The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. I call this tendency the "Seneca Effect."

Monday, July 15, 2013

The punctuated collapse of the Roman Empire

originally published on "Cassandra's Legacy" on Monday, July 15, 2013


I defined as the "Seneca Cliff" the tendency of some systems to collapse after having peaked. Here I start from some considerations about whether the collapse could be smooth or an uneven process that we could define as "punctuated." I am taking the Roman Empire as an example and showing that it did decline much faster than it grew. But the decline was surely far from smooth. 

The idea of an impending collapse of our civilization is already bad enough in itself, but it has this little extra-twist that collapse may be given more speed by what I called the "Seneca Cliff," from the words of the Roman Philosopher who had noted first that, "Fortune is slow, but ruin is rapid". The concept of the Seneca Cliff seems to have gained some traction over the Web and many people have been discussing it. Recently, I found an interesting comment on this pointby Jason Heppenstall on his blog "22 billion energy slaves". He summarizes the debate as:

"In the fast-collapse camp are the likes of Dmitry Orlov (who bases his assessment on his experience of seeing the USSR implode) and Ugo Bardi, who expects a ‘Seneca’s Cliff’ dropoff. James Kunstler, Michael Ruppert and any number of others can probably also be added to the fast-collapse camp.

By comparison, the likes of John Michael Greer reckon we are in for a drawn-out era of terminal decline punctuated by serious crises which, at the time, will seem rather severe to all involved but which will give way to plateaux of relative stability, albeit at a lower level of energy throughput."

Actually, the two camps may not be in such a radical disagreement with each other as they are described. The idea of the fast (or Seneca-like) collapse does not necessarily mean that collapse will be continuous or smooth. The model that describes the Seneca effect does give that kind of output, but models are - as usual - just approximations. The real world may follow the curve in a series of "bumps" that will give an impression of recovery to the people who will experience the painful descent period.

So, collapse may very well be "punctuated: a series of periods of temporary stability, separated by severe crashes. But it may still be much faster than the previous growth had been. I discussed this point already in my first post on the Seneca Effect, but let me return on this subject and let me consider one of the best known cases of societal collapse: that of the Roman Empire.

First of all: some qualitative considerations. Rome's foundation goes back to 753 BC; the end of the Western Empire is usually taken as 476 AD, with the dethroning of the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustus. Now, in between these two dates, a time span of more than 1200 years, the Empire peaked. When was that?

The answer depends on which parameter we are considering but it seems clear that, whatever choice we make, the peak was not midway - it was much later. The Empire was still strong and powerful during the 2nd century AD and we might take the age of Emperor Trajan as the peak (he died in 117 AD) as "peak empire." We may also note that up to the time of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (who died in 180 AD), the empire didn't show evident signs of weakness, so we could take the peak as occurring in mid or late 2nd century AD. In the end, the exact date doesn't matter: the Empire took around 900 years to go from the foundation of Rome to the 2nd century peak. Then, it took just 400 years - probably less than that - for the Empire to wither and disappear. An asymmetric, Seneca-like collapse, indeed.

We also have some quantitative data on the Empire's cycle. For instance, look at this image from Wikipedia.





It shows the size of the Roman military over the Empire's span of existence. WIth all the uncertainties involved, also this image shows a typical "Seneca" shape for both the Western and the Eastern parts of the Empire. Decline is faster than growth, indeed.

There are other indicators that we can consider about the collapse of the Roman Empire. In many cases, we don't have sufficient data to say much, but in some, we can say that collapse was, indeed, abrupt. For instance, you can give a look to a well known image taken from Joseph Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex Societies"



The figure shows the content of silver in the Roman "denarius" which by the 3rd century AD, had become pure copper. Note how the decline starts slow, but then goes on faster and faster. Seneca himself would have understood this phenomenon very well.


So, the Roman Empire seems to have been hit by a "Seneca collapse" and that tells us that the occurrence of this kind of rapid decline may be commonplace for the entities we call "civilizations" or "empires".

It is also true, however, that the Roman collapse was far from being smooth. It went through periods of apparent stability, interrupted by periods of extremely fast descent. The chroniclers of the time described these periods of crisis, but none of them seem to have connected the dots: they never saw that each crisis was linked to the preceding one and leading to the next one. Punctuated collapse seemed to be invisible to the ancient Romans, just as it is for us, today.


Wednesday, March 13, 2013

The World is a Fountain

Originally published on Cassandra's legacy Wednesday, March 13, 2013



The world is complex, variegated, convoluted, multi-faceted, interconnected, complicated, circuitous, and more. And, yet, there is a logic in the way it works.

Look at the Trevi Fountain, in Rome, it is complex and variegated, but in the end there is a logic: water always goes down. It is physics: it is the gravitational potential that makes water move.

The same is true for the whole world. Lot's of things are going on, but there is a logic: energy goes down, it degrades, it is a chemical potential driven by the second law of thermodynamics.

So, no matter how complicated the Trevi Fountain is, water always goes down. No matter how complicated is the world, chemical potentials always "go down."

This is the idea at the basis of the paper that I published in "Sustainability", titled "Mind-Sized World Models." as part of a special issue dedicated to the 40th anniversary of "The Limits to Growth"

The term "mind-sized" comes from the ideas of Seymour Papert, who said that models should be simple enough to be understandable, if one has to act on them. On the basis of this idea, I tried to put together simple, "mind-sized", models which can still tell us something of the way the world works. World Models, in short.

