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Sun could set suddenly on superpower as debt bites
by Niall Ferguson
WE have been raised to think of the historical process as an essentially cyclical one.
We naturally tend to assume that in our own time, too, history will move cyclically, and slowly.
Yet what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arhythmic, at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?
| That's punctured equilibrium, that is. But what if overall it's cycles, but the occasional puncture sets everything to a new, and drastically different range? |
Great powers and empires are complex systems, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder, on "the edge of chaos", in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton.
Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting.
| Back when I played with factories for my pay, Total Quality was all the rage, which tells you how long ago that was. The idea was to tighten up the range within the system actually worked, not to remove variability and cycles altogether. Removing variability and cycles being impossible, as it turns out. Constantly wobbling around a balance point is the normal order of things. This becomes especially noticeable when one pulls a back muscle. |
Posted by: Steve White 2010-08-02 |
