"Cultural drift is one possible mechanism by which exceptionally good cultures could tend to go bad, both in firms and in civs."
Another mechanism I have personally lived through at firms is when you get big and successful, there is a tendency to assume your success is due to a good culture, so why change anything? The culture gets cocky and stops bringing in new ideas, and once the cultural immune system shuts off, cancers begin to take root. Andy Grove famously said only the paranoid survive, but the real question is how does one remain paranoid in the midst of success.
Does this happen to civilizations as a whole? Maybe. I instinctively distrust any group or culture that is too self-assured. That is always the step before the downfall.
Yes, I was pointing out that sometimes "drift" isn't the problem, but rather "lack of drift" or ossification. Drift implies a random walk, and while some of that certainly occurs there are also phenomena that are very directed and predictable.
"We can thus infer that this change in the growth rate was accompanied by a decline in those other “culture” feature for which we credited the rise. And we can also infer that this causal channel from culture to growth rate during this period was not mediated by wealth and scale, as those stayed the same here.."
We say "rise and fall", not "rise and decline", because the rise is much slower than the fall. This is the most-crucial observation, I think. It suggests we look to catastrophe theory.
There is no reason to think that the change from growth to decline should be attributed to a change of some system parameter from increasing to decreasing. I'm pretty confident that's usually not the case in complex systems. The system moves through its phase space as many parameters change simultaneously, and typically a catastrophe happens when one variable, the one we identify as "growth", increases too rapidly with respect to some other compensating variable, even though that compensating variable might also be growing. The collapse isn't caused by a single variable or parameter.
Most of what we measure, e.g., an economy's GDP, are variables, not parameters. Parameters govern functions; functions compute variables from parameters and variables. A collapse means a sudden fall in some variable for which more is better. But that variable is probably the output of a complex function of other variables. Collapse is not caused by a change from increasing to decreasing in a parameter, but in a /mismatch/ between sets of variables, where "mismatch" means "a combination which results in some function producing a value below rather than above a threshold."
For instance, in the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model, there are a predictable series of rises and sudden collapses in predator population, even while the system parameters (prey and predator reproduction rate, predator starvation rate, & predation efficiency) remain constant. The sudden collapse in predator population happens because the predator /population growth/ rate (not reproduction rate) is a function of the prey population divided by the predator population, and the first derivative of the predator growth rate turns negative when the ratio of those two variables falls below some function of the system parameters.
A theory I've had for decades to explain civilizational collapse is that evolution causes a system to become more-stable as it grows, but engineering causes a system to become less-stable as it grows.
Growth of any kind, population, wealth, territory, whatever, makes a system more complex. Random growth in one area nearly always makes a stable system less stable. So it's surprising that evolution makes a system more-stable as it grows.
The reason engineering destabilizes it is also mathematically complicated, but less-complicated: Evolved systems have catastrophes--let's call them avalanches, because I got this idea from avalanche theory circa 1990--with a power law size distribution.
- The size S of an avalanche is the number of things that are perturbed by the avalanche, like the number of grains of sand in a sandpile avalanche.
- The fraction of avalanches of size S is proportional to 1/S^a.
- If S is discrete (avalanche sizes are integers), then
-- If a > 1, the average avalanche size is finite.
-- If a < 1, the average avalanche size is infinite.
- If S avalanche sizes are real numbers, then
-- If a > 2, the average avalanche size is finite.
-- If a < 2, the average avalanche size is infinite.
One of the many problems with engineering society is that humans always think linearly. Whenever an equation comes up in life, humans assume it's either linear, or constant, or just "True" or "False". Humans don't intuitively grasp power laws.
When re-engineering society, humans who aren't religious zealots usually try to make it bigger and better, which means more-complicated. Smart engineers can see that these new complications introduce new failure modes. They try to predict how often a system with the proposed change will fail, and how badly it will fail. And they nearly always do this using some linear model, like asking "how many avalanches of size > S will occur per century" or "what is the expected time to an avalanche of size S." Then they engineer the system to get a failure rate that's acceptable /under that linear model/.
The society they're engineering, having evolved, is /always already near a cusp catastrophe/ at every control point. That is, lots of things in it already have a power-law distribution, including the failure they're trying to guard against. Things with power-law distributions are very safe in the short-term, because the risk is all concentrated in the long-term. Planners looking ahead 1 or 10 or 100 years will inevitably engineer something that will have a system-destroying catastrophe after that lookahead time.
