You cannot use anthropic principle here. Unless you postulate some really weird distribution of risks unlike any other distribution of anything in the universe (and by the outside view you cannot do that), then if risks were likely we would have many near misses—either barely getting away from total destruction of humanity, or events that caused widespread but not complete destruction. We have neither.
Global warming and Iraq war are tiny problems, vastly below any potential to threaten survival of civilization. Totalitarian regimes have very short half-lifes. Threat of the Cuban missile crisis seems vastly overstated, especially considering how many wars by proxy United Stated and Soviet Union fought without getting anywhere close to using nuclear weapons, and how nothing indicated intention of either party to resort to nuclear attack.
Communist Russia didn’t went that badly by historical standards—standards of living when it ended were a lot higher than standard of living when it started, and if it shows anything is how remarkably resistant civilization is, restoring itself so smoothly after Stalin in such a hostile environment. You see the same pattern in China and so many other totalitarian regimes worldwide—how they get softer and more civilized given time, peace, and economic prosperity. We seem very well protected here.
Agreed that we have evidence about the distribution of risks for asteroids, nuclear war, etc, based on historical data. But we also have empirical experience with disasters that follow power-laws, so that most of the expected damage comes from the most extreme disasters:
then if risks were likely we would have many near misses
THERE HAVE BEEN NEAR MISSES!
We nearly nuked ourselves on 4 occasions that are public knowledge in the cold war.
Nazi Germany only lost WWII because Hitler made very silly mistakes. [leading plausibly to a Eurasia wide totalitarian state, which may have been stable] - I would regard the survival of neo-enlightenment Europe from WWII to be a lucky event.
shows anything is how remarkably resistant civilization is, restoring itself so smoothly after Stalin in such a hostile environment.
Russia is still a big mess, but I must admit, however, that the collapse of the USSR is a very encouraging data point. It seems that there are certain stability providing mechanisms, thanks.
You see the same pattern in China and so many other totalitarian regimes worldwide—how they get softer and more civilized given time, peace, and economic prosperity
No, I disagree. Look at Africa, for example, which seems to get more screwed over time. Also, China seems to be on the knife-edge between actually evolving to a liberal democracy and evolving to a techno-enabled totalitarian dystopia. Look at the great firewall, Tinanamen square, organ harvesting from political dissidents, etc.
The genetic bottleneck around the time of the eruption was not as “near” as all that—in part since there were Neanderthals around at that time as an additional backup mechanism, complementing the surviving humans. Plus, of course, Homo floresiensis! ;-)
Figures from before the eruption appear to have not been dramatically higher:
Scientists from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in the U.S. have calculated that 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors were spreading through Africa, Europe and Asia, there were probably only around 18,500 individuals capable of breeding (and no more than 26,000).
True. I had forgotten the genetic bottleneck. Also I think I conflated the risks that will increase with technology (Nukes, Bio, Totalitarian) with the risks that were the actual closest near misses—the anthropic principle doesn’t care.
The proposed genetic bottleneck around the time of the eruption was long ago—when the human population may have been very small anyway. Today, we have six billion humans. There are better defenses against such things—in terms of stocked underground bunkers. So: a modern volcanic eruption would have to be vastly more destructive to kill all humans. The probabilities involved are miniscule, and shrink with every passing day. It is only because of a “Pascal’s wager”-style argument that people can be made to consider such risks.
Nazi Germany only lost WWII because Hitler made very silly mistakes.
I can’t find it, but there’s an article explaining how the Axis was more or less doomed from the start. In short, United States had twice the production capacity than all other participants combined. I’m saying Hitler’s mistakes only hastened the inevitable.
I’m not sure we should argue politics but… American intervention was not inevitable. Even merely materiale supply wasn’t inevitable. There were a number of ways America could’ve been out of the picture or impotent; one of the cited turning points/mistakes was the failure of the Battle of Britain to bring England to terms, or the escape of their army at Dunkirk.
Letting America into the war was arguably one of Hitler’s greatest mistakes (either by commission or omission, and there was even a historical parallel warning against America that Hitler was intimately familiar with—WWI).
America may’ve been tops in industry, but it’s hard to see it launching a transoceanic invasion into Europe with no allied powers closer than… Africa? Asia?
United States had twice the production capacity than all other participants combined.
Seems implausible to me, and also it seems to me that this would not be sufficient evidence to claim that Axis was almost certainly doomed from the start, though it would push that way.
Also, consider this in relation to Carl’s point about long-tailed power-law risk distributions. The fact that WWII was only a quite near miss as opposed to a very very near miss then looks less reassuring.
I see that the US’s GDP (a good proxy, I think, for industrial production, was 800 at the start of the war, while total Axis GDP was 685. The rest of the Allies represented 829. So by itself, the US was 17% more than the entire Axis alliance, and just under half of the Allies (ie. the rest of the world). Pretty impressive.
The last column has the USA at 1474, or >3x total Axis output (466), and is at 64% of Allies. Incidentally, this means at the end of the war, the US was >2x what the Axis were at the beginning of the war. So the US did not have twice what the rest of the world had; but it did have twice the Axis by the end, and presumably this was foreseeable. So we can change Smith’s point from being that the USA could industrially epic pwn the Axis, to merely pwn them.
