I just added the following to my doomers page.
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Risk 6: Complete financial collapse
The ABC recently hosted “The Ascent of Money” by Niall Ferguson. To present the case for economic collapse, I will hand you over to the ABC’s ‘Big Ideas’ podcast which recently played the 2010 John Bonython Lecture by Niall Ferguson.
Is the rise and fall of empires cyclical or arrhythmic? How does economic profligacy – whether the result of arrogance or naivety – contribute to the downfall of civilisations?
Today Professor Ferguson will argue that great powers or empires are in the strict sense of the word, complex systems. Made up of very large numbers of interacting components that are quite asymmetrically organised. In other words, he continues, their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Moreover imperial falls are nearly always associated with fiscal crises, when there are dramatic imbalances between revenues and expenditures.
Thus alarm bells should be ringing in Washington DC but what does that for mean for Australia?
via Empires on the Edge of Chaos – Big Idea – 22 August 2010.
