The Seneca Effect: What It Is and Why It Is Important For Us

by Ugo Bardi

About 2,000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote to his friend Licilius noting that "growth is slow, but ruin is rapid". It was an apparently obvious observation, but one of those observations that turns out to be not obvious at all if you just think a little about it.

For example, do you remember Newton's apple? Everyone knows that apples fall from the trees, but it took Newton to get out of this well-known thing something that was not at all obvious: the law of universal gravitation. It is the same thing for Seneca's observation that "ruin is rapid." Everyone knows that it is true, think of a house of cards. But why is it like this?

It turns out that Seneca's observation - which I dubbed "The Seneca Effect" (or the "Seneca Cliff" or the "Seneca Collapse") is one of the key elements we need to understanding the developments of what we now call the "science of complexity." In the space of a few decades, starting since the 60s of the twentieth century, the development of digital computing has allowed us to tackle problems that, at the time of Newton (not to mention those of Seneca) could not be studied except in a very approximate way.

This new science has allowed us to penetrate a world that in a certain sense was familiar to us: the world of real things that are born, grow, and sometimes collapse in a ruinous way. But it was also a world that once upon a time scientists, accustomed to describing everything with equations, found it difficult to understand and which - in practice - ignored. But there are no equations for certain natural phenomena such as earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, or even for seemingly simple things like the bursting of a balloon. Nor are there any equations for phenomena such as the collapse of the empires, the collapse of the stock market, the disappearance of political parties, and many other things.

All these things, and many more, I put them together in my book that I titled "The Seneca Effect" in honor of the ancient Roman philosopher. It is a story that I tell starting from an example that, in the book, I call "the mother of all collapses," that of the Roman Empire. But in the book I talk about many things: the breaking of objects, the collapse of buildings, the frequency of earthquakes, the war, the financial markets, mass extinctions and many other things. The basic thesis is that all these phenomena have a lot in common: the mechanism of the collapse happens when the system is dominated by the mechanism we call "feedback."


That is, systems may collapse when just one of the elements that compose them fails. That may lead to the failure of the elements that surround it. These, in turn, cause the failure of other elements of the system, and so it goes. The result is what we call an "avalanche" and, as Seneca said, "ruin is rapid". It is a feature of the systems we call "networks", which have undergone a very rapid development of studies in this regard. 

So, I wrote an entire book on the subject that you may find interesting. But one question I am often asked about this book is, "can we use it to predict the future?" The answer is, in the words of Mark Twain, that predictions are always difficult, especially when they have to do with the future. What is the future if not a bundle of possibilities that we ourselves decide whether to turn into reality or not? The future can not be predicted, one can only be prepared for the future. 

Seneca himself would probably have agreed with this concept: he was deeply involved in the Stoic philosophy. As a good Stoic, he knew that we must always be prepared for the future, knowing full well that ruin can come upon us at any moment. This is true for individuals as well as for an entire society. He himself experienced a "rapid ruin" when his former pupil, Emperor Nero, accused him of treason and ordered him to commit sucide. Seneca had no other choice but to comply. 

We can use mathematical models to describe the "Seneca Effect," but they are mainly a quantification of ancient wisdom. It is not a question of predicting the future, it is a question of understanding it. And we can use the models to understand that the ecosystem in which we live is not a supermarket from which we can take what we need - and without even having to pay. It is a complex system, subject to the Seneca Collapse. And since we are also part of the ecosystem, when the ecosystem collapses, we collapse, too. Even a stoic like Seneca would have said that if we can try to avoid climate collapse and other environmental disasters, we must try. 


The book, "The Seneca Effect" is available in English and in German

 

The "Seneca Effect" Published

Springer: The Frontiers Collection

© 2018

The Seneca Effect

Why Growth is Slow but Collapse is Rapid

Authors: Bardi, Ugo

Presents wisdom from an ancient Roman Philosopher that you can use today. Explains why technological progress may not prevent societal collapse. Provides a true systems perspective on the widespread phenomenon of collapse. Highlights principles to help us manage, rather than be managed by, the greatest challenges of our times.

My new book, "The Seneca Effect" is now available, you can find it on the Springer site, or on Amazon and other on-line sellers. Excuse me if I define it as "monumental" but, really, it has been a lot of work and the book contains a lot of things, mainly explained on the basis of system dynamics. It goes from the crumbling of pyramids, the breakdown of everyday things, all the way to social and economic collapses, including famines wars and assorted catastrophes. Yet, it is not a catastrophistic book. It is just that catastrophes exist and we have to deal with them. And, if nothing old ever disappeared, nothing new could come.

