Prepper Recon

X Events

X Events, the Collapse of Everything is the new book by John Casti. It makes for some great bed time reading to give you that warm fuzzy feeling inside. I am sure you could guess that from the title! The author looks at several possibilities that could bring on different levels of collapse. The theme that runs throughout the book is the problem of complexity. He points out that as systems become more and more complex, they require more complex means of managing those systems. As the systems grow, be they financial systems, supply systems or information systems, they become complex beyond anyone’s ability to fully understand them. When this happens, collapse is inevitable.

A great example of this was the 2008 Mortgage Backed Securities debacle. Mortgages were bundled up into packages, then the packages were split up into Collateralized  Debt Obligations or CDO’s. These CDO’s were sold in tranches of  risk levels that payed different interest rates. As complex as it is, you may be thinking “someone came up with the idea, so they must have understood it”. They did understand it. The problem begins with the ability for the regulators to understand it. The problem extends to the buyers of the CDO’s and the record keeping as it failed to keep up with who actually owned what mortgage. When the subprime mortgages finally defaulted, no one knew who owned the property as the mortgage had been diced up, sold, repackaged and resold so many times.

As X Events points out, this level of complexity runs throughout our society. The inability to understand it by those tasked with monitoring the systems creates instability. Complexity of this magnitude exists in information systems such as the internet and is beginning to show up in our food supply lines.

X Events  also points out the fact that while any given catastrophic event may have a very low probability of occurring, the aggregate probability of one event happening is much higher. Perhaps an EMP attack has a low probability of occurring, as would a global pandemic, or worldwide famine. However the probability of one of those events occurring is much higher. In actuality, Black Swan events (rare events) in aggregate actually become White Swan events (very common events).

X Events explores in detail what could cause and how we might react to, the failure of the internet, the breakdown of the food supply system, an EMP attack or solar EMP, global pandemic, drying up of oil supplies, collapse of financial markets, and several other  X events.

The book is available on Amazon.com  and can be ordered directly by clicking the link on the top right column of this page. It is a great read.

Happy Prepping!