Not Dealing With Wealth Inequality Could Collapse Civilization
Wealth inequality has been involved in every collapse for the last 5,000 years.
It’s very easy to point at billionaires and say, “There! There is the cause of our pain, suffering, and poverty; our lack of a sweet ride, a swank crib, and steak instead of beans for supper.” It’s also hard to really prove that’s the case, and so it comes off as kind of whiny and sour grapes-ish because of that. Maybe that’s why Occupy Wall Street sort of petered out.
But in the back of your mind is that feeling, that gut-induced intuition telling you it makes sense. If that gut feeling comes from having missed a meal or two, you may be cheered to know there are some studies that show a correlation between inequality and the fall of civilizations. Sorry it’s only mental nourishment, not vindication for going out and starting to loot just yet.
Funded by NASA, “Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies” came out in the May 2014 issue of Ecological Economics. The authors took a well known biological/ecological model known as the “predator-prey model” and applied it to human civilizations setting the humans as predator and planetary resources as prey and introduced a couple of new…