One thing I have to explain about this book is the relatively high price. This is part of Springer's policies; they are not mainstream publishers and they have different pricing policies. And, as you probably know, authors have little to say on this subject, although I think I managed to convince Springer to price this book at relatively low levels for their standards. Don't think I hadn't tried mainstream publishers but, apparently, books about collapse are a no-no with publishers, right now. Nobody wants to mention the subject and maybe there are good reasons.....  (in ancient times, they said, "name the devil and the devil is here")

Also, I can send you a flyer for a 20% discount; just write me at ugo.bardi(thing-a-magig)unifi.it (valid until Oct 07, 2017). If it is still too expensive for you, if you follow the Cassandra blog or the Seneca blog, there are many things you can learn about system dynamics and collapses. It is truly a fascinating subject!

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Here is a description of the book that you can find on the Springer site


The essence of this book can be found in a line written by the ancient Roman Stoic Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca: "Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid". This sentence summarizes the features of the phenomenon that we call "collapse," which is typically sudden and often unexpected, like the proverbial "house of cards." But why are such collapses so common, and what generates them? Several books have been published on the subject, including the well known "Collapse" by Jared Diamond (2005), "The collapse of complex societies" by Joseph Tainter (1998) and "The Tipping Point," by Malcom Gladwell (2000). Why The Seneca Effect?

This book is an ambitious attempt to pull these various strands together by describing collapse from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint. The reader will discover how collapse is a collective phenomenon that occurs in what we call today "complex systems," with a special emphasis on system dynamics and the concept of "feedback." From this foundation, Bardi applies the theory to real-world systems, from the mechanics of fracture and the collapse of large structures to financial collapses, famines and population collapses, the fall of entire civilizations, and the most dreadful collapse we can imagine: that of the planetary ecosystem generated by overexploitation and climate change. The final objective of the book is to describe a conclusion that the ancient stoic philosophers had already discovered long ago, but that modern system science has rediscovered today. If you want to avoid collapse you need to embrace change, not fight it. Neither a book about doom and gloom nor a cornucopianist's dream, The Seneca Effect goes to the heart of the challenges that we are facing today, helping us to manage our future rather than be managed by it.

Donald Trump in Davos

How to Avoid the Seneca Cliff

The Seneca Ship

The Seneca Effect: how the concept evolved

Reposted from "Cassandra's Legacy"

An image taken at a recent meeting in Barcelona. You can see the evolution of the concept of "collapse", from Malthus to Forrester. The latter can be seen as the true originator of the concept that I call the "Seneca Cliff" or the "Seneca Effect" 

Malthus (1766 - 1834) is supposed to be the catastrophist in chief, the prophet of doom whose prophecies never came to pass. And yet, if you read what he wrote (not everyone does), you see that he never mentioned the concept, familiar to us, of "civilization collapse". Malthus was perfectly able to imagine pestilences, wars, and famines; all common occurrences at his time. But he wasn't aware of the idea that population could grow well above the "Malthusian limit" and then crash.

The idea of a cyclical pattern of growth and decline came much after Malthus, you find its origins in biological studies, with Lotka and Volterra being perhaps the first to propose it in the form of a mathematical model in the 1920s and 1930s. Later on, in the 1950s, Marion King Hubbert proposed his "bell-shaped" curve for the cycle of production of crude oil in a specific region. For us, it is a relatively well known story even though most people seem to remain convinced that - somehow - growth can go on forever.

Finally, the idea that the bell shaped curve is asymmetric was explicitly expressed in terms of a mathematical model by Jay Forrester, in the 1960s, Even though Lucius Annaeus Seneca had already proposed it in qualitative terms long before, Forrester can be seen as the true originator of the concept of "Seneca Cliff."

Over more than a century of work, humankind has developed tools that make us able to face the future. We only have a little problem: we are not using them; our current leaders don't even know that such tools exist. And so, our destiny is to slide down, blindfolded, along the Seneca Cliff.

Those whom the Gods want to destroy, they drive toward the Seneca Cliff

Talking of madness, this piece from the Guardian reaches a nearly sublime level. It is about the Maldives, one of the places of the world most seriously threatened by sea level rise. Really, read it, it is worth savoring every word.

So, what does the Maldivian govenrment decide in order to face the climate threat? That their real goal is "development," in terms of "Riviera-style super-resort with sea sports, six star hotels, high-end housing and several new airports," and "Plans to increase tourism from 1.3 million people a year to more than seven million within 10 years".

