The narrow/wide bucket analogy is neat; it is a good thinking tool. That said, I am by no means a historian, and do not know how good of a model it actually is. Some scattered thoughts:
The metaphorical bucket overflowing means unavoidable innovation, not system collapse per se. It seems to me like the narrow bucket can overflow many times, and each time it does it gets wider. That completely changes the model: no longer does it explain this ‘shift towards the north’.
As for Rome, it had long exhausted the surrounding lands before it collapsed. Its bucket overflowed many many times. One of the innovations they made is to cultivate grain in distant lands and ship it to Rome in huge quantities (Im sure they weren’t the first to do this but the scale is massive). Your bucket-theory is tightly coupled to people exploiting their surroundings only, and this breaks the model completely in my opinion.
A good source for reading in this vein is this blog, in case you haven’t seen it yet. This specific article is about land exploitation from a city point-of-view, but I think it’s very much related.
In regards to the bucket metaphor: the ‘width’ is the amount of fertile land available to its inhabitants.
Water only starts ‘stacking’, going ‘up’, if it can’t go ‘down’ or ‘to the sides’ anymore. The walls of a bucket prevent sidewards expansion and force the water level to go up.
Like water, pre-industrial humans had good reasons to avoid ‘stacking’ as well. Population density forces farmers (which is 90%+ of the population in pre-industrial times) to adopt more labor-intensive practices. So when humans had the chance, they preferred to spread out.
When hunter-gatherers cannot find enough food anymore, and all surrounding lands are exhausted by other hunter-gatherers, ‘spreading out’ ceases to be a viable method. ‘HumanWater’ has spread as far as it can, and now it will start to ‘stack’: hunter-gatherers will adopt slash-and-burn agriculture, raising the potential population density. When slash-and-burn agriculture has spread through the entire ‘bucket’ (all reachable fertile ground), the next agricultural step is implemented. The easiest one: they don’t go from slash-and-burn agriculture to plowing, irrigating, weeding and spreading manure in one generation. It happens step by step, starting with the least labor intensive ‘upgrade’ and only escalating when forced to.
The term “unavoidable innovation” really irks me. It has become this teacher’s password for all the world’s uncomfortable questions. Why was Malthus wrong? Innovation! How do we prevent civilizational collapse? Innovation! How do we solve competition and conflicts for limited resources? Innovation! How can we raise the standard of living without compromising the environment? Innovation!
As if life was fair and nature’s challenges were all calibrated to our abilities such that every time we run into population limits, the innovation fairy appears and offers us a way out of the crisis. Where real disaster can only ever result from corruption, greed, power struggles and, y’know, things that generally fit our moral aesthetics about how things ought to go wrong; things that would make a good House of Cards episode.
Certainly not mundane causes like mere exponential population increase. Because that would imply that Malthus was (at least sometimes) right, that life was a ruthless war of all against all, a rapacious hardscrapple frontier. An implication too horrible to ever be true.
I’m not arguing that the Malthusian trap explains all the civilizational collapses in history, or even Rome in particular. But it is the default failure mode because exponential growth is fast and unbounded, so to avoid it your civilization has to A) prevent population growth altogether, B) outpace population growth with innovation consistently, or C) collapse from another cause way before population pressure becomes a problem.
I am not sure what you are arguing here. First of all, I will completely agree with you that ‘innovation’ is not an explanation, and so we should be wary of it being used as such. I don’t actually think the bucket analogy has much explanatory power (though I find the concept interesting and worthy of further exploration). Using the term ‘unavoidable innovation’ was my attempt to clarify the analogy in order to be able to point out where in my opinion it fails.
The model in fact attempts to explain why innovation happens, not use innovation as an explanation for progress (since as you point out, that seems merely tautological or at least devoid of new information).
The rest of your comment I find harder to follow. I hope you agree that disasters from natural causes such as floods or meteor storms qualify as real disasters. Game of Thrones is not a realistic depiction of human morality, being focused on the grim and dark. It is especially not a realistic depiction of history. The Malthus-trap point is hopefully irrelevant once we agree that innovation should indeed not be used as explanation, but rather explored as a consequence. Otherwise I really did not understand it (but please do clarify!).
I wasn’t trying to argue anything in particular, I’m just using comments as a notebook to keep track of my own thoughts. I’m sorry if it sounded like I was trying to start an argument.
