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Not anymore. Societies fall, but they fall a fixed distance before they restructure and recover, and they start a little higher every year.
I look at the failed states index and it makes me pessimistic.
If you really want to get pessimistic, read Collapse, by Jared Diamond. It shows how a complex, apparently functioning society can totally fall apart in way less time than you might expect.
I read that book a while ago. My memory is that the societies he examined were in very fragile environments, much more fragile than most places people are.
He argues that how fragile an environment is, depends on the demands placed on it by it inhabitants. The Mayan Yucatan, Haiti, and Rwanda were not particularly fragile, but every place has a limit.
You're right; I was just remembering the easter island and greenland bits.
Many of those failed states are states which have been failed for quite a long time. It is extremely rare for a state to be in good shape and then get to very bad shape.
It's not the ones at the bottom I'm concerned with.
Many of the ones rated "Moderate" don't seem stable for our purposes here, which are slightly different than the list's compilers'. We want to see countries that are unlikely to have a sufficiently bad shock over the next century and a half or so, the index is concerned with related but different things including refugees and factionalization of elites.
A good example of what I'm talking about is Kuwait. As far as I can tell it deserves its place in the same category as the United States, near the bottom of it with the US near the top. But its geographical position makes it extremely unreliable as a possibly stable place for the next few centuries.