Interesting read on societal collapse and where we are at now. ( from a NASA research group ) Researchers developed a relatively simple formula with four factors influencing social collapse: nature and natural resources, the accumulation of wealth, the elite and the commoners. The team calls their model Human And Nature Dynamics, or HANDY. A HANDY tool The researchers used the HANDY model to analyze three different social scenarios: an egalitarian society with no elite class; an equitable society with workers and non-workers (students, retirees, disabled persons); and an unequal society with a robust class of elites. The egalitarian and equitable societies could produce a sustainable civilization and avoid collapse, even with a high ratio of non-workers. Social collapse was more likely after people overreached and depleted natural resources. Importantly, even without any social stratification, collapse could occur if a society exhausted its natural resources. In the unequal society, however, collapse was almost unavoidable and these were the HANDY scenarios that mirrored our current globalized society. The income gap The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments, where we introduced economic stratification, the researchers wrote, referring to uneven wealth distribution. Under such conditions, we find that collapse is difficult to avoid. Other recent research backs up the authors claims: A 2012 study from the journal American Sociological Review shows that the income share of the top 1 percent of Americans grew rapidly after 1980 from 10 percent in 1981 to 23.5 percent in 2007, an increase of 135 percentage points. Meanwhile, the bottom three-quarters of the U.S. population has seen slow economic growth, with predictable results: A 2011 study published in the journal Psychological Science found that happiness, trust in others and life satisfaction plummet when income inequality is high.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 20:17:29 +0000
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