Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Complex human societies, including
our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web
of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray
easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal
conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.
Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing
historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are
slow to subside. The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval
and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to
cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of
instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age
and the “violent 1910s.”