So, I build these models as if they were multi-level fountains, one basin, two basins, three basins, and more.




Each basin represents a stock of energy, which is dissipated in steps, going from top to bottom (in energy terms). It is a concept that I already described in a post of mine titled "Entropy, Peak Oil, and Stoic Phylosophy" but that now I examined more in depth.

Now, imagine a multi-level fountain; imagine that it is dry at start. Then put some water in the top basin. It will go down, step by step, until it reach the bottom basin, and then disappear falling on the ground. It is, in the end, what we have been doing with fossil fuels; burning them until they disappear as they become atmospheric pollution.

Here is the model for the "three-level" fountain. It is the one that gives rise to the "Seneca Effect" (When things go wrong, they go wrong fast)


This is the model that originates the "Seneca Cliff" that we may also call "collapse" and that we may experience at some moment in the future.



My paper in "Sustainability" is "open access". Here is the link

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Seneca's cliff goes iPad



originally published on Cassandra's Legacy on Wednesday, June 13, 2012


My post on the "Seneca cliff" has inspired Hannes Rollin to create an App for the iPad that can be used for running the model for different input parameters. I must confess that I don't own an iPad, so I can't test the model, but it seems to me a very interesting idea. So, here is the story, with many thanks for Hannes for his interest in my work.

Guest post by Hannes Rollin

Many of you who are reading this post may be familiar with one or the other of Ugo Bardi's mind-sized models, where he employs system dynamics to illustrate fundamental economic and natural processes in a general way. The model which impressed me the most was the one Ugo called Seneca's Cliff – a very simple model capable of generating an economic decline much faster than previous growth had been, a fact already remarked by Seneca. Hence the name.

I give you a quick summary of the model. You have three stocks (imagine them as containers), namely Resources, Economy and Pollution. Now, a given fraction of Resources is extracted and used to run the Economy. Subsequently, a fraction of the Economy spawns Pollution. The flow is furthermore dependent upon degradation or restoration (negative degradation) of each stock. If you ever asked yourself where the nice curves come from, here is the answer: The content of the stocks is plotted against time.

Ugo tweaked the parameters to give a Resource depletion and Economic activity curve very similar to one of the more famous outputs of the WORLD3 model of the Limits to Growth team. I have set this result as the default settings of the iPad app.


The interesting thing is that the model can evolve scenarios quite distinct from the standard run above. If you model a renewable Resource stock with negative resource loss rate, you get a (potentially infinite) sequence of boom-and-bust cycles similar to H.T. Odum's simulation of locust pests.



Although this run looks catastrophic as well with long periods of almost zero economic activity, it already maintains two highly optimistic assumptions: First, resources are strictly renewable no matter how much strained, and second, that pollution (gray), which spikes sharply according to the initial economic peak, is handled completely by natural self-repair.

It is even possible to create something like a steady-state economy, a slightly meandering stream of low but positive activity. When you play with the app, however, you will see that combinations of parameters leading to such favorable circumstances are hard to find, and the solution is highly unstable – wiggle any slider in any direction, and you are quickly back to extinction or boom-and-bust.


Note that in this run high growth is followed by rapid decline and finally zero
growth (brown). The steadiness of the Economy has its price: economic activity is pretty low compared to the once-in-a-lifetime peak at the beginning, and the Resource stock never again reaches its initial wealth due to continual harvesting. The are many more scenarios this simply excellent model can provide, for instance two or three consecutive peaks of activity, increasing or decreasing, followed by die-off (stable solution) or steadiness (unstable solution).

As an apology, I am certainly aware of the irony of porting a model for the simulation of economic decline to the flagship of techno-narcissistic consumerism, klickibunti self-distraction, and perpetual remote controlling of human resources. But, you know, the spirit speaks in many tongues. There is certainly something to gain by playing with the model rather than merely studying formulas or staring at static graphs. Just like the Pythagoreans presumably played with pebbles to gain a feeling for the relation between triangles and squares, you may develop a feeling for the precariousness of stability and, perhaps, understand how inevitable and fierce a destiny is able to fulfill itself.

This said, I would only wish to add that the app is, of course, free, and anyone who wants to learn the background or extend the model is invited to mail me (Hannes Rollin) at initials at sabik dot de. The Seneca cliff App has recently been approved to App.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Seneca Effect: why decline is faster than growth


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Originally published on "Cassandra's Legacy" on Aug 28 2011





"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, n. 91







Don't you stumble, sometimes, into something that seems to make a lot of sense, but you can't say exactly why? For a long time, I had in mind the idea that when things start going bad, they tend to go bad fast. We might call this tendency the "Seneca effect" or the "Seneca cliff," from Lucius Annaeus Seneca who wrote that "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."

Could it be that the Seneca cliff is what we are facing, right now? If that is the case, then we are in trouble. With oil production peaking or set to peak soon, it is hard to think that we are going to see a gentle downward slope of the economy. Rather, we may see a decline so fast that we can only call it "collapse." The symptoms are all there, but how to prove that it is what is really in store for us? It is not enough to quote a Roman philosopher who lived two thousand years ago. We need to understand what factors might lead us to fall much faster than we have been growing so far. For that, we need to make a model and see how the various elements of the economic system may interact with each other to generate collapse.

I have been working on this idea for quite a while and now I think I can make such a model. This is what the rest of this post will be about. We'll see that a Seneca cliff may indeed be part of our future if we keep acting as we have been acting so far (and as we probably will). But let's go into the details.