Mark Your Calendars

Ensuring the Continuity of our Species: It doesn’t look good for the home team. (Part 4 of 4)

The balance of nature

The egalitarian (1) and equitable (2) societies could produce sustainable civilizations and avoid collapse, even with a high ratio of non-workers. Social collapse was more likely after people overreached and depleted natural resources. Importantly, even without any social stratification, collapse can occur if a society exhausts its natural resources.

In the unequal (3) society, however, collapse is almost unavoidable. This is the scenario that mirrors our current globalized societies, even here in the United States.

The income gap

The researchers wrote, "The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments, where we introduced economic stratification. Under such conditions, referring to uneven wealth distribution, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid."

Other recent research backs up the authors' claims: A 2012 study from the journal American Sociological Review shows that the income share of the top 1 percent of Americans grew rapidly after 1980. We often hear that the top 1 percent now hold more wealth than the other 99 percent combined.

Meanwhile, the bottom three-quarters of the U.S. population has seen slow economic growth, with predictable results. A 2011 study published in the journal Psychological Science found that happiness, trust in others, and life satisfaction plummet when income inequality is high.

Technology won't save you

For those who believe that there must be a technological fix to all this despair and destruction, the researchers found that the historical record provides "testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.

The authors wrote that “It may be reasonable to believe that modern civilization, armed with its greater technological capacity, scientific knowledge, and energy resources, will be able to survive and endure whatever crises historical societies succumbed to.

But [our] brief overview of collapses demonstrates not only the ubiquity of the phenomenon, but also the extent to which advanced, complex and powerful societies are susceptible to collapse."

All is not lost

The authors suggest that, “If societies can moderate the two factors that contribute most to social meltdown, 1) the exploitation of natural resources, and 2) the uneven distribution of wealth, collapse can be avoided and the society can reach equilibrium.

To accomplish this, the per-capita rate of depletion of nature must be reduced to a sustainable level, and resources must be distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.

Given the above suggestion things are not looking good … you’d better repack that Bug Out Bag!