And the sea level rise? A threat that, according to IPCC, "could mean 75% of the Maldives being under water by 2100"? Well, according to a government official, “it is not going to happen next year. We have immediate needs. Development must go on, jobs are needed."

Not next year, maybe, but take a look at the capital of the archipelago, Malé, and imagine what's going to happen, sooner or later.

Is this an epidemics of brain disease? Or do the Gods really drive crazy those whom they want to destroy?

Maybe. But there is also a perfectly rational explanation for what's happening. Imagine that you are part of the elite of the Maldives. And imagine that you are smart enough to understand what's going on with the Earth's climate. As things stand today, it is clear that it is too late to stop a burst of global warming that will push temperatures so high that nothing will save the Maldives islands. Maybe not next year but in a few decades, it is nearly certain.

So, given the situation, what is the rational thing for you to do? Of course, it is to sell what you can sell as long as you can find a sucker who will buy. Then you can say good riddance to those who remain.

What we are seeing, therefore, is a game in which someone will be left holding the short end of the dynamite stick. When the elites of the Maldives will have left for higher grounds, the poor will be stuck there. For them, the Seneca Cliff ends underwater.

Are they just scamming us, or are they experimenting with us?

Sometimes I have the impression that they are not just fooling us. They are experimenting with us to see how we react. Do you remember the experiments that Konrad Lorenz would do with geese? Fooling them to follow a puppet as if it were their mother? Something like that.

Sometimes, the sheer amount of idiocy involved in certain messages makes you wonder. See the example above. A "little burp" from Mt. Etna, supposed to have bee spewing "10,000 times" more CO2 into the atmosphere than the whole amount emitted by humankind.

Now, the picture of the volcano seems to be a scam in itself. It comes from a Facebook site defined as "Fantastic World Collection" and the title doesn't seem to promise strict guidelines for presenting only real photos. This one looks heavily retouched, if not completely fake. But that's a minor problem. Consider the text, come on, "10,000 times"? And won't anyone feel the need for a minimal fact check of this number before diffusing this image on Facebook as the obvious proof that human caused climate change is a hoax? And yet, people do that. This photo arrived to my Facebook account with exactly this kind of accompanying message.

That minimal fact check would lead anyone to discover that volcanic eruptions emit, at best, about 1% of the CO2 emitted by humans. This comes from the very first hit on Google on this matter.

So, the claim in the figure with Mount Etna is wrong of about a factor one million. But what's such a little discrepancy among friends? As I noted in another post, the fact that these claims are so blatantly absurd is not a bug, it is a feature. They are not aimed at normal people; they are studied for identifying and selecting suckers. And suckers are very useful for many things, in politics as well as in commerce.

I go a little farther than that and I tend to think some of these absurdities don't even have specific commercial or political purposes. They are experiments, tests to probe the level of human gullibility; designed to collect data that then could be used for more important and darker purposes.

Maybe I am wrong, of course. But, in any case, we seem to have lost control of how reality is connected to our perception of reality. And if you lose your perception of reality, you are heading straight for a steep Seneca Cliff.

Seneca Cliff? What Seneca Cliff?

The essence of the coming global Seneca Cliff

"The economy is collapsing because it was based on cheap oil, which is no longer cheap to pull out of the ground — despite what you might pay for it at the pump these days. The public is understandably confounded by this. But their mystification does nothing to allay the disappearance of jobs, incomes, prospects, or purpose. They retreat from the pain of loss into a fog of manufactured melodrama featuring superheros and supervillains and supernatural doings."

- James Howard Kunstler

(h/t David Casey)

Simulating peak oil

Not exactly a Seneca cliff, but in the same category. Here, one of my students shows the results of her simulation of resource depletion compared with the classic ASPO projections of peak oil. 

They say that the universe is all a simulation. Here you see the simulation of a simulation

Another Seneca Cliff: The "Mouse Utopia"

Image courtesy of Hans Pelleboer. This is a screenshot from Dr. Calhoun's `Mouse Utopia' experiment from the 1960s Abscissa; time in days, Ordinate: Log N population.

In Calhoun experiment, rats were confined in a finite physical space, but they were always provided with sufficient food. The result was a growing population density that eventually led to disaster. Here is how Calhoun describes his results (Calhoun, John B. (1962). "Population density and social pathology". Scientific American. 206 (3): 139–148.)


Many [female rats] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption. [...]

The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.

[...] In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.

