I think it’s also worth considering that GDP and life expectancy and such are very downstream and aggregated outcomes. If society was to collapse, you wouldn’t expect this to occur uniformly, but instead that the foundations that generate society would erode, and only once these are sufficiently eroded would society break.
An obvious example would be population. If you don’t have a total fertility rate above 2, your society is decaying, yet most developed countries have a fertility rate quite far below 2. One theory for why is that housing is unaffordable, and again this seems to be a fundamental problem where people restrict construction to increase the value of the houses they own. The accumulation of knots like this could presumably kill a society, even if e.g. technological development is temporarily increasing GDP and lifespan in the short run.
I think it’s also worth considering that GDP and life expectancy and such are very downstream and aggregated outcomes. If society was to collapse, you wouldn’t expect this to occur uniformly, but instead that the foundations that generate society would erode, and only once these are sufficiently eroded would society break.
An obvious example would be population. If you don’t have a total fertility rate above 2, your society is decaying, yet most developed countries have a fertility rate quite far below 2. One theory for why is that housing is unaffordable, and again this seems to be a fundamental problem where people restrict construction to increase the value of the houses they own. The accumulation of knots like this could presumably kill a society, even if e.g. technological development is temporarily increasing GDP and lifespan in the short run.