A quick response from a former historian and ex UN guy: China and Japan are examples of societies that have not collapsed but have gone through waves of change. As Jared Diamond so eloquently wrote in his seminal book Collapse what determines whether a civilization collapses or mostly collapse (no or few societies have totally disappeared; most re-emerge in a different form) is its ability to adopt adaptive management strategies to changing conditions. Complexity can be used as a somewhat imperfect tool to rationally determine what the best adaptive management strategies are. There is a book, 1421, that describes China's great effort to explore and map the world well before the Europeans and why their effort ultimately was abandoned and partially lost, although the Venetians used the Chinese maps. The Chinese actually explored the Americas and Africa and started trading in these places. Basically the mandarins decided to isolate China from the rest of the world to improve their own power base, a bad adaptive strategy. Perhaps had they used the complexity tools devised by Confucius they would have not so. Paul
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