If the failures have integer sizes, they might actually do this right! Because then they can use a linear model. But even then, the max avalanche size is typically REALLY BIG, like $15 trillion (in the NYSE), or 350 million (people). So the math gets done right only if you use a truncated power law and take the sum all the way out to that big number; and the bigger the number is, the less-stable your estimate is. So even then you should really be engineering in an /a/ > 2, which you can't do with linear thinking.
Self-organized critical systems explain a lot of phenomena because they are so general: They robustly occur whenever you have many independent elements interacting via a threshold mechanism that resists small changes. They explain the fluctuation scaling laws seen in avalanches, earthquakes, brain activity, and stock market prices among other things.
I think it very plausible that when we talk about civs "rising and falling", we're talking about the largest events in what is really a continuum. Human beings interact, and for a variety of reasons we tend to resist changes, and when stress builds up – the system occasionally reconfigures. Those reconfigurations happen at every scale and in a myriad of ways, down to the individual decisions you will make today (which route to drive, which product to buy, etc.). Threshold dynamics are everywhere.
But as with the stock market, people crave a narrative. They want an explanation for why this earthquake was so big, or why that stock market crash was so catastrophic. To me it feels like searching for faces in the clouds. We can explain why earthquakes happen in general (accumulated stress of plate movements), but it's foolish to seek an explanation for why one particular earthquake was big or small.
Why do you assume that civilizations are engineered as the result of planning? There has to be some wealth accumulation mechanism, but I would think the civilization that springs up around a wealth accumulation mechanism is more a natural consequence than an engineered construct.
Planning society has become more and more common in the modern era. The Soviet Union was highly engineered. Things that go thru Congress are engineered. The US tax code is engineered to serve many different purposes; it's Congress' go-to method for encouraging behavior that would be unconstitutional to enforce. The physical things being engineered are more and more often complex systems like the Space Shuttle, not just bridges and dams; and sometimes a whole nation might collapse if one system fails, like NORAD, or the Iron Dome, or the canal system in medieval China.
Ok, but I don’t think it woks that way on a “civ” level. No one planned that a society would become Christian, develop capitalism, have a scientific revolution, an Industrial Revolution, a health revolution, an Enlightenment, begin to secularize, invent the internet, go woke, have a reaction against woke including Brexit and Trump, etc.
Many of the most-important changes to how the US does things now take place through the actions of government rather than by evolution. That was not the case 100 years ago. Many social changes today take place due to social planning by some small group of rich people. The conquest of modernism in the fine arts in the period 1930-1950 is a perfect example. The percent of the public that wanted that change would probably round down to zero percent; it was pushed from the top down by very small but persistent groups of intellectuals and rich people. Modernism itself is the name we give to this sort of social engineering.
(A great deal of planning went into making Europe Christian, developing a free-market finance system, creating a scientific revolution, etc. But if that planning was not done with utilitarian ethics, and the objective of producing a better society with multi-generational stability, it can be seen as random from the perspective of engineering, and that development gets treated as organic, evolved.)
Brexit was a reaction against a top-down re-engineering of Europe, /because/ it was a re-engineering rather than an organic development. My theory would predict that the EU made Europe more-vulnerable to large-scale catastrophes, on account of being engineered based on a democratic process which was inherently incapable either of understanding the system sufficiently to do the job, or of doing mathematically correct risk analysis. But I haven't studied the EU, and don't claim that is in fact the case.
This pattern ("cycling of Empires") was explained to me as a result of the geometry of the Ancient State. The Ancient State was comprised of a small military elite that leveraged its monopoly access to the weapons of war--swords, armor, horses--the supply of which was highly constrained, in order to extract tribute from a relatively defenseless, mostly peasant, frontier. Picture a circle, centered around the capitol--which serves as headquarters--expanding over time.
The frontier (the circumference of the circle) expands linearly with time, but the body of the empire (the area of the circle) expands quadratically. The empire must expand over time in order to extract greater tribute to reward its military nucleus, but that profit will eventually be eclipsed by the more rapidly growing upkeep costs of ruling over a larger and larger area. Eventually the costs overwhelm the benefits, leading to schismatic disorder, which sets the table for a new military elite to overthrow the establishment and redirect military largess toward THEIR newly formed capitol.
