This week's New Scientist magazine features a cheery cover announcing "The Collapse of Civilization." Fine, I can do without anything except wikipedia and Swiss chocolate. What will be the immediate cause? New Scientist doesn't say, considering a flu pandemic, environmental degradation, and the depletion of fossil fuels.
Why will it collapse? Complexity, of course, but New Scientist seems to focus on two aspects of complexity in particular:
First, our hyper-efficiency, which means that there is very little redundancy in the global economy. If only a handful of factories in the world make an essential widget, and they use their economies of scale to offer that widget cheaply to everybody--that's terrific, until every worker in one of those factories suddenly comes down with bird flu and the universe grinds to a halt.
Second, our interconnectedness. As Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of an organization improbably called the New England Complex Systems Institute, explains, "A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism. Random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep."
Interestingly enough, New Scientist cites the subprime mortgage crisis--I wrote here about the weird connections it was revealing--as a prime example of sheep-lopping. Instead of spreading the risk in the sense of dividing it up and minimizing it, our financial system is now so tightly wound that it spreads risk like a contagion--and if one segment of the American mortgage market gets sick, there is a worldwide credit crunch.
Who comes out on top when the collapse occurs? Subsistence farmers, according to Bar-Yam. Garden Rant readers, according to me. Independent types who know how to use a shovel.
Oh good. Finally, a chance to find out if any part of asparagus ferns are edible.
Posted by: mrsubjunctive | April 11, 2008 at 04:49 PM