Post-1870 (or post-steam-engine or post-rolling-mill or whatever you want to use as the start point for industrial culture) has the prospect of sufficiency.
Given that prospect, agrarian age insecurity management -- what I have, I hold, because sufficiency cannot be general -- is more of a disaster than it was for the last five thousand years or so. (Incumbents strangle innovation, eventually demand all the money, and collapse the economy. Then your empire goes under; it might go under due to conflict with a marcher state that did innovate, or it may just slump into a heap as the fiction of an economy fails, but it's gone. That keeps happening over and over because trusting the system instead of your own power is too hard for too many people, but also because the system allows individuals sufficient wealth to become oligarchs.)
Today, with not only the prospect of general sufficiency but with many more opportunities to arrange co-operating in groups, the more effective strategy is to just not have anybody who is rich enough to do insecurity management by hoarding or by demanding to get what they want no matter who else suffers. (I mean, hey, that way we can avoid an end-Permian extinction event with us in it!)
When the water comes up -- and that's by 2030 from the current sounds of things -- it's going to be full-on into successor states, with a population too large to sustain with anything but industrial agriculture. I don't have much sense anyone is thinking about that, and I could wish they'd start.
Late Third Republic America! What a sobering thought. I'm afraid that I share your pessimism about the near future. I'm particularly concerned about the possibility of violence against prominent progressive figures. These authoritarian apes measure their manliness by their ability to intimidate and violently imposed their will. The Republican figures who could decide this seem utterly indifferent to the danger. There were apparently no lessons learned from January sixth.
Post-1870 (or post-steam-engine or post-rolling-mill or whatever you want to use as the start point for industrial culture) has the prospect of sufficiency.
Given that prospect, agrarian age insecurity management -- what I have, I hold, because sufficiency cannot be general -- is more of a disaster than it was for the last five thousand years or so. (Incumbents strangle innovation, eventually demand all the money, and collapse the economy. Then your empire goes under; it might go under due to conflict with a marcher state that did innovate, or it may just slump into a heap as the fiction of an economy fails, but it's gone. That keeps happening over and over because trusting the system instead of your own power is too hard for too many people, but also because the system allows individuals sufficient wealth to become oligarchs.)
Today, with not only the prospect of general sufficiency but with many more opportunities to arrange co-operating in groups, the more effective strategy is to just not have anybody who is rich enough to do insecurity management by hoarding or by demanding to get what they want no matter who else suffers. (I mean, hey, that way we can avoid an end-Permian extinction event with us in it!)
When the water comes up -- and that's by 2030 from the current sounds of things -- it's going to be full-on into successor states, with a population too large to sustain with anything but industrial agriculture. I don't have much sense anyone is thinking about that, and I could wish they'd start.
Late Third Republic America! What a sobering thought. I'm afraid that I share your pessimism about the near future. I'm particularly concerned about the possibility of violence against prominent progressive figures. These authoritarian apes measure their manliness by their ability to intimidate and violently imposed their will. The Republican figures who could decide this seem utterly indifferent to the danger. There were apparently no lessons learned from January sixth.