The logic of civilizational expansion is supposed to have transformed at some point following the Enlightenment, when the growth of empires was no longer fueled by tribute consumption (too dangerous) and their stability was no longer threatened by prohibitive upkeep costs (law enforcement efficiencies). From this hypothetical point forward the growth, stasis and regression of empires is best explained by conflicts over regime security.
My mental model of this is a free energy landscape. A growing civilization is climbing a hill, which is naturally slow. A declining civilization is rolling down one, which is naturally fast. The growing civ is presumably expending *something* to achieve the climb, which may or may not be getting replenished by the expansion itself. As soon as it isn't, that something becomes less and less available, until the climb can no longer be sustained.
For me the key question is, is there an island of (meta)stability anywhere that a culture can sit in? Some sufficiently large shock can of course disturb such an island. But I believe based on history that there is such an island around the level of a city-state. I suspect on principle that there should be such an island around the level of a world government. Anything in between, not so much.
I feel like 'culture' and 'rot' are underspecified in this post. Usually "cultural rot" gets used in a post hoc-ish way of "I'll label parts of their culture I didn't like decadence." But look how many self-described periods of "decadence" we've had within the last 200 years, but from a macro perspective it's just been a roughly constant growth. If we ever do "fall", future historians will no doubt be able to identify the most recent self-described period of "decadence," call it cultural rot, and blame the fall on it... but why didn't the Greed is Good 80s, Roaring Twenties or Gilded Age or Regency Period (all ages that people associate with gambling/vice/luxury) make us fall?
Maybe there's a great deal of ruin in a culture.
Your model:
good culture --> innovation --> growth
bad culture --> stable/poor
But a couple things that seems to be missing. One, it should be more of a feedback loop: innovation and growth positively evolve culture in that it's much easier to have an 'innovative' culture when the pie is expanding; if you assume the growth is exogenous, stable and shrinking pie causes lots of deadweight-causing factional fighting on how to slice it, whereas expanding pie keeps infighting and deadweight loss to a minimum.
And second, the admittedly also underspecified 'institutions' needs to be in the loop. Lots of examples of how a people, presumably with similar cultural values, suddenly put into a place with new institutions and suddenly they're rising (or falling).
Seems like a more complete model. And then it probably takes multiple cycles of success to really get a "rise" civilization; and likely multiple rounds of failure to get a "fall" civilization.
I believe the reason is that growth and maintenance require different culture and technology. We can see this today. After centuries of industrial growth, we find it difficult to adapt to a new economic regime that does not require to continue growth (with exponentially increasing negative externalities) and instead focusses on maintaining the wealth we acquired.
Negative externalities aren't exponentially increasing. We are rich enough to mitigate externalities in ways we weren't when we were poorer. But the people J. Storrs Hall dubs "Eloi" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/elois-ate-your-flying-carhtml believe in such externalities anyway and oppose growth, even/especially for things like nuclear power that are cleaner than the power sources it would substitute for.
"Negative externalities aren't exponentially increasing" You are saying this, but I dont think we even measure them. In fact that is part of the problem. We are stuck in an old-growth paradigm. Part of what that means is that we do not measure the increasingly important negative externalities.
Every form of pollution that I can think of except for estrogen mimics, questionably toxic microplastics, and questionably toxic solar power panels has declined dramatically in the US over the past 50 years. Leaded gas and paint, cigarette smoke, coal burning, lake Erie, mercury in fish, acid rain, ozone depletion, DDT, water cleanliness, I could go on. We measure these things much much more than we did 50 years ago. My town's water's purity is tested every 3 months, and I bet it was never tested before 1980.
People are living much longer than they were before. The big health problem had been obesity, but now semaglutides appear to be solving that. If negative externalities were exponentially increasing, how would that be the case?
The infographic seems misleading - in that there were around 40 times fewer people around 2KY ago. That's not what the picture shows at all. The main story over that timescale is one of enormous growth and expansion of the human realm. Bear in mind that - where the infographic shows decline, it is likely to be just slightly slower expansion than usual.
"But there’s also something about about low wealth and scale that tends to heal cultures, and so plausibly also something about high wealth and scale that tends to hurt cultures."
