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JoshuaZ comments on How Islamic terrorists reduced terrorism in the US - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't know about the data in that database but there's other evidence for a similar conclusion. See e.g. this paper which argues that the ratio of dollars of damage done to dollars of cost has been going up. (Disclaimer: one of the authors is my twin.) They cite another paper which I have not read in citation 64 which argues that over the last 70 years smaller and smaller groups have been killing more people.
I wonder if that would be considered evidence for a much broader (and scarier) claim -- that the modern society is becoming increasingly fragile and brittle.
Or simply that societal wealth is growing. If each person is worth their lifetime output, then in societies with higher output per person, even with fixed terrorist effectiveness and cost of terrorism*, the monetary cost will increase. But this has no relevance to any sort of x-risk claim, because society is also wealthier and better able to absorb the damage without x-risk-level collapse.
* there's not really much reason to expect terrorism costs to increase over time. Guns are cheap.
And as James points out, technology does not necessarily have to be a one-way ratchet.
That's certainly true, but the interesting question remains -- is that all there is to it?
Also note that I am not talking about x-risk: if the contemporary Western society turns out to be too specialized to survive a change in the environment (a very common scenario in evolution), that doesn't mean the humans die out -- all it means is that this particular form of society didn't work out well.
This is a very interesting and important question. Is there a general trend for how robustness scales with complexity? For evolved species, there will probably be an answer that depends on their population size and reproductive strategy. For constructed things like civilizations, the answer will probably be different. Gotta run but I'll edit this comment later.
I think the general answer is the useless one: "it depends", but for the particular case of the contemporary high-tech society I get a feeling (a "prior" in local lingo) that the robustness is negatively correlated with complexity.
A notable recent example: the 2008 financial crisis.
In general, economic crashes after World War II have been small compared to many in the 19th century. For example it is sometimes estimated that the panic of 1819 had an unemployment rate around 20% at the height. Serious economic catastrophes have also been not as common.
Great Depression.
I should have been more clear -- my point isn't its severity, but rather what was seen as the greatest danger to be avoided at all costs. That greatest danger was the domino collapse of the entire global financial system and it is precisely that which led the US Fed to adopt rather unconventional methods in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
What was widely seen (correctly or not is a different and complicated issue) as the major issue was the possibility of all the big world's banks freezing up in a chain of defaults or maybe-defaults as all of them are interlinked and hold each other's debt. That didn't exist as a problem in the XIX century.
Domino effects of banks was definitely a thing in the 19th and even 18th century. Moreover, even if it did happen to the extent that the worst case situations envisioned, it isn't clear it would have been worse than 1819. And even if total unemployment did get worse, it is likely that the overall standard of living would still remain far better than any time in the 19th century. Larger events can occur but the ratchet is still slowly moving in the same direction.
Nationally. But not globally.
Nothing is clear since we're dealing with counterfactuals, but why do you believe so?
Well, I never saw an estimate for a worst case scenario with an unemployment rate as high that in 1819, but now that I state my reasoning explicitly, that sounds pretty weak.
What was the unemployment rate in 1819? A brief look at the web gave me nothing.