For things like hurricanes, one can look at the historical record, make a reasonable estimate, and do a prudent amount of prepping. For a societal collapse, there’s no data, so the estimate is based on a narrative. The narrative may be socially constructed, for example, a religious narrative about the End Times. Or it may be that prepping has become a hobby, and preppers talk to each other about their preps, and the guy that has 6 months of water and stored food gets more respect than the guy who has a week’s supply of water under his bed and whatever canned food is in his pantry. The difference is not really the utility functions, but the narratives and probability estimates that feed into the utility functions. The doomsday preppers are prepping more because they think doomsday is much more likely.
(I completely agree with your advice to store some water. I do the same. Over-prepping runs into diminishing returns, and not prepping at all is irresponsible, but a modest amount of prepping is a no-brainer.)
Societies have collapsed before. Plenty of data on eg civil wars presumably. So one could make a useful ballpark estimate of the annual risk of this. Which I suspect is surprisingly high even for rich countries; if we factor in covid as a near-miss. And things like the BLM protests/riots could also lead to local civil breakdown with resulting shortages. Oh, come to think of it it did—CHAZ. In which IIRC the protesters ran short of food and had to request outside supplies.
Realistic threat modeling takes into account severity and duration, not just probability distribution. “had to request outside supplies” describes normal life for most of us, not a situation to prep for.
The thing that’s hard to model is the wide-scale systemic fragility in the modern world. Collapse could easily go deeper than expected, and then there’s no “outside supplies” to be had. It’s very (very!) hard to predict the specific edges of that scenario that would let your individual preparation be effective.
OK, good points. There is a spectrum here… if you live in a place where there’s a civil war every few years, then prepping for civil war makes a lot of sense. If you live in a place where the last civil war was 150 years ago, not so much.
CHAZ took place in a context where the most likely outcome was the failure of CHAZ, not the collapse of the larger society. CHAZ failed to prep for the obvious, if not the almost inevitable.
I’d be careful with thinking of prepping as a binary “do/don’t prep” distinction. If you live somewhere where a civil war happens every 2-3 years, the expected value of something that only has value in a civil war scenario is much higher than if one happens every 150 years or so. However, that doesn’t mean you should “prep” in one case and not the other, just that some actions that would be worth it if civil wars were frequent are not worth it if civil wars are infrequent. Water may be useful in both, but training your friends in wilderness survival or whatever, maybe less so.
Indeed. I think it’s pretty clear there are a few basic prepping things (such as water storage) which are well worthwhile whatever the risk, because they’re cheap and potentially life-saving. And some useful halfway houses—eg re wilderness survival, buying a book (but not going on a survival course) is a cheap option.
For things like hurricanes, one can look at the historical record, make a reasonable estimate, and do a prudent amount of prepping. For a societal collapse, there’s no data, so the estimate is based on a narrative. The narrative may be socially constructed, for example, a religious narrative about the End Times. Or it may be that prepping has become a hobby, and preppers talk to each other about their preps, and the guy that has 6 months of water and stored food gets more respect than the guy who has a week’s supply of water under his bed and whatever canned food is in his pantry. The difference is not really the utility functions, but the narratives and probability estimates that feed into the utility functions. The doomsday preppers are prepping more because they think doomsday is much more likely.
(I completely agree with your advice to store some water. I do the same. Over-prepping runs into diminishing returns, and not prepping at all is irresponsible, but a modest amount of prepping is a no-brainer.)
Societies have collapsed before. Plenty of data on eg civil wars presumably. So one could make a useful ballpark estimate of the annual risk of this. Which I suspect is surprisingly high even for rich countries; if we factor in covid as a near-miss. And things like the BLM protests/riots could also lead to local civil breakdown with resulting shortages. Oh, come to think of it it did—CHAZ. In which IIRC the protesters ran short of food and had to request outside supplies.
Realistic threat modeling takes into account severity and duration, not just probability distribution. “had to request outside supplies” describes normal life for most of us, not a situation to prep for.
The thing that’s hard to model is the wide-scale systemic fragility in the modern world. Collapse could easily go deeper than expected, and then there’s no “outside supplies” to be had. It’s very (very!) hard to predict the specific edges of that scenario that would let your individual preparation be effective.
OK, good points. There is a spectrum here… if you live in a place where there’s a civil war every few years, then prepping for civil war makes a lot of sense. If you live in a place where the last civil war was 150 years ago, not so much.
CHAZ took place in a context where the most likely outcome was the failure of CHAZ, not the collapse of the larger society. CHAZ failed to prep for the obvious, if not the almost inevitable.
I’d be careful with thinking of prepping as a binary “do/don’t prep” distinction. If you live somewhere where a civil war happens every 2-3 years, the expected value of something that only has value in a civil war scenario is much higher than if one happens every 150 years or so. However, that doesn’t mean you should “prep” in one case and not the other, just that some actions that would be worth it if civil wars were frequent are not worth it if civil wars are infrequent. Water may be useful in both, but training your friends in wilderness survival or whatever, maybe less so.
Indeed. I think it’s pretty clear there are a few basic prepping things (such as water storage) which are well worthwhile whatever the risk, because they’re cheap and potentially life-saving. And some useful halfway houses—eg re wilderness survival, buying a book (but not going on a survival course) is a cheap option.