I think the second part of this: something about high wealth/scale that is bad for cultures is plausible from this. But the first part: something about low wealth/scale that is good for cultures may just be selection effect. You point out that the 'Before' period is based on selection effects, because we are picking out eras that lead to great Civs. But it seems to me the After period may also be a selection effect. If a Civ falls and growth doesn't switch from 'falling' to 'stable', even after wealth and scale are both 'poor' and 'split', the culture just disappears, and isn't there any more for us to observe.
I usually see this issue framed as "senescence". We have a science of senescence. I don't think the practitioners frequently use the term "rot". If they want a less-esoteric sounding name they typically use the term "aging". Aside from brevity, I am not sure about the benefits of using the term "rot". The main effect seems to be to detach from the existing science and literature on the topic - much of which seems relevant to me. In particular, we know that senescence is caused partly by the accumulation of persistent parasites and partly by unmaintained damage. Maintenance competes for resources with the production of offspring. As an example of work in the area, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and_longevity
why don't cities rot in the same way? (many examples of cities that stay significant for millenia)
is it that cities aren't 'cultural' in the same way that civs are? or are city cultures significantly more robust / resistant to rot than nation/imperial level cultures?
The insight about culture being upstream of civilization is a good one. Low wealth and scale can be good for culture, but with one caveat - the cultural foundation has to have the right elements to support civilization in the first place. (There are plenty of small and poor societies that just stay small and poor because they lack necessary elements to support scale.) So it’s a good observation with relation to the decline period.
What this model is missing is the economic engine to drive the civilization. I like Carroll Quigley’s model in Evolution of Civilizations. Yes, you need a culture that can support growth, and this culture will determine what the civilization becomes when it expands. Within this culture there arises an economic engine for wealth accumulation. As a minority accumulate wealth, there are surpluses available for defense and conquests. The elite want cool stuff, so the arts and other economic specialization expand. People flock to be part of the shining cultural experience and for economic opportunity. Later on, entrenched interests grab hold of the good things and milk them for their own profits rather than allowing further real progress. The civilization stagnates. The principal economic engine becomes a hindrance to progress rather than an engine. The civ is still extremely wealthy, but there are cracks in the foundation. This era would be called the Golden Age before the decay becomes obvious. Then usually peripheral parts of the civ (more recently prosperous but not yet decadent) see the softness in the middle and vie for the prize, causing instability. Either a peripheral part will take control or an external force will see the internal conflict and swoop in. In the former case it can be possible to reform the civ, find a new economic engine, and continue progress. That is rare. Sometimes, like Byzantium or Egypt, there are no nearby rivals capable of conquering, so the internally crippled civ can last a thousand years. Other times a neighbor will crush it right away.
In this graphic, are these civilizations or polities? For example, the Persian Empire vanished at the hands of Alexander the Great, but Persian culture still seems to be around. Did Greek civilization suddenly vanish when the Romans conquered?
Did Persian civilization suddenly decline, or did it just lose a few critical battles to Alexander the Great? Would we be talking about the decline of Persian civilization if he'd only been Alexander the Pretty Great?
> This seems analogous to the known pattern for corporate cultures today, which tend to consistently go bad, causing firms to go broke, even when strongly incentivized CEOs try hard to prevent that decline.
I'm skeptical that "culture" is a good explanation for why firms go broke. It's a pretty vague term. What specific elements of corporate culture are you holding responsible for the failures? Does it extend to bad decisions on the part of management, investing in the wrong thing or failing to invest in the right thing? That's what most often causes firms to fail. I don't think I'd call that "culture."
I think the typical story that would be blamed on corporate culture going bad, is that initially the founders and early employees put in extraordinary effort to make the company work, because they had substantial equity in the company and were gambling on the future payoff. Then, later hired workers did not have substantial equity and were there for a stable paycheck, and therefore had a more normal work-life balance, and therefore were not as productive. I don't think this is really corporate culture going bad, I think this is just that you get what you pay for. It's not reasonable to expect normal employees to work extraordinary hours for ordinary pay.
"Cultural drift is one possible mechanism by which exceptionally good cultures could tend to go bad, both in firms and in civs."
Another mechanism I have personally lived through at firms is when you get big and successful, there is a tendency to assume your success is due to a good culture, so why change anything? The culture gets cocky and stops bringing in new ideas, and once the cultural immune system shuts off, cancers begin to take root. Andy Grove famously said only the paranoid survive, but the real question is how does one remain paranoid in the midst of success.
