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Civil War Failures

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Lecture 4 introduces us to The Great Acceleration5 and development failures. As we increase our usage of more advanced technologies, we also increase the amount of energy consumed. The increase of fossil fuel usage has allowed this growth of not only energy use but also population growth. With this change, there are both societal and environmental changes as well such as changes in GDP, water usage, deforestation, and ozone depletion. Despite this large increase of energy usage, it is not evenly distributed among the countries. Developed countries, though having smaller populations, uses much greater amounts of energy per person than developing countries. This energy usage divide is slowly getting smaller. Over 75% of people globally are cell …show more content…

In the past, most large societies have reached an inevitable failure. Most often, those failures have resulted due to energy scarcity and an overload of energy consumption as a factor. Another factor is civil wars. The majority of countries around the world have had a civil war since 1980. Conflicts often occur with growing populations as well as low economic growths. There are four theories of civilization failures. The first theorizes that environmental change and lack of resources heavily impact the collapses of society. Many measurements show a correlation between droughts and violence which increases risk of civil war which is largely proven factor of societal failure. The second theory predicts that limits in technology hinder society from growing past a certain point which causes the inevitable failure. Financial imbalance6 is also a key theory in this failure with two sub-theories. The first is social stratification in which the wealthier class exploits the lower class causing the financial imbalance to grow. The second is the overstretch of the empire. This occurs when the society puts such a large amount of their finances into their military in order to maintain it but this ends up causing the collapse instead of avoiding it. Only 14 of 66 countries studied have avoided bankruptcy. Economic booms are also a possible factor for

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