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That's actually a recognized common stage in the collapse of civilizations.
I first came across it in Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. I don't remember the specific terminology - it's been too many years since I read it - but the upshot is exactly as outlined in this article. When a civilization is circling the drain, it's not uncommon for people to try to extract as much material wealth from it as they can - to get while the gettin's good. And that of course just accelerates the process.
This isn’t the term, but I remember reading piece years ago discussing the concept of catabolic capitalism, which has a similar vibe; basically capitalism runs out of new frontiers to mercilessly exploit, and it retools to eat itself. So you end up with an economy (very much like the one we have now) where all growth is in dismantling and busting out the infrastructures and institutions previously erected to support the previous phase.
That's actually another thing Toynbee talks about, except in more general terms.
The broad concept is that early in a civilization's life, it's growing and expanding - building principles and values as well as infrastructure and industries, all with the goal of making life better and/or easier.
Then a successful civilization enters a stage of passive neglect - the earlier generations built a system by which people could live lives of relative ease and comfort, so that's what the later generations do.
But then things start to wear out and break down and fall apart and rot, and the current generations are neither inclined nor equipped to build from scratch, so they instead start cannibalizing parts of the system to maintain other parts of the system. And so on...
Yes I heard an anecdote that describes this trajectory well on a podcast recently: when a society or economy is at the beginning of a development arc, each mile of sewer, road, power, rail, etc can be justified, as it leads to economic growth that was not possible yet. But like you say, 50-100 years later all of that infrastructure requires replacement, maintenance . And the problem is, that investment does not deliver growth, it simply maintains the economic base you already have. So you’d have to be a really long term thinking society and factor in replacement costs in upfront somehow, which would make development substantially more expensive, all for a population that doesn’t exist yet, that you won’t know… a staggeringly difficult ask.
Ah - thanks for that.
The specific reason why it works out that way is somerhing I understood on essentially a gut level (as I would assume many do), but I hadn't framed it in specific terms. And that summed it up neatly.
It do feel like that lol
Thanks for something to add to the reading list. By material wealth do you mean things that would be valuable post money?
Yes - "material" is used the same way it's used in philosophy - to denote something with a tangible, physical existence.
Well yeah it takes of money to fund militias to guard your slaves and keep them from rising against you like some sort of democracy
As an old saying goes, the rats are the first to jump from a sinking ship