Does this happen to civilizations as a whole? Maybe. I instinctively distrust any group or culture that is too self-assured. That is always the step before the downfall.
Not changing to adapt to changing conditions is a way that culture can go bad.
“That is always the step before the downfall.”
Perhaps.
But that’s like the economist who predicted 11 of the last 4 recessions: some of the time they are correct not to change much.
While this has *some* clear overlaps with cultural drift, it doesn’t seem to me to be the same thing.
Resistance to cultural change is not the same thing as repeated maladaptive change.
Yes, I was pointing out that sometimes "drift" isn't the problem, but rather "lack of drift" or ossification. Drift implies a random walk, and while some of that certainly occurs there are also phenomena that are very directed and predictable.
"We can thus infer that this change in the growth rate was accompanied by a decline in those other “culture” feature for which we credited the rise. And we can also infer that this causal channel from culture to growth rate during this period was not mediated by wealth and scale, as those stayed the same here.."
We say "rise and fall", not "rise and decline", because the rise is much slower than the fall. This is the most-crucial observation, I think. It suggests we look to catastrophe theory.
There is no reason to think that the change from growth to decline should be attributed to a change of some system parameter from increasing to decreasing. I'm pretty confident that's usually not the case in complex systems. The system moves through its phase space as many parameters change simultaneously, and typically a catastrophe happens when one variable, the one we identify as "growth", increases too rapidly with respect to some other compensating variable, even though that compensating variable might also be growing. The collapse isn't caused by a single variable or parameter.
Most of what we measure, e.g., an economy's GDP, are variables, not parameters. Parameters govern functions; functions compute variables from parameters and variables. A collapse means a sudden fall in some variable for which more is better. But that variable is probably the output of a complex function of other variables. Collapse is not caused by a change from increasing to decreasing in a parameter, but in a /mismatch/ between sets of variables, where "mismatch" means "a combination which results in some function producing a value below rather than above a threshold."
For instance, in the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model, there are a predictable series of rises and sudden collapses in predator population, even while the system parameters (prey and predator reproduction rate, predator starvation rate, & predation efficiency) remain constant. The sudden collapse in predator population happens because the predator /population growth/ rate (not reproduction rate) is a function of the prey population divided by the predator population, and the first derivative of the predator growth rate turns negative when the ratio of those two variables falls below some function of the system parameters.
A theory I've had for decades to explain civilizational collapse is that evolution causes a system to become more-stable as it grows, but engineering causes a system to become less-stable as it grows.
Growth of any kind, population, wealth, territory, whatever, makes a system more complex. Random growth in one area nearly always makes a stable system less stable. So it's surprising that evolution makes a system more-stable as it grows.
The reason engineering destabilizes it is also mathematically complicated, but less-complicated: Evolved systems have catastrophes--let's call them avalanches, because I got this idea from avalanche theory circa 1990--with a power law size distribution.
- The size S of an avalanche is the number of things that are perturbed by the avalanche, like the number of grains of sand in a sandpile avalanche.
- The fraction of avalanches of size S is proportional to 1/S^a.
- If S is discrete (avalanche sizes are integers), then
-- If a > 1, the average avalanche size is finite.
-- If a < 1, the average avalanche size is infinite.
- If S avalanche sizes are real numbers, then
-- If a > 2, the average avalanche size is finite.
-- If a < 2, the average avalanche size is infinite.
One of the many problems with engineering society is that humans always think linearly. Whenever an equation comes up in life, humans assume it's either linear, or constant, or just "True" or "False". Humans don't intuitively grasp power laws.
When re-engineering society, humans who aren't religious zealots usually try to make it bigger and better, which means more-complicated. Smart engineers can see that these new complications introduce new failure modes. They try to predict how often a system with the proposed change will fail, and how badly it will fail. And they nearly always do this using some linear model, like asking "how many avalanches of size > S will occur per century" or "what is the expected time to an avalanche of size S." Then they engineer the system to get a failure rate that's acceptable /under that linear model/.
The society they're engineering, having evolved, is /always already near a cusp catastrophe/ at every control point. That is, lots of things in it already have a power-law distribution, including the failure they're trying to guard against. Things with power-law distributions are very safe in the short-term, because the risk is all concentrated in the long-term. Planners looking ahead 1 or 10 or 100 years will inevitably engineer something that will have a system-destroying catastrophe after that lookahead time.