The Seneca Effect: Soon to Become a Book!

Reposted from "Cassandra's Legacy"

 

"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

This is very early as an announcement: don't expect this book to appear before Spring 2017 (and, BTW, the cover above is purely a fantasy of mine). However, I thought that things are advanced enough that I can announce this work in progress. I have signed a contract with Springer for publishing this book in their "Frontiers Collection" and it should appear in Spring 2017. The German edition should appear a little later, published by Oekom Verlag.

So, I have been working at full speed on this book all this summer and I can announce to you that, today - actually half an hour ago - I finished it!!! Yes, I arrived at the end of it; 97,000 words in total. I can tell you it was some work. Quite some work! And I looked at everything that I had made, and behold, it was very good!

Well, to say that the book is finished is a bit of an exaggeration: as it is, the manuscript requires a lot more refining, retouching, and rearranging. But it has taken a shape, a logic, a form - it is something that says what I wanted to say (more or less) and excludes what I didn't want to say (more or less). So, things are moving onward according to plan.

So, what will you be able to read in this book? It is a veritable smorgasbord of collapses: you'll read about the mechanics of fracture, the collapse of Egyptian pyramids, about financial collapses, famines, extinctions, the demise of the dinosaurs and - of course - about the fall of the Roman Empire, a favorite subject of mine. But the book is not just a list of collapses, it deals with the theory behind them: system dynamics, network theory, thermodynamics, entropy and more abstruse things which I am not sure I understand myself. And something about Seneca and Stoic philosophy, of course!

The Seneca Cliff goes mainstream

The concept of the "Seneca Cliff" seems to have gone mainstream. Below, it is mentioned in a recent post by Dennis Coyne on "peakoilbarrell" as an obvious concept. Just as when you say "Gaussian Curve", you don't have to specify what shape the curve has, so it is for the "Seneca Curve". It looks like I started some kind of avalanche with my 2011 post when I introduced the term. See also my blog wholly dedicated to the subject.

Here, the projections by AEO (annual energy outlook) seem to me very optimistic; can production really keep growing until 2035-2040? If that were to happen, however, the subsequent collapse would be truly abrupt.

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EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook and the Seneca Cliff

by DENNIS COYNE posted on 05/19/2016

The scenario above shows an Oil Shock Model with a URR of 3600 Gb and EIA data from 1970 to 2015 and the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) 2016 early release reference projection from 2016 to 2040. The oil shock model was originally developed by Webhubbletelescope and presented at his blog Mobjectivist and in a free book The Oil Conundrum.

The World extraction rate from producing reserves must rise to 15% in 2040 to accomplish this for this “high” URR scenario. This high scenario is 100 Gb lower than my earlier high scenario because I reduced my estimate of extra heavy oil URR (API gravity<10) to 500 Gb. The annual decline rate rises to 5% from 2043 to 2047 creating a “Seneca cliff”, the decline rate is reduced to 2% by 2060.

The scenario presented above uses BP’s Energy Outlook 2035, published in Feb 2016. This outlook does not extend to 2040, maximum output is 88 Mb/d in 2035 at the end of the scenario. This scenario is still optimistic, but is more reasonable than the EIA AEO 2016. Extraction rates rise to 10.6% and the annual decline rate rises to 2.5% in 2042 and is reduced to under 2% by 2053.

Continue reading on "peakoilbarrel"

Donald Trump and the Seneca Collapse

From "Cassandra's Legacy" Saturday, April 2, 2016

Donald Trump and the collapse of the Western Empire

In this post, I argue that the ascent of Donald Trump in the US presidential race is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of society, in turn caused by the loss of control generated by resource depletion. At the bottom of this post, you'll find a simple system dynamics model describing the situation and generating another example of "Seneca Collapse" 

Donald Trump seems to have taken everyone by surprise. Whether or not he gains the Republican nomination, and whether or not he becomes president, he took the media by storm: people writing on blogs and newspapers are reeling from the impact, asking themselves: where the heck did this come from? What is he? A God? The reincarnation of Hitler? Or of Mussolini? The devil? Or what? Personally, I don't claim to have been less surprised than most by Trump but, rethinking about the situation, I think it is reasonable to say that something like Trump was unavoidable. He is, really, best defined as the visible effect of the ongoing social phase transition. A discrete change in our path in the direction of collapse.

