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Part of the answer is in Joseph Tainter's work, especially Collapse. Complexity slices problems, but, well, adds complexity.

The question is a fascinating one though.

No it wouldn't, GG&S is the perfect intro to this genre of books. Another good one is Collapse by Joseph Tainter.

A good portion of Jared Diamond's Collapse covers the history and decline of the Greenland settlements. It's a worthwhile read.

Try books by Jared Diamond about world history:

"Guns, Germs and Steel"

"Collapse"

They are not just informative: they change the way one looks at the world. And their prose is excellent.

Jared Diamond isn't "anti-globalist". Collapse is a good book, but IIRC, he isn't attacking free trade, but the overuse of resources. They're two different things.

Whatever that list of 1000 must-reads books, I would include "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, and "A General Theory of Love" by Thomas Lewis et al.

Quite some overlap with others here, but to add some of my own favorites:

- The Shock Doctrine by N. Klein

- The Anarchist Banker by F. Pessoa

- Collapse by J. Diamond

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by D. Kahneman

- a few books by Noam Chomsky

EDIT: nearly forgot:

- Brave New World by A. Huxley

Jared Diamond devotes a whole chapter of his book Collapse to this question. The one cause that struck me the most (Diamond only mentions it in passing) is that they apparently didn't eat the fish.

After that you should read "Collapse", it's even better than Guns,Germs and steel imo.

"Collapse" is also by Jared Diamond. You're thinking of "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (and yes, it is good).

The book Collapse by Jared Diamond is frightening. It shows that throughout history, civilizations have collapsed with eyes wide open. Unlike today, those civilizations faced local collapse, now we have the potential of global collapse and we haven’t changed a goddamn bit

Best book on the subject I read is Wright's "A Short History of Progress" https://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Progress-Ronald-Wright/...
Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is in a similar vein, but less cleanly written.

I recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond and The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, as a treatise over how different societies reacted to resource shortages & environmental damage.

They try to be non-political and are very informative, IMO.

An even better answer specific to the "Why Nations Fail" question is in Jared Diamond's Collapse. Which specifically explores the manifold reasons nations and cultures fail.

Highly recommended.

Maybe you're thinking of "Collapse", which covers Easter Island?

I found Collapse fascinating. At first it was very persuasive, then I got to the chapter about Greenland, which posits that Norwegians at the time would rather starve than eat fish. At that point the book became fascinating for a different reason: The rhetoric and narrative are good enough to make it seem reasonable that people living on a coast rich in fish would develop advanced boats and boating technique, yet absolutely would not eat fish.

It's all done with smooth prose: The book is smoothly easy to read and your attention is kept where you won't wonder why those boats were developed in the first place.

Actually the classic study is the Rapa Nui culture who inhabited Easter Island and whose culture had already been decimated by deforestation when the Europeans arrived.

Jared Diamond's book Collapse is an exploration of the phenomenon. A bit hard to read if you're paying attention.

I think not. This is very much in line with what I know from cultural anthropology, and the writer is Jared Diamond, who you might know as the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse".

The recent Easter Island BBC film [0] was pretty good on this. Jared Diamond did consider all the European destruction in his book 'Collapse' but still believed that there had been a large amount of deforestation well before the first Europeans arrived in 1722.

The BBC claims there were trees and the population was relatively happy when the first ship arrived. But this changed dramatically after that.

Diamond claims that the 1722 expedition saw no trees over 10ft tall, and says that effectively the deforestation was 'complete' by then.

Personally I believe the BBC version of events. Disease + Slavery + 70,000 sheep vs a population that had survived for 1,000 years on a tiny island. Even Diamond agrees that he doesn't understand why the islanders would cut all their own trees down when they were clearly intelligent.

Edit: Here's the actual quote from the Jacob Roggeveen's journal [1]:

> Nor can the aforementioned land be termed sandy, because we found it not only not sandy but on the contrary exceedingly fruitful, producing bananas, potatoes, sugar-cane of remarkable thickness and many other kinds of fruits of the earth; although destitute of large trees and domestic animals except poultry

[0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03srmm6

[1]: https://archive.org/stream/voyagecaptaindo00unkngoog#page/n1...

Free food almost certainly causes more starving children in any country whose main religion/culture demands "be fruitful and multiply".

> Whilst some famines are caused by over-population, it is far more likely that they are caused by other factors such as genocide campaigns, civil wars, refugee flows and episodes of extreme violence and state collapse.

