Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Europe, Europe! The Dream Doesn't Die.


This video exemplifies the problems the European Union has in managing its own image. It was produced in 2012 and then recalled after being widely labeled as "racist." In some senses, it was, but it was also one of the very few attempts the Union made to present itself in ways that go beyond the dull image of a bunch of bureaucrats acting in the name of the global financial powers. Without the ability to project a positive image of itself, the Union may be doomed. But it is also true that in the recent European elections the separatist parties didn't gain as much as they had hoped to. Good dreams never die, they bide their time. And, who knows? One day, the dream of a truly United Europe might come true. 


There was a time, long ago, when the term "Europe" was a vague definition for the lands north of the Mediterranean Sea, a vast regions of fog and swamps, inhabited by hairy Barbarians. In time, the Roman Empire came to dominate the area we call today "Western Europe" but nobody would even dream to call him or herself "European." For more than a millennium, the inhabitants of this region would proudly call themselves "Romans," even though they might never have seen the city of Rome in their lives.

After that Rome fell, in the 5th century CE, the European population declined and, by 650 CE, it is estimated that it had shrunk to some 18 million people. Europe was an immense forest punctuated by castles and villages here and there, and, occasionally, by the ruins of great cities. It was the start of what we call the "dark ages," that weren't dark at all.

It was at that time that Europe arose. Not that Europe was anything like a recognized entity -- people would call themselves "Christians," but never, ever "Europeans."  But Europe had become a recognizable cultural entity. It was the result of two powerful communication tools that Europeans had inherited from the Roman Empire: the Latin language and the codices that replaced the old rolls.

Latin was the language of the Roman Legions. Then, when the legions were gone, it became the sacred language of Christianity and, at the same time, the language of commerce and of politics. Few Europeans could speak Latin, most were limited to their vernacular languages, but if rulers and merchants wanted to speak other they had to use Latin. And the Western European intellectuals couldn't even imagine to express themselves in any other language.

The other tool that created the European cultural unity was the codex. A remarkable invention: it was what we call today "book," a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar materials, bound together. The existence of books looks obvious to us, but, at the time, it was a major revolution. It allowed to store and access information in a much more efficient and rapid way than with the old rolls.

With Latin and codices, the Middle Ages became a sophisticated cultural entity that kept alive the classical literature and added much more to it. One of its features was the return of women as authors. They had been silent during Roman times, but now we hear again their voices: Hildegard Von Bingen, Marguerite Porete, Heloise, and many others. The Middle Ages were not "dark" -- they were, by all means, bookish.

By the 9th century, King Charlemagne attempted to make Europe not just a cultural entity, but a political one with his Holy Roman Empire. It was only partially successful, but with the start of the 2nd millennium, Europe had become powerful enough that it could expand out of its borders: it was the time of the crusades. There was no central European government at the time, but Europeans acted together as if there were one. The crusades saw the birth of entities that prefigured modern multinational companies: the Templar Knights were at the same time a monastic order, a military force, and a bank.

The crusades were only partially successful. The European economy peaked with the beginning of the 14th century and then collapsed with the Great Plague of mid 14th century, when Europe lost perhaps 30% of its population. Then, there came the time of the great rebound and this time Europeans engaged in the great overseas adventure that in a few centuries would lead them to dominate most of the world.

But something had gone wrong in the meantime. The process of European integration that had started in the Middle Ages ground to a halt with the "Renaissance." During the 17th century, the 30-years war saw Europeans fighting each other in what was perhaps the most destructive war ever waged in human history up to that moment. Europeans even waged a war against women: the Renaissance was the time of the great witch hunts that saw innumerable innocent women burned alive at the stake.

Over the centuries that followed, Europe never knew a moment of quiet and it disintegrated into a constellation of nation states. Enclosed within rigid and impermeable borders, these creatures were proud, touchy, and aggressive. With the 20th century, they started behaving like drunken gunmen engaged in a tavern brawl. The result was the disaster of the two world wars.

It was only in the second half of the 20th centuries that Europeans seemed to recover some of their mental sanity and started wondering what they had been doing. Was there a way to avoid new internecine wars? That was the origin of the idea of the European Community, later renamed the European Union. A movement of ideas of people genuinely convinced that Europe was a good thing that would prevent new wars. It was the first time in history when the people living in Europe would start seeing themselves as "European Citizens."

