2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: The more you call white working class voters "racist" the more you will LOSE elections. [View all]Buckeye_Democrat
(14,860 posts)There's a professor in Connecticut named Peter Turchin who's made an effort to "quantify" civilizations throughout history. He was supposedly flabbergasted by the 200+ different conjectures from historians about why the Roman Empire collapsed, so he started assigning values to all kinds of variables to apply statistics to the problem. Those "values" might have been subjective in themselves, but I still applaud his effort to make historical questions more scientific.
The analysis indicates that the main cause for civilizations arising and gaining power was OUTSIDE THREATS. Before that, most people lived in very small family groups (for the majority of humanity's existence).
The main cause for the collapse of civilizations when not caused by outside threats? INEQUALITY of resources.