It's also likely that all those other factors are greatly exacerbated by overpopulation, if not outright caused by it. Jared Diamond's book Collapse makes just that argument for the Rwandan Genocide event. Wikipedia: "Diamond theorized that population pressure was the main cause of the genocide. ... Rwanda's population density in 1990 was 760 people per square mile, one of the highest in the world. The population grew at over 3% a year. By 1985 all the land except the national parks had been cultivated."

> My question remains the same - what would you say to a starving child? Or their parents as the child lay dying?

If I was personally involved then I'd have a hard time not giving aid, even as I was confident I was making the problem worse in the long run. These age-old questions show the reason we insulate our leaders from problems on the ground, the better to allow them to make decisions that do the greatest good.

That's not really the criticism. Jared Diamond is very extremely wedded to the environmental determinism theory (this becomes more obvious after you read Collapse; it's somewhat more muted in Guns, Germs, and Steel), and this theory has serious gaping holes that Diamond never really addresses.

One of the problems of GG&S in particular is that the book presupposes that the European colonization of the Americas was inevitable. For anyone who's actually studied that topic--and Diamond pretends that no one has ever done that before, which is a big fat lie--the most immediate and important conclusion is that it was not inevitable. Pre-Columbian history is already a topic where pretty much everything you were taught is completely and totally wrong [1], and Diamond takes these wrong facts as axiomatic, and people constantly suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel to help reinforce the explanation--it's no wonder there's a large amount of exasperation on the topic.

[1] If you want a good book on this, read Charles Mann's book 1491. It's also a great way of showing how a non-specialist in history can competently approach the topic.

Someone mentions Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" below - which is very good. However, can I strongly recommend his book "Collapse" - which is rather thought provoking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_...

On a related note, a novel that looks at some interesting very long lived organizations and has some interesting philosophical components I'd recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem

> resources are indeed infinite, because the human ingenuity is infinite

Human ingenuity is impressive, but not infinite. I recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's a long read, but every single society he examines thought they were doing great but ended up eating each other (literally) within a couple of generations once some vital resource dried up. Human ingenuity failed all of them.

I'll give you peak oil: our ingenuity is already finding viable alternative energy solutions. But climate change is going to destabilise so much more - food, water, land, security - that I'm pessimistic that our civilisation will last more than a few generations.

So far we've only discovered more positive feedback (e.g. methane from melting Siberia), when we desperately need strong negative feedback. A bit like Covid, where everyone assumed the ingenious new vaccines would get us back to normal in a couple of months, but mutations, politics and social dynamics mean we're still very much on the back foot.

But hey, I'm 60 and still a lefty so obviously no brain and just a bullshit doomer :) But do grab a copy of Collapse, there are a lot of "whoa!" insights and it's a fascinating read.

I just finished a ton of great books, some that immediately come to mind:

The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris - Really made me think about life and the work I do

Tribes by Seth Godin - Love this book.

The Dip by Seth Godin - read it before, reread it again this year

Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina - really had to struggle to get past the beginning, was fantastic once I did

Find Your Great Work by Michael Bungary Stanier - I liked this one a lot, motivational

The Power of Less by Leo Babauta - no surprises here, I enjoyed the book, it reads like you would expect it to. Some new insights that aren't on the blog

Superfreakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Dubner

Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (I liked The Tipping Point the best out of those 3)

Free by...Chris Anderson (?) I forget. Very interesting.

Team Up by Pete Mockaitis - Great read about accountability groups, subset of a mastermind group IMO.

Collapse by Jared Diamond - Very interesting looks at patterns in civilizations. Some people I spoke to get bored after a few examples, it is a little repetitive but I enjoy the parallels

My old faves are of course Gettings Things Done, 7 Habits, Greatest Salesman in The World, and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

More details here:
http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/best-personal-deve...

I regularly (and will be posting a bunch in the next couple weeks) post reviews of books I read here:
http://sidsavara.com/product-reviews

I feel that Jared Diamond's book Collapse belongs on your list of references https://archive.org/stream/CollapseHowSocietiesChooseToFailO...

From Wild Kratts (apologies for quoting kids programs but it's what comes to mind):

> there's no bad guys just predators and prey.

My rather simplistic logic is that humans are predators and I have nothing particularly against that. For 100,000+ years we were hunter-gatherers and very good at it. Humans would kill animals because they wanted the food. Lions kill whatever they can for food, so did we.

From Jared Diamond's book "Collapse", the inuit survived because they would kill whales and seals and keep the blubber for months until it was in a putrid but still edible state and managed to outlast other humans.