In some ways, the European Union was a success, but today it shows the problems that were not solved when it was created. States can be kept together only in two ways: by military force or by cultural bonds. Europe had known both ways in its history: during the Roman Empire, it had been turned into a single political entity by the mighty Roman Legions. Later on, it had been bound together by the common ties of the Christian culture and religion. Within some limits, the United Europe of the second half of the 20th century was the result of the might of the American legions. But legions are expensive commodities and if the American ones leave (and they will), what will keep the European states together?

Here, we see how the European Union was built on weak foundations. The European nation states had consistently refused to cede even an inch of what they saw as their divine right: that of using their national language and only that language in all occasions. The result is that Babel was reincarnated in the city of Brussels, where every statement, every document, every speech, needs to be issued in multiple versions in different languages.

National languages are much more important than colored flags, they are the essence of the concept of nation states. The failure of the founders of the European Union has been that of not pushing a European Language that would have united Europe. Perhaps it would have been possible to resurrect Latin or, more e simply, to adopt English, the de-facto international language of our times. But, instead, the founders thought that it was easier to pay the salary of a legion of interpreters who collected in Brussels like vultures on a fresh kill.

The result was a Europe of the banks rather than a Europe of Europeans. It was never loved, but accepted as long as it seemed to be able to keep the economy going. But, with the economic downturn, feelings changed. Most people tend to reason on the basis of the simplest and most schematic inferences. If the economy was going better before the European Union came, there follows that if we get rid of those ugly bureaucrats (and of the interpreters) in Brussels, things will go back to the good times and everything will be well in the best of worlds. One result was the Brexit disaster and it is a minor miracle and also a good illustration of the power of the European dream that the recent elections saw the separatists win only in some marginal regions of the Union. Overall, most Europeans still see themselves as Europeans.

But for how long can the European Union survive in its current form? Will it collapse and then bounce back? Will it become just a minor peninsula of the great Eurasian co-prosperity zone? Maybe a remote terminal station for the new silk road? And, with its mineral resources badly depleted by millennia of exploitation, can Europeans survive at all in a future where they are threatened by climate change and ecosystem collapse?

We cannot say. The only certainty is that good dreams never really die -- they bide their time. And the dream of a united Europe is not dead. It will come back, one day.




Monday, May 20, 2019

Getting rid of Debt: How About Replacing Money with Social Credit?


Mark Twain had a genial idea with his story "The One Million Pound Bank Note" published in 1853. It was such a huge amount of money that it couldn't be exchanged, yet it gave its owner all sorts of perks and goods. It was, in a certain way, an anticipation of what we call today the "social credit score" obtained on the various social media services on the Web. It is a form of money that can be owned, but cannot be exchanged -- in most cases, you can't even go negative with your social credit. So, no debt, no bankruptcy. Would it be possible to build a financial system based on this concept? Not easy, but also an idea being examined nowadays, especially in China with their state-owned social credit system (shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì). The text below is derived from the chapter on financial collapses of my new book "The Seneca Strategy," to be published in later 2019.



The whole problem of financial collapses is the result of the existence of money. But what is money exactly? Without going into the various theories of money that economists are still discussing, we can say that once, money was something that everybody agreed on: a weight of precious metals. After all, the British currency is still defined in units of weight, even though one pound (in monetary terms) does not weigh a pound (in physical terms). Still, up to not too long ago, money was simply a token representing a physical entity, typically a certain weight of gold and silver. But things changed a lot with time and, with the 20th century, the convertibility of the dollar into precious metals was more theoretical than real. In 1971 president Nixon formally canceled it. From then on, money has been a purely virtual entity created by central banks out of thin air. How people accept to be paid for their work by something that doesn’t exist is a little strange, if you think about that. But that doesn’t change the fact that money is the backbone of society: it is exchanged, lent, borrowed, distributed, spent, and more. And, with money, there comes debt, and with debt there comes insolvency and, with it, bankruptcy.