If the failures have integer sizes, they might actually do this right! Because then they can use a linear model. But even then, the max avalanche size is typically REALLY BIG, like $15 trillion (in the NYSE), or 350 million (people). So the math gets done right only if you use a truncated power law and take the sum all the way out to that big number; and the bigger the number is, the less-stable your estimate is. So even then you should really be engineering in an /a/ > 2, which you can't do with linear thinking.
Self-organized critical systems explain a lot of phenomena because they are so general: They robustly occur whenever you have many independent elements interacting via a threshold mechanism that resists small changes. They explain the fluctuation scaling laws seen in avalanches, earthquakes, brain activity, and stock market prices among other things.
I think it very plausible that when we talk about civs "rising and falling", we're talking about the largest events in what is really a continuum. Human beings interact, and for a variety of reasons we tend to resist changes, and when stress builds up – the system occasionally reconfigures. Those reconfigurations happen at every scale and in a myriad of ways, down to the individual decisions you will make today (which route to drive, which product to buy, etc.). Threshold dynamics are everywhere.
But as with the stock market, people crave a narrative. They want an explanation for why this earthquake was so big, or why that stock market crash was so catastrophic. To me it feels like searching for faces in the clouds. We can explain why earthquakes happen in general (accumulated stress of plate movements), but it's foolish to seek an explanation for why one particular earthquake was big or small.
Why do you assume that civilizations are engineered as the result of planning? There has to be some wealth accumulation mechanism, but I would think the civilization that springs up around a wealth accumulation mechanism is more a natural consequence than an engineered construct.
Planning society has become more and more common in the modern era. The Soviet Union was highly engineered. Things that go thru Congress are engineered. The US tax code is engineered to serve many different purposes; it's Congress' go-to method for encouraging behavior that would be unconstitutional to enforce. The physical things being engineered are more and more often complex systems like the Space Shuttle, not just bridges and dams; and sometimes a whole nation might collapse if one system fails, like NORAD, or the Iron Dome, or the canal system in medieval China.
Ok, but I don’t think it woks that way on a “civ” level. No one planned that a society would become Christian, develop capitalism, have a scientific revolution, an Industrial Revolution, a health revolution, an Enlightenment, begin to secularize, invent the internet, go woke, have a reaction against woke including Brexit and Trump, etc.
Many of the most-important changes to how the US does things now take place through the actions of government rather than by evolution. That was not the case 100 years ago. Many social changes today take place due to social planning by some small group of rich people. The conquest of modernism in the fine arts in the period 1930-1950 is a perfect example. The percent of the public that wanted that change would probably round down to zero percent; it was pushed from the top down by very small but persistent groups of intellectuals and rich people. Modernism itself is the name we give to this sort of social engineering.
(A great deal of planning went into making Europe Christian, developing a free-market finance system, creating a scientific revolution, etc. But if that planning was not done with utilitarian ethics, and the objective of producing a better society with multi-generational stability, it can be seen as random from the perspective of engineering, and that development gets treated as organic, evolved.)
Brexit was a reaction against a top-down re-engineering of Europe, /because/ it was a re-engineering rather than an organic development. My theory would predict that the EU made Europe more-vulnerable to large-scale catastrophes, on account of being engineered based on a democratic process which was inherently incapable either of understanding the system sufficiently to do the job, or of doing mathematically correct risk analysis. But I haven't studied the EU, and don't claim that is in fact the case.
Please translate so that my pea brain can understand.
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
This pattern ("cycling of Empires") was explained to me as a result of the geometry of the Ancient State. The Ancient State was comprised of a small military elite that leveraged its monopoly access to the weapons of war--swords, armor, horses--the supply of which was highly constrained, in order to extract tribute from a relatively defenseless, mostly peasant, frontier. Picture a circle, centered around the capitol--which serves as headquarters--expanding over time.
The frontier (the circumference of the circle) expands linearly with time, but the body of the empire (the area of the circle) expands quadratically. The empire must expand over time in order to extract greater tribute to reward its military nucleus, but that profit will eventually be eclipsed by the more rapidly growing upkeep costs of ruling over a larger and larger area. Eventually the costs overwhelm the benefits, leading to schismatic disorder, which sets the table for a new military elite to overthrow the establishment and redirect military largess toward THEIR newly formed capitol.