However I have two issues:

1. We now have very good farming methods that allow us to avoid eating meat

2. We completely abstract the killing of animals to factories and trawlers and wrap it up in economics and talk about 'efficiency' of killing and wanting our meat as cheap as possible

In some ways I mind less about the killing of whales because it's really hard to kill whales and they live a free life until they are killed. Factory farming of pigs, lambs, chickens and cows seems much more cruel.

So where as I understand the rather animalistic nature of humans, I wish we would use our intellect to stop the cruelty.

> Where do we get this sense of superiority?

There was a recent article on HN [1] about the history of vegetarianism [0], there it talks about that Plato and Aristotle reasoned that humans were the only creatures with immortal souls (Pythagoras had argued earlier that animals did have souls) and the universe was for human use to do as they please. Further they argued that there was a hierarchy of beings with plants and animals at the bottom, and they didn't deserve justice because they couldn't reason.

Edit: the words of Plato and Aristotle remind me of George Orwell's pigs in Animal Farm, where as Pythagoras had argued that all animals had souls and so were to some extent equal, Plato and Aristotle came back saying that humans have immortal souls or equivalently "some are more equal than others".

[0]: http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2010/08/the-hid...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807278

I loved G,G&S, but found Collapse disappointing in comparison. There was a lot of unnecessary personal gushing about his home state which had no contribution to the work and undermined the credibility of the argument. It picks up after that though. It's a much more political and argumentative book than G,G&S, and seems to force a view on the reader (a view I happen to agree with, but still felt uncomfortable with the amount of persuasion in there).

The author is Jared Diamond - IMHO one of the great thinkers of our time, who certainly deserves serious consideration. His books, "Guns, Germs and Steel", "Collapse", "The Third Chimpanzee" are excellent, thought-provoking (even worldview-altering) reads.

That said.. he is right, but from the vantage point of someone in this day and age, who loves science and technology, who has benefitted from the efforts of the billions of post-agricultural humans, I selfishly prefer this outcome to sitting around gathering nuts in uncomfortable underwear, waging endless war with neighbouring bands and tribes.

Sure, agriculture produced a Long Dip in living standards, with population increases outstripping any gains made in production. But the whole point of a large population - perhaps the only redeeming feature of civilization - is that one can trawl the probabilistic waters and produce the few very mad, very interesting geniuses who make it all worthwhile.

I've always thought that the Matrix really came about due to the natural tendency of civilization to increase population density. From the open savannah to cubicles, cars and capsule hotels.. the Matrix is just highly aggressive telecommuting.

And it worked, too. Humans maintained ever higher population densities, produced lots of crazy geniuses who kept improving the interfaces, until significant bits of personalities could jump across from brain to brain. "AIs" were nothing more than mobile multiple-personality disorders. Morpheus' crowd were basically scavengers, helping keep the Matrix clean of dangerous personalities while maintaining a reserve pool of free-range human at Zion, in case the Matrix needed to be repopulated... which it did, from time to time, after epic meme-virus infections which killed off most of the existing inhabitants. The whole "AI vs humans" story and attempts to kill Morpheus & co was a big piece of drama to keep them righteously motivated rather than relaxing with the blue pill.

Very good, as long as it works. There have been cases in the past when people did not find the innovation they needed at some point, and have experienced extinction or close extinction. I would like to not risk that again, also because that would be the first time where the extinction risks to be global, not just local.

I liked very muche Collapse by Jared Diamond. He discusses some cases of this type, starting from the iconic history of Easter Island.

Any analysis of this kind is by necessity an oversimplification of complex reality, but I have lived, traveled, and done business in several 'developing' countries, and this makes a LOT of sense to me. In my experience, when most adults in a country can earn a living and feed their children, people don't take to the streets.

These findings by complex systems theorists also remind me of a powerful map I saw in the book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond (of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" fame) -- a map showing that the areas around the planet which are currently suffering from the most political, institutional, and even societal breakdown also happen to be those that have suffered the most ecological damage, such that self-sustaining agriculture is not a viable option for them in the immediate future.

Haven't read the article, just wanted to point out that 40 years is nothing. In Jared Diamond's Collapse he tells about civilizations that collapsed after 4000 years.

I don't think we can assume that our current society exists in an equilibrium. We launched into the industrial age like a cannonball and we don't know yet where we will land.

Didn't some agricultural revolution in the last century safe our ass for the time being (I'm too lazy to google, basically one guy saved billions of lives). I don't know if that kind of agriculture is sustainable, though. Perhaps it requires a lot of energy, or it destroy the soil in the long run. (Maybe not - I don't know, just saying).