Could we think of going a step beyond the institution of bankruptcy laws and imagine a financial system where people can’t go bankrupt? This is an idea that floats nowadays in the world’s global consciousness. Perhaps the first proposal in this sense was made by Cory Doctorow in 2003 (during the pre-Facebook age) in his novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” where he proposed a kind of “merit money,” called “Whuffie,” that people could accumulate on the good deeds that they performed. This money was a form of credit, but it couldn’t be spent – it just produced perks and advantages for its owner. It was something that pre-figured the “credit score” that Facebook and other social media would later develop. Maybe Doctorow was inspired by Mark Twain’s story "The Million Pound Bank Note" (1903), where the protagonist finds that the mere possession of this banknote of enormous value entitles him with honors and goods, without the need of exchanging it. But Doctorow may have been thinking of the concept of personal honor, fashionable in less monetized times than ours. As an honorable man you were entitled to some privileges, but enjoying them didn’t mean that your honor would be reduced as a consequence.

Later on, the concept of on-line credit score was developed by social media sites such as Facebook, taking the Web by storm starting in 2004. It had been preceded by what was perhaps the first modern social media system, “Friendster” which appeared in 2002 and went bust in 2015. The variety of these sites is large today and most of them use some kind of “credit scoring” for their users. In Facebook, there is no such a thing as a negative scoring, but the possibility of rating users down exists in other social media, for instance in Reddit, where your “karma points” can go negative if you happen to utter an especially ill-thought comment.

The idea of using the social media on the Web as a form of money was proposed perhaps for the first time by Solitaire Townsend in 2013. The Chinese government seems to have taken the idea seriously and they are implementing a statewide system of social credit (shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) that's supposed to “grade” Chinese citizens on a merit score. You get positive points for being a good citizen: helping an old lady crossing the street will bring you points from the lady and from the people who witnessed the good deed you performed. You get negative points when you do something bad, like getting a traffic ticket or just a bad report from someone who felt hurt by something you did.

The Chinese social credit system can be seen as a form of money, in the sense that it is based on the yin-yang opposition of debt and credit. Having a sufficiently high social credit score is a prerequisite for being able to purchase certain things which, in the West, are not for everybody anyway, plane tickets for instance. Something similar had been developed in earlier times in the Soviet Union, where the members of the Soviet Communist Party were considered as having a higher “credit score” than the others and they enjoyed non-monetary perks and services that were denied to the normal Soviet citizens. It was the “nomenklatura” system, not so much different from what we call the “establishment” in the West.

The idea of a universal social credit score is being experimented in various forms, but in the West, it is regarded with suspicion, at the very least considered as an invasion of people’s privacy and the denial of personal freedom. There exists a site called “people” (peeple.com) trying to assign a merit score to everyone – it doesn’t seem to have been very successful, so far. But even in the proud West, there exist smaller scale credit rating systems. For decades scientists have been using “academic credits” designed to establish a pecking order among the scientists working in the same fields. Initially, the system was based just on the number of scientific publications (“papers”) that a scientist could produce. That led to the concept of “publish or perish” and to the multiplication of both papers and scientific journals in a gigantic jumble of low-quality publications. Attempts to remedy the disaster led to various schemes to grade both journals and publications. The latest, currently the most popular, version of scientific grading is called the “h-index” and it provides individual scores depending on how many times a paper published by a scientist has been cited by other scientists. The h-index system, just like all the other scoring systems in science, is based on peer evaluation, therefore it is a kind of social credit system.

The common element of these social merit systems is that points cannot be exchanged among owners. We could imagine a society fully based on a credit system where you obtain goods and services just on the basis of your credit rating. So, suppose you want a coffee, you pay for it by adding a number of credit points to the coffee shop owner/waiters, but you don’t detract these point from your score. Things get a little more complicated if you want something expensive. So, suppose you want a fancy car: you can have, say, a Ferrari if your credit score is sufficiently high. Again, the fact of “buying” a Ferrari in this way doesn’t reduce your credit score but, of course, there has to be some kind of record keeping that prevents high-score people from accumulating Ferraris as if they were toy cars. There is some similarity, here, with the way the Soviet Union market system worked. In order to have a car, you had to register on a list and wait for your turn. Years later, you could see that car delivered to you and you were erased from the list and prevented from re-enlisting from a certain time. That made sure that you wouldn’t waste the products of the people’s factories by having more than one car. But Nomenklatura members didn’t need to wait, being high in the credit score list.

