The Gradual Economic Collapse Is About to Turn into a Sudden Crash – Understanding Logarithmic Decay

Logarithmic decay is like how Hemingway famously described going bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises– “Gradually, then suddenly.”

In fact logarithmic decay is great way to describe social and financial decline.

Even the rise and fall of superpowers are often logarithmic in scale. The Kingdom of France in the 1700s infamously fell gradually… then suddenly.

We can see the same logarithmic decay in the West today, and specifically the United States.

The deterioration of government finances has been gradual, then sudden. Social conflict, censorship, and the decline in basic civility has been gradual, then sudden. Even the loss of confidence in the US dollar has been gradual… and is poised to be sudden.

Back in 2009 when I started Sovereign Man, I spoke a lot about ideas that were highly controversial at the time.

I suggested that Social Security’s trust funds would run out of money. That the US government would eventually be buried by its gargantuan national debt. That the US dollar would eventually lose its international reserve dominance. That inflation and social conflict would rise.

The main thesis, quite simply, was that the US was in decline. And whenever I spoke at events, I used to talk about logarithmic decay, saying:

“As a civilization in decline, you never really know quite where you are on the curve. You could be way over here on the horizontal line, at the very beginning of the decline… or you could be standing on the precipice about to hit the vertical slide down.”

Well, now we have a much better idea of where we are on that logarithmic decay curve. Because these ideas about the national debt, inflation, social security, social conflict, etc. are no longer theories. Nor are they even remotely controversial.

Just last week, US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said in a speech that “America’s debt is a ticking time bomb”. Social Security’s looming insolvency is now openly discussed in Washington and regularly reported in the Wall Street Journal.

By the summer of 1563, all of Britain had plunged into chaos over religion and the Reformation.

King Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic church back in the 1530s, sparking a near civil war within the kingdom. Protestants killed Catholics, Catholics killed protestants, and extreme social tensions lasted for decades.

Universities were at the heart of this conflict; rather than focus on real subjects like science and mathematics, students and professors became radical social activists and turned their schools into ideological echo chambers. Sound familiar?

One of the few students who actually wanted to learn was a Scottish teenager named John Napier; Napier had been enrolled at the University of St. Andrews at the time, but he quickly realized that he would never learn a damn thing in that environment. So he dropped out… and started traveling in search of a real education.

No one quite knows exactly where he went or what he did. But when he returned to Scotland eight years later as a young man, Napier had become an intellectual giant.

You might not have ever heard of him, but John Napier was truly one of the great minds of his era.

And modern science owes a tremendous debt to his work… in particular his development of logarithms.

If it’s been a few years since you studied math (or ‘maths’ for my British friends), logarithms are the inverse of exponential functions.

Simple example: we know that 102 (or 10 squared) = 10 x 10 = 100. So, the number 10 raised to the power of 2 equals 100.

The inverse of that is to say that the ‘base 10’ logarithm of 100 = 2. Or in mathematical terms, 100 log10 = 2

Napier devised an entire system of logarithms. And this was actually a tremendous leap forward in mathematics, because logarithms made it so much easier for scientists and researchers to calculate solutions to complex problems.

The idea behind logarithmic decay is that something declines very, very slowly at first. But, over a long period of time, the rate of decline becomes faster… and faster… and faster.

If you look at it on a graph, logarithmic decay basically looks like a horizontal line that almost imperceptibly arcs gently downwards. But eventually the arc downward becomes steeper and steeper until it’s practically a vertical line down.

Logarithmic decay is like how Hemingway famously described going bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises– “Gradually, then suddenly.”

In fact logarithmic decay is great way to describe social and financial decline.

Even the rise and fall of superpowers are often logarithmic in scale. The Kingdom of France in the 1700s infamously fell gradually… then suddenly.

We can see the same logarithmic decay in the West today, and specifically the United States.