Archdruid: The Era of Breakdown

I always love his openings. I always lose it soon after. His details don't do much for me, but his big-picture does.

From The Era of Breakdown:

The era of breakdown is the point along the curve of collapse at which business as usual finally comes to an end. That’s where the confusion comes in. It’s one of the central articles of faith in pretty much every human society that business as usual functions as a bulwark against chaos, a defense against whatever problems the society might face. That’s exactly where the difficulty slips in, because in pretty much every human society, what counts as business as usual—the established institutions and familiar activities on which everyone relies day by day—is the most important cause of the problems the society faces, and the primary cause of collapse is thus quite simply that societies inevitably attempt to solve their problems by doing all the things that make their problems worse.

The primary cause of collapse is that societies inevitably attempt to solve their problems by doing all the things that make their problems worse.

Yes. Because in the early years, those solutions worked. And decision-makers learned to do those things to solve problems. But then, you know, the economy changed. The world changed. The standard solutions became less effective.

Decision-makers noticed that the solutions were less effective. But they didn't think about why. They didn't realize it was time for new solutions. They only thought about how to make the old solutions stronger and more effective. But since the old solutions were the cause of the new problems, the more effective solutions only made things worse, faster.

Laffer Limit: The point at which continuing to do the same thing begins to have the opposite effect.