So, a “reputation currency” could work, at least in a certain way. An advantage of such a system is that it may be rigged in such a way to create no negative credit (no debt). Could we eliminate the bad consequences of insolvency in this way? And, in a single sweep, we would eliminate such things as theft, robbery, corruption, swindles, and all the crimes related to money. We can imagine ways to swindle the system, but nobody ever could steal your credit rating at gunpoint!

But, obviously, there are problems with the idea. Doctorow says about his creation, the “Whuffie” money, “Reputation is a terrible currency” and that’s very true for those who are at the wrong end of the scale. Have you ever been bullied as a teen? If it happened to you, you know how hard it can be to be the boy at the lowest rung of the ladder. And the only way to move away from the bottom is to behave in the most abject way with the leaders of the group: flattering them and obeying their orders. Doing so, eventually ensures that another hapless person will eventually occupy the bottom place in the pecking order. Then, if you are a scientist, you surely know how powerful a merit score can be as a factor pushing you to conformism. If you are a young scientist, you know that your career depends on never-ever criticizing or disparaging your senior colleagues. That’s a privilege you’ll gain only after getting your tenure and even then you’ll have to be careful about displeasing the powerful dons who control the financing of research.

Doctorow understands this point very well when he says in his book

Whuffie has all the problems of money, and then a bunch more that are unique to it. In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, we see how Whuffie – despite its claims to being ‘‘meritocratic’’ – ends up pooling up around sociopathic jerks who know how to flatter, cajole, or terrorize their way to the top. Once you have a lot of Whuffie – once a lot of people hold you to be reputable – other people bend over backwards to give you opportunities to do things that make you even more reputable, putting you in a position where you can speechify, lead, drive the golden spike, and generally take credit for everything that goes well, while blaming all the screw-ups on lesser mortals.

This is similar to the situation in science nowadays. There is no “scientific bankruptcy” for scientists: their h-index, as it is now, can’t go negative. So, no matter how bad a scientist can be, there is no direct way to hit him or her with a bankruptcy sentence and remove it from the pool of the recognized scientists. This is probably the reason why it is often said that “science progresses one funeral at a time.” (a quote attributed to the German scientist Max Planck). It means that old scientists tend to block scientific progress until the natural phenomenon of biological collapse removes them from the system. It would be an interesting reform to introduce “negative points” in science and fire the scientists who manage to go negative because of one or more truly bad papers. But, before that happens, the “Whuffie trap” that Doctorow described would play its role to push scientists toward the most abject conformism. For a scientist, avoiding to be being the target of the wrath of the scientific powers that be (SPTB) could only mean that they should be extremely careful to avoid to publish or voice anything that goes against the current consensus. And that would destroy that spark of creativity that, despite all odds, science still manages to maintain, so far.

So, switching to an always positive form of money would have some advantages in the sense that it would eliminate debt and, with it, insolvency and all the related problems and traumas. But it wouldn’t in itself, change the fact that currency is just a proxy for something real, the entities we call “goods” or “commodities.” Social credit money wouldn’t do much to solve problems such as resource depletion and pollution: people would still want to consume and waste resources and those who have a high social credit would do that just in the same way as those who are rich in terms of conventional money.

In the end, money may be a virtual entity and you may also define it as the devil’s dung. But we are addicted to it and we keep playing the money game. Money is so deeply intertwined with the way our society works that we can’t even imagine how it could work without it. What could happen to us if a large financial collapse were to destroy the value of our mighty dollar? We can’t say for sure, but the mighty Globalized Empire might crumble like a house of cards in a single, huge, Seneca collapse.




Sunday, May 12, 2019

Human Extinction: An Idea Whose Time had to Come.






A few years ago, a political movement taking the name of "extinction rebellion" would have been wholly unthinkable. On the other hand, after more than forty years of warnings on climate change and ecosystem collapse from the world's best scientists, the message had to start going through, somehow. And it does.

One consequence is the appearance on the social media of a crowd of deranged, depressed, misanthropic, and generally nasty people who have decided that the extinction of humankind is what's going to happen, no matter what we do, and they even seem to like the idea. Others, fortunately, seem to think that we can still do something to avoid this manifest destiny and the consequence is the birth of the extinction rebellion movement. Can it accomplish anything? Hard to say, it sounds a little like an "asteroid rebellion" movement that dinosaurs could have created just before the end of the Cretaceous era.