The logic of civilizational expansion is supposed to have transformed at some point following the Enlightenment, when the growth of empires was no longer fueled by tribute consumption (too dangerous) and their stability was no longer threatened by prohibitive upkeep costs (law enforcement efficiencies). From this hypothetical point forward the growth, stasis and regression of empires is best explained by conflicts over regime security.
My mental model of this is a free energy landscape. A growing civilization is climbing a hill, which is naturally slow. A declining civilization is rolling down one, which is naturally fast. The growing civ is presumably expending *something* to achieve the climb, which may or may not be getting replenished by the expansion itself. As soon as it isn't, that something becomes less and less available, until the climb can no longer be sustained.
For me the key question is, is there an island of (meta)stability anywhere that a culture can sit in? Some sufficiently large shock can of course disturb such an island. But I believe based on history that there is such an island around the level of a city-state. I suspect on principle that there should be such an island around the level of a world government. Anything in between, not so much.
I feel like 'culture' and 'rot' are underspecified in this post. Usually "cultural rot" gets used in a post hoc-ish way of "I'll label parts of their culture I didn't like decadence." But look how many self-described periods of "decadence" we've had within the last 200 years, but from a macro perspective it's just been a roughly constant growth. If we ever do "fall", future historians will no doubt be able to identify the most recent self-described period of "decadence," call it cultural rot, and blame the fall on it... but why didn't the Greed is Good 80s, Roaring Twenties or Gilded Age or Regency Period (all ages that people associate with gambling/vice/luxury) make us fall?
Maybe there's a great deal of ruin in a culture.
Your model:
good culture --> innovation --> growth
bad culture --> stable/poor
But a couple things that seems to be missing. One, it should be more of a feedback loop: innovation and growth positively evolve culture in that it's much easier to have an 'innovative' culture when the pie is expanding; if you assume the growth is exogenous, stable and shrinking pie causes lots of deadweight-causing factional fighting on how to slice it, whereas expanding pie keeps infighting and deadweight loss to a minimum.
And second, the admittedly also underspecified 'institutions' needs to be in the loop. Lots of examples of how a people, presumably with similar cultural values, suddenly put into a place with new institutions and suddenly they're rising (or falling).
culture --> institutions --> economic growth/decline/stable --> culture
Seems like a more complete model. And then it probably takes multiple cycles of success to really get a "rise" civilization; and likely multiple rounds of failure to get a "fall" civilization.
"Why do civs rise and fall?"
I believe the reason is that growth and maintenance require different culture and technology. We can see this today. After centuries of industrial growth, we find it difficult to adapt to a new economic regime that does not require to continue growth (with exponentially increasing negative externalities) and instead focusses on maintaining the wealth we acquired.
Negative externalities aren't exponentially increasing. We are rich enough to mitigate externalities in ways we weren't when we were poorer. But the people J. Storrs Hall dubs "Eloi" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/elois-ate-your-flying-carhtml believe in such externalities anyway and oppose growth, even/especially for things like nuclear power that are cleaner than the power sources it would substitute for.
"Negative externalities aren't exponentially increasing" You are saying this, but I dont think we even measure them. In fact that is part of the problem. We are stuck in an old-growth paradigm. Part of what that means is that we do not measure the increasingly important negative externalities.
Every form of pollution that I can think of except for estrogen mimics, questionably toxic microplastics, and questionably toxic solar power panels has declined dramatically in the US over the past 50 years. Leaded gas and paint, cigarette smoke, coal burning, lake Erie, mercury in fish, acid rain, ozone depletion, DDT, water cleanliness, I could go on. We measure these things much much more than we did 50 years ago. My town's water's purity is tested every 3 months, and I bet it was never tested before 1980.
Similarly, smog has virtually disappeared from Los Angeles over my lifetime.
People are living much longer than they were before. The big health problem had been obesity, but now semaglutides appear to be solving that. If negative externalities were exponentially increasing, how would that be the case?
The infographic seems misleading - in that there were around 40 times fewer people around 2KY ago. That's not what the picture shows at all. The main story over that timescale is one of enormous growth and expansion of the human realm. Bear in mind that - where the infographic shows decline, it is likely to be just slightly slower expansion than usual.
