{"id":62888,"date":"2022-06-15T06:12:13","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T11:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62888"},"modified":"2022-06-15T06:12:13","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T11:12:13","slug":"this-is-how-civilisations-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62888","title":{"rendered":"This is how civilisations collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"page\" class=\"site\">\n<div id=\"wrapper-navbar\" class=\"\">\n<nav class=\"navbar navbar-expand-md navbar-dark \">\n<div class=\"container-fluid\">\n<div class=\"col-sm-4 col-4\">\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/nav>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"single-wrapper\">\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"container-fluid\">\n<div class=\"row\"><main id=\"main\" class=\"site-main\"><\/p>\n<article id=\"post-269458\" class=\"post-269458 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-uncategorized tag-america tag-ancient-rome tag-apocalypse tag-civilisation tag-civilisational-collapse tag-dont-miss tag-economy tag-globalism tag-neoliberalism tag-rome tag-supply-chains tag-trade tag-united-states section-analysis theme-global-affairs\">\n<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<div class=\"row\">\n<div class=\"col-sm-4\">\n<div class=\"metabox\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/unherd.com\/2021\/11\/this-is-how-civilisations-collapse\/?=frlh\">This is how civilisations collapse<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"col-sm-8\">\n<div class=\"article-image\">\n<div class=\"featured_caption\">Last week, in an attempt to explain away the supply chain woes that are increasingly leading to goods shortages in America, President Biden cited<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/I,_Pencil\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u00a0a popular neoliberal fable<\/a>. He<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ABCPolitics\/status\/1458555757616631809\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0that to make a pencil, wood and graphite must be sourced from the other ends of the world before the finished product can end up in American hands. \u201cIt sounds silly, but that\u2019s exactly how it happens,\u201d Biden mused, \u201cthat\u2019s just the nature of the modern economy.\u201d But the result, he added, is that \u201cwhen global disruptions hit\u2026 it can hit supply chains particularly hard\u201d.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"article-body container-fluid\">\n<div class=\"row\">\n<div class=\"col-sm-9 col-lg-6 \">\n<div class=\"pianocontentwrapper\">\n<p>For neoliberal ideologues such as Milton Friedman, who\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">used the pencil fable<\/a>\u00a0to argue for opaque world-spanning supply chains, the beauty of such complex systems is not only that the consumer obtains his product at the lowest price possible, and that the producer can maximise his profits, \u201cbut even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world\u201d.\u00a0As the historian Quinn Slobodian noted in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979529\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>Globalists<\/i><\/a>, his recent study of the first neoliberal theorists, such idealistic motivations were evident from the very start. Ignoring the fact that the globalised world of the late 19th century failed to prevent World War One, they believed that creating a giant interconnected market would make a repeat of such a cataclysm impossible.<\/p>\n<p>They were wrong. Instead, the restructuring of the global economy into a large web vastly increases the risk of<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u00a0a total system collapse<\/a>. Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. A war in distant Taiwan can mean<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/may\/19\/chips-with-everything-how-one-taiwanese-company-drives-the-world-economy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u00a0you\u2019re no longer able to buy a new car<\/a>; a drought on the other end of the world<a href=\"https:\/\/www.brinknews.com\/global-food-supply-chains-are-being-overwhelmed\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u00a0means empty shelves at home<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<p><\/main><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is how civilisations collapse Last week, in an attempt to explain away the supply chain woes that are increasingly leading to goods shortages in America, President Biden cited\u00a0a popular neoliberal fable. He\u00a0observed\u00a0that to make a pencil, wood and graphite must be sourced from the other ends of the world before the finished product can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,5,7],"tags":[32965,150,154,5055,5326,4651,26505,805,20539],"class_list":["post-62888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","category-geopolitics","category-survival-2","tag-aris-roussinos","tag-collapse","tag-complexity","tag-dependency","tag-fragility","tag-globalisation","tag-sociopolitical-collapse","tag-trade","tag-unherd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62889,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62888\/revisions\/62889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}