These openly declared attitudes may be just the tip of the iceberg, others may well have decided that, if overpopulation is the problem, then there are quick and very dirty ways to solve it. They may be concocting dark and dire things and they won't care too much about who thinks exactly what about the likelyhood of a coming human extinction. Their only concern would be that THEY won't go extinct. But, as usual, we see the future darkly, as in a mirror, and the time when we'll see it face to face has not come, yet. 

Below, a text by "Reverse Engineer" of the Doomstead Diner who examines the question and, at the linked page, you'll find also a longer video. (U.B.)



Guest post by R.E. (Reverse Engineer).



Extinction has moved from the dark corners of the Collapse Blogosphere into the consciousness of the mainstream.  Just a few short years ago the discussion of human extinction was relegated to a few fringe websites, but not so anymore.  Now it has become Topic #1 in the discussions on many websites that concern themselves with topics of collapse.  Sometimes this comes to the exclusion of many other collapse related topics in economics, geopolitics, energy and social psychology that are impacting more directly right now.

Generally, my focus over the years has been on the economics and energy end of the spin down we are immersed in, and I don't dwell too much on the issues of extinction.  However, here on the Diner we have treated the subject to analysis on a few occasions, most notably the Human Extinction Survey, which we ran a couple of years ago.  It garnered the most respondents of any survey we have run at around 350 submissions until recently, when our Collapse Projections Survey brought in responses from over 600 Kollapsniks.  The extinction survey also inspired a month long email stream between various bloggers and pundits which was quite interesting.

I generally tend to avoid extinction discussions though for a few reasons.  First, I have discovered over the years that it attracts a certain type of reader/commenter who is often nihilistic, misanthropic and sometimes suicidally depressed.  The blog becomes consumed with the discussion of the topic while more proximal problems get ignored.  Who cares if the monetary system is going to crash if we're all gonna die anyhow, right?  It also sometimes inspires people toward counter-productive behaviors.  If we're all destined to inevitable death here no matter what, let's just Party like it's 1999!  It leads to inaction on problems we still can have an effect on as we move forward in collapse.

The timeline question becomes very important here, because if extinction is indeed going to happen, when will it actually occur?  If it's in the next 5 years say, that has one set of problems and responses, if it's going to happen in 50 there's another set.  Nobody can really finger this accurately, it's all speculation but some true believers hammer down on anyone who doesn't buy the whole ball of wax on Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE) is in denial and shooting up too much Hopium.  Amongst this crowd, hope is a bad thing to have.

Recent events however compelled me to discuss this subject in detail, which I do in today's Collapse Morning Wake-Up Call.  The first is the rise of the Extinction Rebellion movement, which recently held a week long series of often very theatrical demonstrations in London to raise consciousness and hopefully get some real ACTION out of governments to combat this problem, which looms larger each day as more climate related calamities strike in more places with incresing ferocity and frequency.all over the globe.  The second is a corollary issue of Population Overshoot, and the fact that many Millenials are now choosing to remain childless, for one reason or another.  What kind of difference will this make to our society as time marches on here?

All in all, Extinction is a difficult conundrum to deal with, a Wicked Problem.  Hopefully, I clarify some issues with this discussion, or at least lay out my position on where I stand on these issues.

Save As Many As You Can

Video
 

Monday, May 6, 2019

Are the Martyrs Coming Back? Julian Assange and the Fall of the Global Empire




And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand (Matthew. 12:25)


The more the current world drama unfolds, the more I am amazed by how closely we are following the path that the ancient Roman Empire followed toward its final collapse. Dmitry Orlov, another student of civilization collapse, seem to think in the same way. In a post on his blog, he notes how Julian Assange could be the first martyr for truth of modern times, he calls him "St. Julian." Says Orlov:

If all goes well, he (Julian Assange) will be released and reestablish himself as a media personality of great stature. And if everything goes badly and the Americans do get their hands on him and torture him to death, he will die as a martyr and live in public memory forever.

