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Musings Report 2021-37 9-11-21 Why Collapse Is Inevitable: Elite/Commoner Inequality
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Why Collapse Is Inevitable: Elite/Commoner Inequality
I've been meaning to discuss a research paper on inequality and societal collapse, and last week's exploration of withdrawing the consent of the governed is a natural introduction:
Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.
The authors' goal is to identify the general causes of societal collapse, as opposed to conditions unique to a specific collapse event.
Their model, called HANDY, for Human and Nature DYnamics, identifies two general causes of collapse:
(1) the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity
(2) the economic stratification of society into Elites and Masses (or "Commoners")
They also model the similarities and differences between animal and human populations. They model wealth inequality based on a "predator/prey" dynamic:
A "predator-prey" mathematical model developed in the early 20th century maps how the populations of predators and prey oscillate around equilibrium:
"The predator–prey model, the original inspiration behind HANDY, was derived independently by two mathematicians, Alfred Lotka and Vitto Volterra, in the early 20th century.
However, in the context of human societies, the population does not necessarily begin to decline upon passing the threshold of carrying capacity, because, unlike animals, humans can accumulate large surpluses (i.e., wealth) and then draw down those resources when production can no longer meet the needs of consumption.
This adds a different dimension of predation whereby Elites 'prey' on the production of wealth by Commoners."
The key factor in inequality is the elite holds the vast majority of the surplus (wealth) and so they can remain complacent as resources dwindle:
"This buffer of wealth allows Elites to continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe. It is likely that this is an important mechanism that would help explain how historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).
Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."
In other words, the burdens of scarcities, inflation, declining income, etc. fall on the Commoners, not the elite, until commoners collapse, taking the elite down with them.
The authors identify two types of collapse:
Type-L (Disappearance of Labor) Collapse:
In a Type-L collapse, growth of the Elite Population strains availability of resources for the Commoners. This causes decline of the Commoner Population (which does the labor), and consequently, decline of Wealth. Finally, Elite Population plummets since its source of subsistence, i.e., Wealth, has vanished.
Note that this type of collapse can only happen in an unequal society, because the major cause behind it is inequality.
Type-N collapse (Exhaustion of Nature).
A Type-N collapse, on the other hand, starts with an exhaustion of Nature, followed by a decline of Wealth that in turn, causes a fall of the Commoners and then the Elites.
Type-N collapses can arise because of excessive depletion only or both excessive depletion and inequality."
They conclude that "in a society that is otherwise sustainable, the highly unequal consumption of elites will still cause a collapse.
Under conditions of economic stratification, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid, which helps to explain why economic stratification is one of the elements recurrently found in past collapsed societies."
In the U.S., the elite class owns the vast majority of wealth and controls the political power needed to protect it: the top 0.1% hold 20% of all wealth, the top 1% hold 40%, the top 10% hold 85%, and the bottom 50% own less than 1%. You've seen these charts on the blog, but they are stark evidence of soaring inequality. It's little wonder the bottom 60% would have trouble raising $500 for emergencies while the top 1% households are each worth millions of dollars.
The top 1% own over half of all financial assets. This is an extreme concentration of wealth, i.e. stored surplus.
In the current era, a collapse of natural resources is viewed as either impossible or unlikely. But collapse of the food supply, etc., is less a risk than the decline of Commoners' income and purchasing power relative to the rising cost of essentials as global scarcities take hold.
There can be enough food and energy but if the majority can no longer afford to buy enough to support consumption, then mass production no longer makes financial sense and the financial underpinnings of global supply collapse, taking the social and political structures down.
My takeaways from the paper are:
1. The elite becomes a burden when a) it becomes, to use Peter Turchin's description, parasitic rather than productive and b) its vast parasitic weight exceeds the carrying capacity of the economy. In Turchin's words, there is an overproduction of parasitic elites.
2. The elite's enormous wealth (in effect, the vast majority of the economy's stored surplus) buffers them from the initial consequences of breakdown, and so they resist any evolutionary/adaptive measures to save the system because "we're still doing fine, so why risk changing a system that works so well for us?"
In other words, they resist the radical reforms needed to reverse the slide to collapse because they believe the system is so powerful that it could never collapse--and their experience supports this complacent confidence.
Their detachment from the bottom 90% is their Achilles Heel. Blind to the burden their dominance puts on the system and the decay of the mass consumption model, the financial collapse and social-political unraveling will quickly accelerate beyond their control.
Their flailing, desperate efforts to reform the system while leaving their own wealth and power intact will be too late to matter.
If the elite were not so dominant, then the bottom 90% would demand reforms that might restore the system's equilibrium between resources and consumption. But the elite views such reforms not as solutions but as threats, and so they seal their own fate by defending the status quo from any meaningful reform.
To save the system from collapse, the wealth-power pyramid would have to be reversed so the bottom 90% hold 80% of the wealth and political influence, and the per capita consumption of the entire society will have to decline to levels that are sustainable, i.e. restore the equilibrium of resources, costs and consumption.
Neither are acceptable to the elite, so collapse is inevitable. Plan accordingly.
Highlights of the Blog
Podcast:
The Sample Hour #230 - Building Social Capital Through Community (1 hr, with Drew Sample)
Posts:
The Fed Is Fatally Corrupt-- And So Is the Rest of America's Status Quo 9/10/21
Please Don't Pop Our Precious Bubble! 9/8/21
Is Anyone Willing to Call the Top of the Everything Bubble? 9/6/21
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Harvested our first breadfruit of the season, and we were gifted dragon fruit from a home garden.
From Left Field
No Time to Die: does a new trailer mean 007 is finally ready for action?
Insurers Pullback On Satellite Policies Due To Space Junk Crisis-- fixing the space junk problem isn't sexy to billionaires...they only want to add 100,000 more pieces of junk....
The Density Divide and the Southernification of Rural America (via Maoxian) -- follow the trend on your car radio....
Sotheby's Just Sold A Bunch Of Ape NFTs For $24.4 Million -- what will they be worth in a year? It's anyone's guess....
China's Marxist "Profound Revolution" Is Here, And Nobody In The West Is Ready-- incomplete but a worthy introduction...
The Age of Exterminations: Who Will be Next Victims? -- give the witch burners the witches' assets and you get witch-hunting ...
Nation-States Vs Network-States Vs Crypto-Claves
The American plan for the end of the World finally revealed -- Dr. Strangelove in real life....
A problem shared is a problem doubled--sharing buffers works until everyone needs the same buffer....
Market Topping Signals To Watch (18 min) -- well worth a look if you have any exposure to at-risk financial assets....
Vietnam gasps for air as Delta deals a lethal blow--opening up has unintended consequences....
The Nitrogen Bomb: fossil-fueled fertilizers keep billions of us alive
"Everyone's trying to reach the top. Tell me how far is it from the bottom." Peter Tosh (via GFB)
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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