The Seneca Effect (The Frontiers Collection)

In this book, Ugo Bardi carries on the great tradition established by the Club of Rome when it sponsored the Limits-to-Growth studies of the 1970s. In fact, Bardi wrote it as a report to the Club, drawing on an observation of Seneca, the great Roman Stoic philosopher of 2000 years ago: “Growth is slow but the road to ruin is rapid”.There are certainly many signs of an impending collapse of modern civilization, yet how close are we to it, and what can, or should, be done? Bardi certainly does not shy away from tough questions! His ultimate answer is, appropriately, a Stoic one: Don’t fret over what is beyond our control – big change is coming whether we like it or not. But do try to understand the complex system we live in and look for “leverage points” – feasible actions with big effects that might nudge the coming collapse into less dangerous territory.Surprisingly business and political leaders are often quite aware of these “levers of power” but choose to pull them in the wrong direction. Ugo’s prime example is “economic growth”, which at this point in time, will only accelerate the collapse and make it far more painful, placing him firmly in the “de-growth” camp, though he does not use that term. To give us more ideas, he lists twelve leverage points, p. 165, identified by Donella Meadows. These he combines into three broad categories: (1) Oscillations (e.g. financial booms and busts) and instabilities (e.g. war and political turmoil), (2) Critical resources (e.g. fossil fuels), and (3) Ways the system works (e.g. commerce, governance, culture).As to the latter point Bardi advises not to take a head-on, brute-force approach (prohibition of alcohol or drugs, and revolutions, being classic examples) despite their political popularity, but instead to engineer regulatory and cultural changes designed to “go with the flow” and overcome the forces of resistance in more strategic ways. Obviously this applies to the instability and resource issues as well. For humanity, a big problem is our inability to deal with long term delays. Another is that society tends to creep up on dangerous “tipping points”, with institutions being caught unaware or paralyzed by inertia and lack of easy options.The “business-as-usual” limits-to-growth scenario suggests that collapse will begin within a decade or two. Bardi suggests that our current political difficulties are symptom of this. From another point of view, Peter Turchin, in “Ages of Discord”, identifies the 2020s as period of epic turmoil for the US. Others may argue that fracking, combined with continued develops in technology, may give us a brief reprieve, more like one of softer limits-to-growth scenarios. But already more experts are worried about how the world will feed 9 to 10 billion people as fossil fuel wealth heads into serious decline within a generation or two, even without wars.Bardi explains why a Seneca-type collapse, rather than a slower decline, is likely: several factors may combine to drive down the system, feeding off each other: In this case, once industrial production begins to drop due to the rising cost of oil and resources, pollution (especially climate change) will also be taking an increasing toll, and food will be hard hit as well. Financial collapses are similar: there is a great deal of unexpected synergy, or “panic”. Resilience means designing the system to prevent these kind of destructive synergies.In finance that means things like reserve requirements and limitations on leverage. For today’s deregulated free market capitalism, it would mean new regulations, sacrificing short term efficiencies, to maintain diversity in resources, technology, production and transportation networks, etc. All this could be viewed as efficiency from a long term point of view. In deed, I think that establishing a 100 year timeline for maximizing profits (or minimizing losses) would be a very useful way to go about this. Related to this is Peter Barnes’ idea of establishing public trusts to benefit future generations, governing valuable natural resources and the “commons”.This book starts out with a multitude of interesting historical examples of a variety of collapses, both social and physical, from Egypt pyramids and the Roman Empire, to 19th century whaling, up to coal and oil (ongoing), plus airplane and financial crashes, famines, runaway climate changes, and more. There is some overlap with “Six Sources of Collapse” by Charles Hadlock, such as on brittleness or resilience in networks, but overall Bardi is more philosophical, broadly scientific, and much less mathematical. He relegates his explication of the Seneca effect in system dynamics to a three variable example in an appendix, using diagrams from user-friendly software rather than equations.

Reading this book was liking sipping a much aged and refined brandy. I read the book very slowly, which is unusual for me, because I was savoring its richness. The book deeply reflects the maturity of the author, who has pondered long and hard about the planetary issues of global pollution (including global warming) and the stark realities of resource depletion. The likely future for us is a continued rapid expansion of industrial society (for a decade or so) followed by drastic and painful contraction that is quite quick. Near the end of the book Professor Bardi explores how to manage this fate. However, "The Seneca Effect" is more general than our imminent collective fate. It offers stories of relatively long growth of something (several hundred years of industrial society) followed by a relatively short drastic shrinking. My favorite among these stories is his account of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, which he distills down to a few key commodity flows and a few pages. A masterpiece! The time scales can be days (bacteria in a dish of food left out) to millions of years (the population of dinosaurs). Simple mathematical models of A eating B eating C (say viruses killing foxes killing rabbits) easily illustrate slow rise followed by more rapid decline. Once one understands that mathematical model, and realizes that it probably occurs almost everywhere, "the Seneca effect" is universal enough to be a basic tool for thinking about how systems change. I do offer one caveat to the reader: there are some odd word choices, phrasings and misspellings.

Pros: Each chapter examines a different example of collapse. This gives the reader numerous threads of context to draw on to help them capture the many insights that the book provides.Cons: Not many. Aimed at an educated audience. Some familiarity with Systems Theory and System Dynamics, while not required, would be helpful.I guess it's saying something good about the book when my major quibble was the extremely small font the publisher chose to use. Some chapters are stronger than others. Being a person trained in both History and System Dynamics I found the first chapter on Rome the least insightful, perhaps only because that chapter didn't tell me anything beyond what I already knew. Some of the other chapters were very good. Overall, a good addition to the literature on collapse.

Good book for those interested in systems dynamics and complexity. Brought in the work of Donella Meadows in the conclusion. Probably not worth the price unless you're a systems geek but definitely a work that adds a dimension to the study of systems by focusing on a particular property. .

Okay book. But not worth the price at all.