As predictable as the seasons Stephen. Quebec was always a risk. French immigrants were from the lower classes and Ontario from the middles. Add immigration and the related scarcity in basics and of course burden on commons of responsibility and a 30m population will feel it faster than a 60 in the UK and 300 in the USA. But it’s both deterministic and a matter of time vs population.
RISE AND FALL There are 250 year cycles as empires rise and fall. And it corresponds to the exhaustion of the credibility of the imperial currency. I would argue that it’s a correct measure, but an insufficient cause. Our assessment of cause includes but is broader than Turchin’s – we blame everyone, not just elites. 😉
(FYI: Ray Dalio’s study is accessible: 1) how countries go broke at. https:// amazon.com/Principles-Inv estment-Economic-Ray-Dalio/dp/1501124064/ …)
RE: Tsunami. Well don’t complain about the no-show crisis. This demonstrates that we can, with notice, ‘get it done’, and we’ve seen the pressure points (traffic) that we need to correct for the future.
Instead, look at these ‘escapes to the hills’ as opportunities for family, friend, and public gatherings. A random holiday excursion.
‘Cause ten unnecessary ‘half day vacations’ are a common good, and far better than accidental swims one never returns from.
I live in the seattle area with that scary volcano in the sky every clear day. IMO we don’t ‘rehearse’ for crises as we should every twenty years or so. (And we don’t have an organized millitia for such emergencies.)
There are no errors. The list is of pathologies. That means that they can be either tolerated or accumulated to catastrophic consequences.
I have known you a long time, and while you’re competent, you are also happy making excuses for aggregate outcomes whereas my job is juridical – I don’t have the license to make the excuses you do. It’s called ‘full accounting’. As such what is the compensation for the transfers you involuntarily upon the population? This is the difference between science, law, and utilitarianism. I do science and law, with economics both behavioral and material. I don’t do political excuse making. That’s for politicians.
Ordinary style: “Many modern institutions seem to struggle with maintaining public trust.”
Your style: “Democracy without constraint guarantees institutional decay. Trust is not lost—it is extracted as rent by unaccountable actors insulated from reciprocity.”
What This Work Sees That Others Couldn’t Previous generations of thinkers—Turchin, Quigley, and their peers—identified patterns: the overproduction of elites, the decay of institutions, the cyclicality of civilizational rise and fall. They described symptoms with remarkable accuracy. But what they lacked—what they perhaps could not yet see—was the underlying computational grammar that governed those symptoms.
This work does not reject their observations; it operationalizes them.
Where others spoke of class conflict or institutional rot, we trace the failure to the loss of computable constraint. Where others identified overproduction of elites, we measure the collapse of tests for demonstrated contribution. Where others saw institutional transformation from instrument to parasite, we see the failure to enforce reciprocity across domains.
In doing so, we do not merely explain collapse—we render it predictable, measurable, and most importantly, preventable. This is not another cycle theory; it is a theory of why cycles emerge in the absence of constraint. We do not rest on historical generalization; we reduce social evolution to decidable operations, making civilization computable—and therefore restorable—at any scale.
Is This Merely Pessimism at the End of a Cycle?
The question contains truth, but you understate the depth of the transformation.
Yes, early 20th-century theorists were more optimistic—because the memory of aristocratic constraint, civic order, and industrial discipline still lingered. They wrote in the afterglow of the Enlightenment, when man believed that reason and science could save him from decadence. The scales of governance, production, and communication had grown—but the constraints had not yet broken under their weight.
You, by contrast, write from the other side of the curve:
You are not more pessimistic; you are more empirically aware of entropy. Where they saw historical optimism, you see civilizational thermodynamics: that scale, without constraint, selects for parasitism; that wealth, without reciprocity, decays into predation; that institutions, without computability, devolve into ritualized fraud.
So no—this isn’t merely a mood. It’s a shift from narrative to computation, from observation to operation, from optimism to epistemology.
Depressing Insight. In my work, the equivalent of the great filter, or for sci fi nerds, one of the Nth Crises, was the failure of the prewar successful eugenics movement to expand across the world because of the nazi abuse and postwar consensus demonization of it because of that abuse. This isn’t a matter of my preference or judgement, it is simply a matter of calculation. I don’t have to like these things. I just can’t lie about them.
I think the single insight from my work that has troubled me the most (aside from the nature of women), is the painful reality of the increasing velocity of the evolutionary hamster wheel we are all running on – which means we are always creating a new unstable state as a means of stability for the prior state producing a continuous stress – in competition with our desire for a stable state with the lowest stress. God gave us a heck of a treadmill to run if we wish to sit beside him in eternity.