It isn't helpful to myopically discuss population and ignore other things like environmental limits, affluence, resource intensity, biodiversity, (in)equality, etc.

Similarly, it is not helpful to decree that any discussion of population is tabu.

Other societies have very different standards of what is morally normal and acceptable when it comes to population growth.

E.g. Jared Diamond's book Collapse discusses the island of Tikopia [1] -- the people living on this isolated island (~1200 people on 5km^2 of land) managed to live sustainably for hundreds of years with a stable population:

> Most readers of this book will have practiced one or more of those methods [of population regulation], such as contraception or abortion, and our decisions to do so may have been implicitly influenced by considerations of human population pressure or family resources.

> On Tikopia, however, people are explicit in saying that their motive for contraception and other regulatory behaviours is to prevent the island from becoming overpopulated, and to prevent the family from having more children than the family's land could support.

Traditional methods of regulating population included: contraception, abortion, infanticide, celibacy of younger sons and "surplus" marriageable women, suicide, "virtual suicide" (setting out on dangerous sea voyages with essentially no hope of survival), and one instance of warfare between clans (after a decrease of fish and shellfish population led to starvation and conflict over the remaining land and coastline).

> Most of these seven methods for keeping Tikopia's population constant have disappeared or declined under European influence during the 20th century. The British colonial government of the Solomons forbade sea voyaging and warfare, while Christian missions preached against abortion, infanticide, and suicide. As a result, Tikopia's population grew from its 1929 level of 1,278 people to 1,758 people by 1952, when two destructive cyclones within the span of 13 months destroyed half of Tikopia's crops and caused widespread famine.

Petty much every documentary I have seen the last 5 years claims humans are increasingly ruining the planet at a non-sustainable rate. I expected this to be common knowledge by now.

If you prefer reading about it, Collapse by Jared Diamond[1] is an exceptional book on the subject, with facts and references for every claim and anecdote.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143117009/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

There are also cultures that vanished after thousands of years, and crisises in which millions of people died. Human ingenuity and technological progress didn't solve every problem. We just forgot about the dead (classic survivor bias). Collapse by Jared Diamond has some examples of societies that failed - by comparison, our current civilization is very young and hasn't really "played out" yet.

Maybe the estimates of Malthus were wrong, but the underlying concern is still correct. Our current food production is not sustainable because it relies on non-renewable energy sources. I don't claim no solution can be found for that, but there is also no reason to believe there will be a solution.

Another way to look at it makes it very plain: the surface area of earth certainly is limited. So if population would grow forever, we would reach a point where every person would only have one square foot of ground to live on.

Even that might be doable - we could live in a stacked way (skyscrapers), or Matrix-Style in coffins with virtual environment. Nevertheless it doesn't seem like a very desirable future.

I haven't read Collapse but Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures had an idea for "black swan philantrophy", which would be "focused on funding projects aimed at preventing or coping with very low probability events that would have cataclysmic outcomes for humanity."

I don't know why threats.org is down at the moment; perhaps it's due to the fact that there weren't that many people willing to actually help with the non-profit a few months ago.

http://continuations.com/post/106672598/looking-for-help-in-...

I guess a lot depends on your outlook on how well organized society will hold up. It provides the platform by which specialization of experts and industrial production of your proffered items can be sustained. There's a lot of higher order effects that are not obvious when you consider just the immediate effects of scarcity, famines, wars etc. Remember that all the recent places in danger of local collapse have been propped back up by the rest of the world because the troubles have been local.

Hisory has many lessons of civilizations collapsing, you might read up on Jared Diamond's Collapse or Joseph Tainter's earlier work. A lot of these past civilizations had all the ingredients to make it, but ended up destroying themselves.

A book? I can’t color between the lines on this one, maybe I can’t read between them either. Here’s 3:

Collapse by Jared Diamond

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon

Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (English: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies ) by Bartolomé de las Casas

Just in time for one of the coldest summers on record.

It's hard for people to fathom the thought of global warming while their local weather is in fact colder.

Jared Diamond's Collapse is a good reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(book)

What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree and doom the island think as he used his stone axe?

While I remain skeptical about global climate change, I can also appreciate the fact that polluting less and taking care of the environment is a good thing.

The problem is that even as America becomes cleaner, China, India and the rest of the third world are burning trees and coal like crazy.

Recommendations:

- Collapse by Jared Diamond, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_%28book%29 about how we over-exploit our planet.

- The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom, psychological and cultural explanations of how humans react to "memes" amongst other gems of knowledge.

- The Eschaton series by Charles Stross (sci-fi).