tldr: Civilization should collapse some time around 2030.
But maybe a point of no return would be harder to detect. Like health is improving but resources are dropping to unrecoverable levels.
If you think we’re in a setback, decline, etc., maybe, but when I think collapse, I think a “Guns, Germs & Steel” / Easter Island type event.
From Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse
Here’s the definition:
> the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence
And it isn’t usually a slow process:
> Societal collapse is generally quick
So for Western civilization or the US to truly collapse it means a complete loss of cultural identity, destruction of the economy, no government and tons of violence.
Even war torn countries rarely collapse because even if the government is removed, violence spikes and the economy stops working the people can still maintain a sense of common shared culture and identity and avoid collapse. I guess it becomes more of a rebirth or evolution at that point.
I think a lot of people see 1 sign of collapse and think it’s a collapse, but it’s actually just a decline or an oscillation.
Collapse includes decline but decline doesn't necessarily lead to collapse. That said, collapse is really just decline that happened too fast. Decline appears to be caused by a handful of factors. In the event that too many factors are in play at once collapse becomes inevitable.
You could say the the US / Western civilization is the rebirth of the Roman Empire (Rome 2.0). If you look at the historical accounting of the [1] Roman collapse it is frighteningly similar to the issues US is facing at the moment.
However, it is possible that societies are doomed to the 4 stages of [2] Strauss-Howe generational theory of cyclical repetitions with an inability to ever break free of it.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Demographi... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...
A much longer time frame will be required to determine if life is improving over time for people or not. Possibly on the scale of generations.
How have education outcomes changed past 18 months? What about specifically to the 95th percentile most/least deprived?
How have health outcomes changed past 18 months? What about the quantiles?
How have financial plans been affected past 18 months? How much worse off are those who already weren't that well off?
How have climate change outcomes changed past 18 months? Will the recent climate action drive meaningful outcomes or is it another power/cash-grab with social utility you gotta search for?
What will be the cumulative effect of all this on people's willingness to introduce human life to the planet?
Human reproductive potential has been steadily declining for something like a century. Have the past 18 months been more of the usual or has the gradient been steeper? How significant of a fertility rate decline can the economic system tolerate be
Basically what I'm trying to say is: as the mean changes, how are the tail ends affected? Is the tail end activity contributing to some kind of feedback loop?
For us elites life is still somewhat good, but the dominos are falling and we just haven’t been hit yet.
Well then it clearly isn't.
Outside rich Western countries life is - on average - getting better. For every disaster like Syria there is are multiple quiet successes across the poorer parts of the world where millions of people get measurably better by 5 or 10%.
Eg, in Nigeria, where between 2009 and 2019 average life expectancy increased by over 4 years.
In other words, expect to see some things getting better while other things we've long taken for granted get worse. It all gets much patchier, the interdependencies more fragile, more brittle, until, quite suddenly, collapse is upon us. So at the same time as we're getting better network connectivity, the electricity supply is more erratic, prone to unexpected failures. Just as we're getting better vaccines, postal service is coming apart. And so on. And it's different kinds of patchiness in different parts of the globe, and the more tightly we interdepend different geographies, the more sudden and weirdly perplexing the failure modes manifest. Container shipping, anyone?
It's a process, not a single inflexion point. Only somewhere deep in the future will historians put a stick in the ground and say, "There. That was where the collapse was undeniably evident."
That could be a consequence of absurdly inflated sugar intake (without adequate fiber) causing Metabolic Syndrome that causes a host of different acute, often enough fatal ills.
But persuading Americans to ditch sugar and eat more fat will be a hard sell after so much propaganda against the has spilled.