Thanks for finding that, Arraya. More or less what I was alluding to. There is always someone out there who can speak to the topic better. Gotta love the Internets.
From the sane link.
“At the largest scale, empires are also grounded in pyramid dynamics, which is why they too have a limited lifespan. They grow by assuming control, either politically or economically, of new territories, positioning themselves to cream off surpluses from an ever-expanding geographical area in a form of involuntary buy-in. In the past political control through invasion or physical colonization was more common, but latterly globalization has enabled the development of a sophisticated system of economic control based on international debt slavery, supplemented with economic colonization for the purpose of resource extraction. Both resources and financial surpluses, in the form of perpetual interest payments, could be efficiently extracted from the periphery and accumulated at the centre, where they led to the development of an unprecedented level of socioeconomic complexity.
Such wealth conveyors in favour of the economic centre, at the expense of the hinterland, are the very heart of empire, but without continual expansion to feed rapidly developing central complexity, they eventually fail, leaving the centre unable to sustain its existing complexity level. As with economic bubbles, empires hollow out in the latter stages, consuming their own substance in a catabolic manner in order to compensate for the inability to strengthen wealth conveyors sufficiently quickly to keep pace with the expanding requirements of the centre.
As the hinterland is increasingly stripped of wealth and resources, and burdened with the increasing environmental impact of its own exploitation, an increasing fraction of it is left too impoverished to sustain a minimum level of internal order. In modern times we speak of failed states without realizing why many of these states are failing, or the impact that an increasing number of failed states will ultimately have on our own standard of living.
Wealth conveyors are breaking down, and no amount of financially squeezing the population in the central economies can compensate for the loss of that ability to accumulate wealth from virtually the whole world. The vast majority of the central population will be brutally squeezed as the elites try to hang on to their own privileged position, but this can only sustain a very small, and rapidly shrinking, fraction of the population, and at great cost.
We are living through the collapse of the final – and all-consuming – economic bubble at the end of the American empire.”
I don’t necessarily agree with the last sentence. Eventually the thing falls down.