I don’t know whether Assange has been baptized, but a proper choice of saint for him would be St. Julian of Antioch, who was martyred during Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians between 303 and 313 AD. Julian was stuffed into a sack filled with sand, vipers and scorpions and dumped in the sea. Diocletian’s initiative was a failure: the son of one of his lieutenants, Constantine, not only canceled the persecution of Christians but made Christianity into Roman Empire’s state religion. He then moved its capital to New Rome (Constantinople), abandoning Old Rome to languish in the Dark Ages while his New Rome went on for a thousand glorious years.

Should Julian Assange end up martyred by the Americans, we can expect a vaguely similar result: future generations of Americans will say: “There once was a great journalist by the name of Julian. He died as a martyr for the truth. It was a long time ago, and we don’t know what’s been happening to us since then, because all we have been hearing ever since have been nothing but lies…”


I think this post by Orlov goes to the heart of the matter. A civilization collapse is, in the end, a collapse of trust. An empire, a state, a family, any social structure, can be rich or poor, powerful or weak, new or old, happy or sad, but if there is no trust keeping it together it cannot exist for long, it is like a solid turning into a gas when the chemical bonds keeping the atoms together are not strong enough. It is what happened to the Roman Empire, it is what's happening to us. As Matthew says, "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand" (12:25).

Ultimately, trust is based on truth. Without truth, there cannot be trust. In Roman times, the fight of Christianity against the Empire of Lies was more than everything else a fight to rebuild trust by establishing a new truth, the revealed one. I wrote in a previous post that:

Augustine and other early Christian fathers were engaged, first of all, in an epistemological revolution. Paulus of Tarsus had already understood this point when he had written: "now we see as in a mirror, darkly, then we'll see face to face." It was the problem of truth; how to see it? How to determine it? In the traditional view, truth was reported by a witness who could be trusted. The Christian epistemology started from that, to build up the concept of truth as the result divine revelation. The Christians were calling God himself as witness.
In the name of truth, the Christian martyrs (a Greek term meaning "witness") were willing to give their life, to die vilified and tortured in the most gruesome manners. It was the courage of the early martyrs that eventually brought down the zombie creature that the once great Roman Empire had become.

And now? We are rapidly entering a phase when the lies told to us by our governments and our elites are so huge, so pervasive, so blatant to qualify as diabolical. But in the great confusion of our times even the good among us are confused, they can't discern the truth anymore. And the time may have come when we need a new generation of Martyrs for truth is needed.




Thursday, May 2, 2019

Climate Science Deniers Start Feeling the Heat. Now it is Foot-Dragging Time!


Greta Thunberg is both a cause and an effect in the great shift that's ongoing in the public opinion about climate change. Climate science deniers are feeling the pressure and they are preparing to change their strategy. No more denying that AGW exists and that it is a danger for all of us. It is time to move to foot-dragging for profit. 



A post by Tim Ball on the despicable WUWT blog is well worth reading because it summarizes the plight of climate science deniers in the current debate. Ball says that he calls it quits because:

"you are asking people to believe that a small group of people managed to deceive the world into believing that a trace gas (0.04% of the total atmosphere) was changing the entire climate because of humans. In addition, that group convinced many others to participate in the deception. The public view is that deceiving so many is just not possible. "
Stark clear: Ball perfectly summarizes the problem for him and his band of science-deniers: how could anyone believe what they are saying? With Greta Thunberg bursting into the debate, their position is rapidly becoming untenable. So, they are shifting away from discussing whether AGW exists or not. Ball says,
"I decided to stop trying to educate people about the global deception that is AGW. ... The challenge now is to help people understand the differences between deceptively derived policies, and what is the best, most adaptive, most profitable, and most rewarding strategy for survival of the individual, business, or industry. "
And I couldn't have said it more clearly. Ball and his ilk are preparing for a war of attrition against the attempt to do something to save humankind before it is too late, all in the name of the "most profitable" strategy. 


(I know, I know, I shouldn't link to anti-science blogs, but this one is a must read -- anyway I put a no-follow clause on it. Note also a recent post by Michael Barnard on Medium that notes the same thing as I did)


Who

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome, faculty member of the University of Florence, and the author of "Extracted" (Chelsea Green 2014), "The Seneca Effect" (Springer 2017), and Before the Collapse (Springer 2019)