The narrow/wide bucket analogy is neat; it is a good thinking tool. That said, I am by no means a historian, and do not know how good of a model it actually is. Some scattered thoughts:
The metaphorical bucket overflowing means unavoidable innovation, not system collapse per se. It seems to me like the narrow bucket can overflow many times, and each time it does it gets wider. That completely changes the model: no longer does it explain this ‘shift towards the north’.
As for Rome, it had long exhausted the surrounding lands before it collapsed. Its bucket overflowed many many times. One of the innovations they made is to cultivate grain in distant lands and ship it to Rome in huge quantities (Im sure they weren’t the first to do this but the scale is massive). Your bucket-theory is tightly coupled to people exploiting their surroundings only, and this breaks the model completely in my opinion.
A good source for reading in this vein is this blog, in case you haven’t seen it yet. This specific article is about land exploitation from a city point-of-view, but I think it’s very much related.
Thanks!
In regards to the bucket metaphor: the ‘width’ is the amount of fertile land available to its inhabitants.
Water only starts ‘stacking’, going ‘up’, if it can’t go ‘down’ or ‘to the sides’ anymore. The walls of a bucket prevent sidewards expansion and force the water level to go up.
Like water, pre-industrial humans had good reasons to avoid ‘stacking’ as well. Population density forces farmers (which is 90%+ of the population in pre-industrial times) to adopt more labor-intensive practices. So when humans had the chance, they preferred to spread out.
When hunter-gatherers cannot find enough food anymore, and all surrounding lands are exhausted by other hunter-gatherers, ‘spreading out’ ceases to be a viable method. ‘HumanWater’ has spread as far as it can, and now it will start to ‘stack’: hunter-gatherers will adopt slash-and-burn agriculture, raising the potential population density. When slash-and-burn agriculture has spread through the entire ‘bucket’ (all reachable fertile ground), the next agricultural step is implemented. The easiest one: they don’t go from slash-and-burn agriculture to plowing, irrigating, weeding and spreading manure in one generation. It happens step by step, starting with the least labor intensive ‘upgrade’ and only escalating when forced to.
I hadn’t really considering overflowing buckets, but for example, the Greek colonisation might be a good example of that happening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation
I love the blog you linked! Funny to see the screengrabs from Game of Thrones, that exact problem bothered me as well :)
The term “unavoidable innovation” really irks me. It has become this teacher’s password for all the world’s uncomfortable questions. Why was Malthus wrong? Innovation! How do we prevent civilizational collapse? Innovation! How do we solve competition and conflicts for limited resources? Innovation! How can we raise the standard of living without compromising the environment? Innovation!
As if life was fair and nature’s challenges were all calibrated to our abilities such that every time we run into population limits, the innovation fairy appears and offers us a way out of the crisis. Where real disaster can only ever result from corruption, greed, power struggles and, y’know, things that generally fit our moral aesthetics about how things ought to go wrong; things that would make a good House of Cards episode.
Certainly not mundane causes like mere exponential population increase. Because that would imply that Malthus was (at least sometimes) right, that life was a ruthless war of all against all, a rapacious hardscrapple frontier. An implication too horrible to ever be true.
I’m not arguing that the Malthusian trap explains all the civilizational collapses in history, or even Rome in particular. But it is the default failure mode because exponential growth is fast and unbounded, so to avoid it your civilization has to A) prevent population growth altogether, B) outpace population growth with innovation consistently, or C) collapse from another cause way before population pressure becomes a problem.
I am not sure what you are arguing here. First of all, I will completely agree with you that ‘innovation’ is not an explanation, and so we should be wary of it being used as such. I don’t actually think the bucket analogy has much explanatory power (though I find the concept interesting and worthy of further exploration). Using the term ‘unavoidable innovation’ was my attempt to clarify the analogy in order to be able to point out where in my opinion it fails.
The model in fact attempts to explain why innovation happens, not use innovation as an explanation for progress (since as you point out, that seems merely tautological or at least devoid of new information).
The rest of your comment I find harder to follow. I hope you agree that disasters from natural causes such as floods or meteor storms qualify as real disasters. Game of Thrones is not a realistic depiction of human morality, being focused on the grim and dark. It is especially not a realistic depiction of history. The Malthus-trap point is hopefully irrelevant once we agree that innovation should indeed not be used as explanation, but rather explored as a consequence. Otherwise I really did not understand it (but please do clarify!).
I wasn’t trying to argue anything in particular, I’m just using comments as a notebook to keep track of my own thoughts. I’m sorry if it sounded like I was trying to start an argument.