The Financial Times reported that heatwaves have impacted Europe’s potato crop: https://www.ft.com/content/8eda412f-caed-4b31-bdee-b76fc9f3ba82?syn-25a6b1a6=1 (Now a paywalled article)
Iran: Drought & Over-Extraction of Water, Coupled with Accelerating Global Climate Heating, already written about on this blog. The riots were about shortages. They were ordinary people rioting about shortages of water and food. Climate change is increasingly becoming the main driver of rising food costs. Climateflation: How Climate Change Is Now the Primary Driver of Food Prices. According to economists, rising oil, diesel, and fertilizer prices are driving up costs. “Climateflation is the process by which society’s climate interface, including the causes of climate change, its consequences, and efforts to address it, influences prices.” We are no longer on the cusp of a global food crisis. We are in the midst of a climate change-driven agricultural collapse, but it isn’t driving a civilization or societal collapse yet, and it probably won’t.
1600 year ago, the Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD; it wasn’t a sudden cliff where civilization vanished overnight. Instead, it was a long, messy, and complicated transformation. The term “collapse,” used to describe the disappearance of civilizations, is increasingly being recognized as inaccurate. Few civilizations go off a cliff edge due to despotism, corruption, over-complexity, and failing harvests. War, genocide, and catastrophic natural disasters (Earthquakes and Tsunamis) have historically pushed city-state civilizations off the cliff. But a large interconnected civilization like this one, like Rome, was?
Large, interconnected, technologically advanced civilizations don’t collapse; they adjust. Countries on the peripheries, labeled as failed states, including Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti, have remittance economies that represent a resilient source of non-debt foreign capital. They consistently outpace the combined total of foreign direct investment (FDI) and Official Development Assistance (ODA). In the world’s most severe Fragile and Conflict-Affected States (FCS), migrant and diaspora transfers have transcended their role as simple financial gifts. They form the literal macroeconomic foundation for recipients’ survival and engagement in the local economy. Not only do migrant, refugee, and diaspora populations benefit the countries from which they originate, but they also contribute to the countries that welcome them by taking on roles that the local population rejects and by paying taxes. Furthermore, the engagement of migrant, refugee, and diaspora populations in Vocational Education acts as a powerful engine for upward mobility and integration. For many newcomers, traditional academic pathways are blocked by credential recognition issues, language barriers, or immediate economic pressures. Vocational education and training (VET) offers a practical, faster route to meaningful employment and financial independence.
The notion of failed states, however, is not even. For example, the remittance economy is also dependent on mobile data, and mobile phone digital and mobile money transfers have made sending money across borders faster and cheaper, but this ties the entire process directly to stable internet and mobile data access. When mobile data fails or costs too much, families risk losing immediate access to vital funds. Countries like Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have widespread usage, intense provider competition, and relative stability. The shift away from line-based infrastructure has improved communications. Multiple operators have entered an empty market with low levels of regulatory structuring and state-controlled licensing.
It would probably be a surprise to know that 1 GB of Mobile data is cheaper in many “failed states” than it is in industrialized countries:
- Syria: 1 GB costs approximately $0.01 to $0.67 USD
- Somalia: 1 GB costs approximately $0.50 USD
- Sudan: 1 GB costs approximately $0.27 to $0.63 USD
- Democratic Republic of the Congo: 1 GB costs approximately $0.52 to $2.00 USD
- Rwanda: 1 GB costs approximately $0.55 USD
War is the primary impact on cost due to the fragmentation of the cellular data infrastructure:
- South Sudan: 1 GB costs approximately $23.70 USD
- Yemen: 1 GB costs approximately $15.68 USD
- Syria: 1 GB costs approximately $2.00 to $5.00 USD
Compared with Industrialised countries:
- United States: 1 GB costs approximately $6.00 USD
- UK: 1 GB costs approximately £3.00 to £6.00
- France: 1 GB costs approximately $0.15 to $0.20 USD
- Apart from Israel: 1 GB costs approximately $0.02 USD
Platforms like M-Pesa and carrier-integrated mobile wallets process massive transaction volumes, encouraging providers to keep base data costs affordable to keep users active on their networks. While the raw per-GB dollar cost is low, data can still consume a high percentage of local average monthly earnings, meaning it is “cheap” by international comparison but represents a meaningful expense for everyday citizens. Mobile data for internet use is not consumed in the same way as in the industrialized North. But the competitive pricing reflects lower levels of state regulation and laissez-faire economic conditions. Mass uptake is a direct response to the international remittance economy.
Capitalism doesn’t collapse; it adjusts. It expands and contracts with the market or with the availability of a means to exchange goods and services for currency. For capitalism to flourish, a stable state is required. In the absence of a stable state, the primary driver is the need for a means of exchange for goods and services. The remittance economy’s reliance on mobile-based international money transfers is a novel financial market in which mobile data, taxes, commissions, and local taxation interact across digital/physical worlds. This phygital-financial interactivity is an example of how humans survive localized collapse in the 21st century.
The fall of Rome wasn’t a catastrophic cliff that the entire empire plummeted off. It was a decline and shrinkage of the empire. In the Western Empire, on September 4, 476 AD, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Chieftain Odoacer did not want to destroy Rome; instead, he sought to preserve and emulate its political structure and culture. He did not declare himself emperor. Instead, he recognized the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople as the sole ruler of the empire and ruled Italy as a patrician and king. He preserved the Senate, maintaining its privileges, prestige, and administrative roles; he left the existing legal, judicial, and tax systems intact; he continued to appoint traditional Roman aristocrats to high government positions; his administration issued coins featuring his own image, styled strictly in the traditional imperial Roman fashion. With a little consolidation among 3 chieftains, the Empire remains Romanish in flavor but considerably poorer and in permanent decline.
