warming is “too complicated for the public to understand” and nothing to worry about.
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Globalglassonion summarizes” as follows: David Roberts at Grist summarized a report by the environmental consultant group Trucost, at the behest of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity over at the United Nations. The idea behind the report was simple. Tally up all the world’s natural capital — land, water, atmosphere, etc. — that doesn’t currently have a dollar value attached to it, and figure out the price. Figure how much of that natural capital is being consumed, depleted or degraded without the responsible party paying the cost for that use. The number the study hit on was a staggering $7.3 trillion in 2009 — about 13% of global economic output for that year. In a theoretically perfect market, the price of consuming, degrading or depleting a resource would be paid by the party responsible.But getting the theory of markets to map onto the real world is difficult. Dumping trash on a neighbor’s lawn is technically free, so a lot of us should be doing it more. But because we’ve built societies in which our neighbor can sue us, or the cops can fine us, we’re forced to internalize that cost. Lots of costs can only be internalized through smart institutional design and govern
Preface. The human brain and culture evolved at an astonishing rate, making scientists wonder what conditions and ecological pressures drove it, why we became homo sapiens so quickly. This is a post that will grow over time as I find new reasons and go back over my other research to assemble existing theories. So far I summarize bipedalism and have a book review of “The 10,000 Year Explosion. How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution”. But there’s climate change, our opposable thumb making it possible to manipulate objects well, fire, increasing eusociality, and more.
Preface. My books and energyskeptic.com explain why the electric grid can’t stay up. This is a book review of Makansi’s “Lights out: the electricity crisis, the global economy, and what it means to you”. He explains why the grid is falling apart, and since then it’s only gotten worse. Now the decaying grid is starting wildfires in California, which I know from first-hand experience: our home burned down in the 1991 Oakland firestorm. I’ll write about this more when I review the book “California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric–and What It Means for America’s Power Grid” by Katherine Blunt.
This is a post about disaster insurance, and our own nightmare experience in dealing with the insurance company after our house burned down in the 1991 Oakland California firestorm. Plus a book review of Feinman’s 2010 book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance companies don’t pay claims and what you can do about it”. If only this book had existed in 1991! And by the way, one reason you don’t know about this is that everyone who finally settles with an insurance company signs a nondisclosure agreement, so I am not stating which company we were with. But I can say that nearly all behaved badly because we were in touch with neighbors who were members of at least 20 different insurance companies. So be sure to do research at United Policyholders and other sites mentioned below before buying insurance.
Preface. In September 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom passed 12 bills making abortion easier to obtain, and invites women from states where abortion is forbidden to come here.
Preface. Drought is probably reason #1, but collapse is complex, I’ve seen lists of over 200 reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire, and our own fall will have even more causes, though triggered by energy decline, since for now, cheap oil hides how far we’ve fallen into ecological collapse. With oil you can pump up deep underground aquifers, recover from hurricanes, move food thousands of miles, catch the last fish in Antarctica…
Preface. I wrote in “Life after fossil fuels” that as energy declined, it would be hard to cut down distant forests with limited oil supplies. I thought this because even in Britain, so denuded of trees people turned to filthy coal, forests still existed. This was because trees needed to be near rivers or waterways to transport their timber to towns and cities. Overland horses could transport wood perhaps 10 miles or less since roads were awful if they existed at all. But today due to the war in Ukraine and Russia cutting off oil, gas, and coal to Europe & Ukraine, people are driving to forests and cutting them down for heat in the winter since oil still exists at reasonable prices.
Forests in Europe and elsewhere are already being decimated by Europe’s need for wood — biomass is over half of the EU “renewable” energy. Though there are forests inaccessible due to lack of roads or too far from towns and cities, such as the boreal regions. But even these forests may disappear as they go up in smoke from global warming wildfires and bark beetles.