"But there’s also something about about low wealth and scale that tends to heal cultures, and so plausibly also something about high wealth and scale that tends to hurt cultures."
I think the second part of this: something about high wealth/scale that is bad for cultures is plausible from this. But the first part: something about low wealth/scale that is good for cultures may just be selection effect. You point out that the 'Before' period is based on selection effects, because we are picking out eras that lead to great Civs. But it seems to me the After period may also be a selection effect. If a Civ falls and growth doesn't switch from 'falling' to 'stable', even after wealth and scale are both 'poor' and 'split', the culture just disappears, and isn't there any more for us to observe.
I usually see this issue framed as "senescence". We have a science of senescence. I don't think the practitioners frequently use the term "rot". If they want a less-esoteric sounding name they typically use the term "aging". Aside from brevity, I am not sure about the benefits of using the term "rot". The main effect seems to be to detach from the existing science and literature on the topic - much of which seems relevant to me. In particular, we know that senescence is caused partly by the accumulation of persistent parasites and partly by unmaintained damage. Maintenance competes for resources with the production of offspring. As an example of work in the area, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and_longevity
why don't cities rot in the same way? (many examples of cities that stay significant for millenia)
is it that cities aren't 'cultural' in the same way that civs are? or are city cultures significantly more robust / resistant to rot than nation/imperial level cultures?
Not everything ages at the same rate. See giant redwood trees. Or more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence
Am I crazy or does the second paragraph only have three steps?
It has four steps.
The insight about culture being upstream of civilization is a good one. Low wealth and scale can be good for culture, but with one caveat - the cultural foundation has to have the right elements to support civilization in the first place. (There are plenty of small and poor societies that just stay small and poor because they lack necessary elements to support scale.) So it’s a good observation with relation to the decline period.
What this model is missing is the economic engine to drive the civilization. I like Carroll Quigley’s model in Evolution of Civilizations. Yes, you need a culture that can support growth, and this culture will determine what the civilization becomes when it expands. Within this culture there arises an economic engine for wealth accumulation. As a minority accumulate wealth, there are surpluses available for defense and conquests. The elite want cool stuff, so the arts and other economic specialization expand. People flock to be part of the shining cultural experience and for economic opportunity. Later on, entrenched interests grab hold of the good things and milk them for their own profits rather than allowing further real progress. The civilization stagnates. The principal economic engine becomes a hindrance to progress rather than an engine. The civ is still extremely wealthy, but there are cracks in the foundation. This era would be called the Golden Age before the decay becomes obvious. Then usually peripheral parts of the civ (more recently prosperous but not yet decadent) see the softness in the middle and vie for the prize, causing instability. Either a peripheral part will take control or an external force will see the internal conflict and swoop in. In the former case it can be possible to reform the civ, find a new economic engine, and continue progress. That is rare. Sometimes, like Byzantium or Egypt, there are no nearby rivals capable of conquering, so the internally crippled civ can last a thousand years. Other times a neighbor will crush it right away.
In this graphic, are these civilizations or polities? For example, the Persian Empire vanished at the hands of Alexander the Great, but Persian culture still seems to be around. Did Greek civilization suddenly vanish when the Romans conquered?
Did Persian civilization suddenly decline, or did it just lose a few critical battles to Alexander the Great? Would we be talking about the decline of Persian civilization if he'd only been Alexander the Pretty Great?
> This seems analogous to the known pattern for corporate cultures today, which tend to consistently go bad, causing firms to go broke, even when strongly incentivized CEOs try hard to prevent that decline.
I'm skeptical that "culture" is a good explanation for why firms go broke. It's a pretty vague term. What specific elements of corporate culture are you holding responsible for the failures? Does it extend to bad decisions on the part of management, investing in the wrong thing or failing to invest in the right thing? That's what most often causes firms to fail. I don't think I'd call that "culture."
I think the typical story that would be blamed on corporate culture going bad, is that initially the founders and early employees put in extraordinary effort to make the company work, because they had substantial equity in the company and were gambling on the future payoff. Then, later hired workers did not have substantial equity and were there for a stable paycheck, and therefore had a more normal work-life balance, and therefore were not as productive. I don't think this is really corporate culture going bad, I think this is just that you get what you pay for. It's not reasonable to expect normal employees to work extraordinary hours for ordinary pay.