People often date the birth of capitalism to within the past 300 years, but I would suggest the signal for capitalism is far older. The Roman Empire was an example of how every aspect of trade was taxed, and these taxes made the empire wealthy. Taxation is profit or surplus; the foundations of capitalism are in a 2000 year old culture that killed its prisoners for entertainment, traded in millions of slaves daily, and pursued conquest through war followed by trade. This model is no different from the foundations of the Dutch and British East India Companies. What they produced was a civilization large enough not to collapse catastrophically, but to break down into a simpler human-scale economy.
The simplification of the Roman Empire meant that key technologies were lost or became impossible to copy
- Large-scale state with taxation wealth: The specific formula for ultra-durable, waterproof concrete—especially the kind that set underwater using specific volcanic ash—largely fell out of use in Western Europe for centuries because the trade networks to source the materials and fund massive marine structures vanished
- Advanced Glassmaking: Masterpieces like the Portland Vase featured intricate layered cameo glass and precise colorants. These required long-distance trade for rare minerals and specialized workshops that the post-Roman economy couldn’t sustain
- Hypocausts (Central Heating): The complex under-floor heating systems used in public baths and wealthy villas required precise architectural dimensions and constant supervision, making them impractical for smaller medieval lifestyles
- Industrial-Scale Watermills: Sophisticated milling complexes (such as Barbegal in France) used intricate gear trains and vertical wheels to grind grain by the ton for massive urban populations and garrisons. With cities shrinking, local communities returned to smaller grinding methods
- Water Infrastructure: Aqueducts, piped water, and water treatment.
- Written records of the movement of goods: a written language based on trade, with ledgers recording goods and their value. While writing didn’t vanish, Germanic tribes did have runes, and Proto-Germanic and Proto-Norse were written languages. Latin almost vanished, but not for the church.
- Mining and smelting metals at scale, and feeding them into an industrial production system, ceased.
The simplification took over 1,500 years to recover from and required organizations capable of generating and holding wealth. The Templars developed an advanced banking system and letters of credit that used a secret cipher to prevent fraud. The heavily armed order of warrior monks, charged with protecting pilgrims, soon began protecting pilgrims’ wealth and later kings’. Their wealth allowed for technological advancement. At one point, London’s grain and flour were milled and taxed by the Templars in their tide mills moored along the Thames Wharf near Blackfriars Bridge.
When writer Sarah Wilson argues that we’re hurtling toward the same end as ancient Rome and the Mayan civilization — but that there’s plenty to fight for — I am trying to understand what she means. Oh yes, the Hollywood version of collapse. You know what I mean, Channel 4 Apocalypse. We wake up, and it’s…
Just like that, capitalism ended. You gotta go and fend for yourselves, and it looks like a scene from The Road. I Eat The Stars. “This is not just about the climate, but civilization buckling under the weight of its own complexity. Given worsening inequality, political polarisation, falling fertility, resource shortages and global conflicts, Wilson argues that we are hurtling towards the same end as ancient Rome.” The Guardian. The case for Rome’s collapse being a simplification, and for the transfer of power away from Rome and into the hands of petty Germanic chieftains who admired Rome and sought to emulate the power they perceived without its complex technology, is increasingly the view of most historians.
“What I do is feel what people are thinking and wrangling with internally, but hasn’t yet been expressed as a public narrative. My dad says: “If there’s an elephant in the room, Sarah will just scream it out.” I’m not claiming to be the expert – I’m just bringing the complex science into the public realm.” The Guardian: This is definitely a public narrative, and “collapse” has become the most overused term, while its mechanisms in complex societies are poorly understood. “A civilization is a complex system of complex systems. Eventually all complex systems, without exception throughout history, have collapsed under the weight of their complexity.” The Guardian. This is untrue; it’s simplistic, and it is easy to see why many historians and thinkers—like Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies—argue that excessive complexity, bureaucracy, and diminishing returns doom civilizations. However, looking closer at historical “collapses” reveals that societies rarely vanish; instead, they undergo simplification, followed by the shedding of bureaucratic structures that no longer serve a purpose. The evidence shows that the Roman Empire not only simplified but also underwent a series of transformations and fragmentations, rather than ending in a single moment of catastrophic non-existence.
“I think we are in a liminal moment: we know the present setup can’t hold, but we don’t know what’s going to come next.” The Guardian
I listened to Sarah Wilson on Nate Hagens’s podcast, The Great Simplification. I’m not sure she is as sure about the future as she claims: “We are between an old world and a new world which is yet to be born. So the opportunity is to get the better ideas, the more life-generating ideas.“Sarah Wilson & Nate Hagens: At no point do Hagens or Wilson discuss how 1.5C represents the loss of the Goldilocks climate niche for Agriculture. “That liminal moment” is the loss of 12,000 years of climate in which agriculture flourished.
There is a desperation to be optimistic. It’s far easier to rearrange the deckchairs on a sinking ship and pretend everything is fine than to face the fact that we are severely underskilled for the world we face post 1.5C. Post-1.5C is both a simplification and a depopulation on an unprecedented scale, as the global elites emigrate to Mars or New Zealand to die in bunkers of rocket ships; it doesn’t matter which. The rest of us are left with economies addicted to oil and a system rigged to protect it with armed force if necessary. The one thing I can say has been forever useful is the foundations of Marxism to inform my anarcho-primativist view of the world we are up against. I say this because it is missing from Green Party rhetoric about the future: Imagine thinking the old system is just going to die, and we can build a new world in the shell of the old. When 1% are gone, they will leave their loyal middle managers, armies, navies, and air forces to protect the wealth-generating machine that eats the earth.
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