For a good number of years, I have been studying the reasons for the collapse of societies. And, at the beginning, I tended to explain it as mainly the result of the depletion of crucial resources; crude oil, in our case. But, the more I think about that, the more I understand that the relation between depletion and collapse is far from being straightforward. A society can very well collapse without running out of anything; think of the case of the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, the Union had still plenty of mineral resources, but it couldn't find a way to exploit them in a convenient manner. In the case of the Roman Empire, also, there is no evidence that it run out of food or of any basic resource. Rather, it ran out of the resource it used for paying its troops, gold and silver for its currency. In both cases, it was a question of the collapse of control. As we all know, power without control is nothing.

Note that the loss of control is related to resource depletion, but the relation is not direct. It works like this: any complex society can exist only in certain conditions: it is not enough to have access to natural resources. It is necessary to be able to distribute these resources in such a way to keep all the sections of society supplied; this is a question of control. You can also use the term "governance" if you like to avoid a term that has a military ring to it. The point is that if a society is unable to allocate the a resources in such a way to make most people accept the way they are allocated, it will break down, or collapse, or both things.

In our world, resource allocation is controlled by the entity we call "the market", with some correction on the part of another entity that we call "the government". Generally speaking, the government is supposed to correct for the fact that the market is not supposed to provide a fair distribution of wealth. For instance, the government is supposed to provide health care services even to people who can't afford it. This is why taxes are progressive (or used to be, before president Trump took office). This is what we normally call democracy: it works on the shared belief that society is kept together by a certain degree of fair sharing of the available resources.

It works, but only in some conditions. In particular, it works under the assumption that the available resources are relatively abundant. If that's the case, it is more convenient to create new wealth by exploiting some untapped resource than to steal wealth from others who already have it. But that's not always the case. Lets'imagine that you are out of your job. In normal conditions, you look for another job. But if there are no jobs available, or you are too old to get a new job, your only possible survival strategy is theft or robbery (it is happening). Then, if those silly Arabs are sitting on our oil, then it makes sense to bomb them to smithereens and get it. And why should the poor get our money for their health problems?

Note that you don't need to run out of anything to cross the critical point. Within some limits, you may assume that the cost of exploiting a natural resource goes up with the inverse of the resource abundance while the cost of stealing it from someone who has it may be taken as approximately constant. So, there has got to be a point where stealing becomes a better strategy than finding new resources. It is a phase transition in society (see the model, below). At this point, society goes to a crisis that leads it either by some form of breakdown, including "ethnic cleansing," or to some kind of centralized military control. The second outcome can be said to be better than the first. That's what the Romans did when it moved from a republic to an Imperial system. That's the path in front of us.

If we see the situation in these terms, then Trump is, really, nothing unexpected. He is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of the social pact in the US and all over the West. Indeed, he is capitalizing on this breakdown by using his aggressive rhetoric, playing on the attempt of the white (former) middle class to maintain at least some of its previous prosperity and privileges. Trump is not (yet) an emperor and probably he'll never be one. But he is a step in that direction; an unavoidable consequence of resource depletion.

When the first barrel of oil was extracted from underground in 1859, it might have been possible to imagine that depletion would cause big problems, at some moment in the future. It would have been impossible to imagine that, one century and a half later, it would lead to a presidential candidate with carrot-colored hair whose motto could be "we shall overcomb." But so is the future: it always surprises you.


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Cannibal foxes and the Seneca Collapse
by Ugo Bardi, April 2016

Here is a simple model that explains the transition of a complex society from a strategy mainly based on exploiting new resources to one based on the theft of resources from those who have them already. The model is based on well known the "Foxes and Rabbits" model; where we assume that foxes are the predator and rabbits the prey. Here, we examine only a single cycle of the model; assuming that rabbits reproduce too slowly to make a difference. For more details on how this model works and how it can be used to fit historical data, take a look at this paper of mine.

To describe the phase transition, I assume here that some foxes can become cannibals and eat other foxes. These cannibal foxes can use a double strategy, if rabbits are abundant, they will eat rabbits, but if they are not, they will eat other foxes, especially if the latter are very abundant. Here is the model, implemented using the standard conventions of system dynamics and the "Vensim" software.

And here are some results of the model, showing the evolution of the populations of the regular foxes and of the cannibal ones

You can see how the cannibal foxes grow as a "parasite" of the regular foxes, causing their population to collapse more rapidly than it would have done without the cannibals. It is another example of the "Seneca Collapse".

This is, of course, a very simple model, but I think it conveys the basic mechanism of the breakdown of society. This breakdown occurs not when society actually runs out of anything, but much earlier. That seems to be what's happening to us and Donald Trump is just a symptom of the change.