Rancid wrote:This is precisely why whenever a crisis comes and passes, and you re-evaluate the situation. The rich come out better than ever, and the poor come out worse than ever. It happened in 2008, and it's going to happen again here.
At some point, somethings gotta give though, no?
Well, that is the worry. See, the rich don’t always do well out of crisis. Consider historical examples such as the Red revolution in Russia, 1918, or the liberal revolution in France, 1789. The rich didn’t so particularly well out of that. In fact, most of them suffered execution in one form or another.
There are other historical examples, but my personal favourite, which I would like to bring to your attention, is the collapse of the Mediterranean Bronze Age civilisation around 1300BC. This was the time of the Trojan wars and the New Kingdom Egyptians.
The archeological record has cities which show the city centre government buildings having been destroyed at the time of the collapse, but the surrounding residences being relatively intact. This subjects revolt by the proletariat rather than sacking due to invasion. The Sea People’s were likely displaced commoners ravaging the countryside rather than marauding Barbarians, as was originally thought.
Was the Bronze Age collapse the first commie revolt? @Donna ?
The following era wears a dark age, which saw a loss of high culture and an interruption to the transmission of abstract learning. It also saw a long period of population decline, move to smaller, defended settlements and general lose of cultural complexity. Population decline like that would mean a high death rate than birth rate. Try to imagine how that would be for the people of the time living through it.
But after a few centuries, cultural complexity began to recover as some settlements grew in size, were then able to collect a greater economic surplus and so fund armies of suffice to size to subjugate their neighbours, thus creating new empires. This recreated the greater economic efficiencies that allow substantial increases in cultural complexity and, hey presto, we are back to a civilised age again. This time the age of the Persians and the Greeks. The classical world that would be dominated by the Romans until it too collapsed in its turn, giving way to a new dark age.
That dark age would gradually resolve into the Middle Ages, then the renaissance and the age of modernity, the last 500 years of civilisation. But nothing lasts forever. What is must pass and return to the earth once more. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Well, let us classify that as the worst case scenario.