Comment by m0llusk
4 years ago
Geoffrey West has some really good work on this. What happens most of the time is that new alternative technologies and ways come in and change the whole context around. That is, the old civilization really does collapse in a sense but a new and different one takes its place. A good recent example of this is the "green revolution" which for better or worse created a burst of productivity in agriculture that has so far sustained ongoing population growth that previous agricultural traditions could not have supported.
The Santa Fe Institute (of which Geoffrey is a member) is explicitly dedicated to complex systems research. They tend to take some theoretical stances certain fields might consider controversial, but there's a lot of smart people there nonetheless. I'd also recommend Marten Scheffer's work on the stability of complex systems as particularly relevant to this thread.