By popular demand, we welcome Joseph Tainter, USU professor and author of The Collapse Of Complex Societies (free book download here).
Dr. Tainter sees many of the same unsustainable risks the PeakProsperity.com audience focuses on — an overleveraged economy, declining net energy per capita, and depleting key resources.
He argues that the sustainability or collapse of a society follows from the success or failure of its problem-solving institutions. His work shows that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their energy subsidies reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. That is what we are going to be talking about today, especially in regards to where our culture is today, the risks it faces, and whether or not we might already be past the tipping point towards collapse but just don’t know it yet.
By popular demand, we welcome Joseph Tainter, USU professor and author of The Collapse Of Complex Societies (free book download here).
Dr. Tainter sees many of the same unsustainable risks the PeakProsperity.com audience focuses on — an overleveraged economy, declining net energy per capita, and depleting key resources.
He argues that the sustainability or collapse of a society follows from the success or failure of its problem-solving institutions. His work shows that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their energy subsidies reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. That is what we are going to be talking about today, especially in regards to where our culture is today, the risks it faces, and whether or not we might already be past the tipping point towards collapse but just don’t know it yet.
If you have not yet read Part 1: Does Your Plan B Include a Second Place to Live if Plan A Doesn’t Work Out? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1 we reviewed the three basic categories of Plan B Residences: temporary (to ride out an emergency); semi-permanent (to weather a recession/loss of income) and permanent (replacing Plan A residence with Plan B residence).
In Part 2, we’ll consider a Matrix of Factors that will help us choose the inevitable trade-offs of costs and benefits, and add a category—permanent maintenance of two fully functional residences.
While there are many factors in any Plan B, I’ve pared the key factors in Plan B residences down to five: cost, control, security, depth of resources and functions enabled. Each is on a sliding scale from low to high. There are costs and benefits to each being low, medium or high.
Let’s go over each factor.
While cost measured by price is self-explanatory, this also includes opportunity costs (what else could have been accomplished with the money?), time (the hassle factor of how long it will take to get something done) and labor—how much labor must be invested to accomplish a goal.
There is even a stress cost: how much will this goal/project add to my stress load? Even if the money needed is on hand, the overall cost can be high in terms of time, hassle, stress and opportunity cost.
By this I mean ownership (of the land, the house, etc.), contractual control (of jointly owned assets, of any hired labor, etc.) and functional control, i.e. residency. As many have discovered to their regret, it’s possible to have legal ownership/control but end up with effectively zero functional control, as your house might be occupied by squatters or family members who morphed from allies to enemies.
Control is important because…
If you have not yet read Part 1: Does Your Plan B Include a Second Place to Live if Plan A Doesn’t Work Out? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1 we reviewed the three basic categories of Plan B Residences: temporary (to ride out an emergency); semi-permanent (to weather a recession/loss of income) and permanent (replacing Plan A residence with Plan B residence).
In Part 2, we’ll consider a Matrix of Factors that will help us choose the inevitable trade-offs of costs and benefits, and add a category—permanent maintenance of two fully functional residences.
While there are many factors in any Plan B, I’ve pared the key factors in Plan B residences down to five: cost, control, security, depth of resources and functions enabled. Each is on a sliding scale from low to high. There are costs and benefits to each being low, medium or high.
Let’s go over each factor.
While cost measured by price is self-explanatory, this also includes opportunity costs (what else could have been accomplished with the money?), time (the hassle factor of how long it will take to get something done) and labor—how much labor must be invested to accomplish a goal.
There is even a stress cost: how much will this goal/project add to my stress load? Even if the money needed is on hand, the overall cost can be high in terms of time, hassle, stress and opportunity cost.
By this I mean ownership (of the land, the house, etc.), contractual control (of jointly owned assets, of any hired labor, etc.) and functional control, i.e. residency. As many have discovered to their regret, it’s possible to have legal ownership/control but end up with effectively zero functional control, as your house might be occupied by squatters or family members who morphed from allies to enemies.
Control is important because…
by hgrootveldgmail-com