We /did/ nuke each other—in Japan. Some people even died. Civilisation however, did not end. It seems pretty speculative to classify 20th century history as some sort of “near miss”. 6 billion humans represents the enormous success of our species—each human is a backup copy of our DNA. To classify this as a “near disaster” seems strange.
Civilisation however, did not end. It seems pretty speculative to classify 20th century history as some sort of “near miss”.
The use of two kiloton yield weapons in a one-sided war in Japan is not exactly the same thing as the use of nearly 100,000 megaton yield weapons in the cold war. In terms of pure explosive yield, the situations differ by a factor of 100,000,000, so I call bullshit on your analogy.
That hypothetical explosion never happened. Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me. If you want to “establish that there are actually such things as serious existential risks and major civilization-level catastrophes” then invoking things that never happened seems like rather weak evidence.
I am invoking the near misses in the cold war. But now you have changed your tack from “Civilisation however, did not end” (i.e. the effect of a nuclear war is not an existential disaster) to “Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me”, which doesn’t really matter. What the probability is is what matters, which you didn’t comment about.
I did—I said your estimate of a “near miss” was “speculative”. In fact, the world didn’t end, and you haven’t presented evidence that that was actually a likely outcome. Calling the “cold war” a “near miss” doesn’t count for very much. We had zero use of nuclear weapons in anger during that era.
We’re much safer against even very rare natural disasters like Toba (and others that act through climate) than it was historically. The kind of disaster that could wipe as out gets less and less probable every decade. I’m not even sure if the kind of asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs would be enough to wipe out humanity now, given a few years of prior warning (well, it would kill most people, but that’s not even close to getting rid of the entire humanity).
I seriously dispute the idea that we were very close to nuclear war. I even more seriously dispute the idea that it would have any long term effects on human civilization if it happened. Even in the middle of WW2 people’s life expectancy was far higher than historically typical, violence death rates were far lower, and I’d even take a guess that average personal freedoms compared quite well to the historical record.
Whether those catastrophes could destroy present humanity wasn’t the point, which was whether or not near misses in potential extinction events have ever occurred during our past.
Consider it that way : under your assumptions of our world being more robust nowadays, what would count as a near miss today, would certainly have wiped the frailer humanity out back then; conversely what counted as a near miss back then, would not be nearly that bad nowadays.
This basically means, by constraining the definition of a “near miss” in that way, that it is impossible to show any such near miss in our history. That is at best one step away from saying we’re actually safe and shouldn’t worry all that much about existential risks.
Speaking of which, when arguing the definition of an existential risk, and from that arguing that such catastrophes as a nuclear war, aren’t existential risks, blurs the point.
Let us rephrase the question : how much would you want to avoid a nuclear war, or a supereruption, or an asteroid strike ? How much effort, time, money should we put into the cause of avoiding such catastrophes ?
While it is true a catastrophe that doesn’t wipe out humanity forever, isn’t as bad as one that does, such an event can still be awfully bad, and deserving of our attention and efforts, so as to prevent it. We’re talking billions of human lives lost or spent in awful conditions for decades, centuries, millennia, etc. If that is no cause to serious worry, pray tell what is ?
Total extinction has expected value that’s pretty much indistinguishable from minus infinity.
Global thermonuclear war? Oh sure it would kill some people but expected number of deaths and amount of suffering from let’s say malaria or lack of access to fresh water in the next 100 years is far higher than expected death and suffering from a global thermonuclear war in the next 100 years.
Even our most recent total war, WW2, killed laughably small portion of the fighting population relative to historical norms. There’s no reason to suspect WW3 would be any different, so number of deaths would most likely be rather limited. And as countries with low birth rates (that is pretty much all countries today) have historical record of trying very hard not to get into any war that could endanger their population (as opposed to send bombs to other countries and such), chance of such a war is tiny.
So let’s say 1% chance of global thermonuclear war killing 100 million people in the next 100 years (expected 1 million deaths) versus 1 million deaths a year from malaria, and 2 from diarrhea. I think we have our priorities wrong if we care about global thermonuclear wars much.
(of course people might disagree with these estimates, in which case they would see a global thermonuclear war as more important issue than me)
Under those assumptions your estimates are sound, really. However, should we only count the direct deaths incurred as a consequence of a direct nuclear strike ? Or should we also take into account the nuclear fallout, radiations, nuclear winter, ecosystems crashing down, massive economy and infrastructure disruption, etc. ? How much more worse does it get if we take such considerations into account ?
Aside from those considerations, I really agree with your idea of getting our priorities right, based on numbers. That’s exactly the reason why I’d advocate antiagathic research above a lot of other things, which actually kill and make less people suffer than aging itself does, but not everyone seems to agree to that.
Right now 350–500 million people a year suffer from malaria, billions live in places of massive economy and infrastructure disruption, and with health prospects most likely worse than first world person would have in post-thermonuclear-war environment.
I doubt fallout would be that bad in the long term. Sure, there would be higher cancer rate, but people would abandon the most irradiated places, take some precautions, and the overall loss of healthy lifespan would most likely be of the same order of magnitude as a couple of decades of progress of medicine. For all I know people after a potential 2100 thermonuclear warfare might live longer and healthier than us.
Right now 350–500 million people a year suffer from malaria, billions live in places of massive economy and infrastructure disruption, and with health prospects most likely worse than first world person would have in post-thermonuclear-war environment.
And what do you think the effect of a full-scale global nuclear war on the poorest one fifth of the world would be?
Do you think that they would be unaffected or not affected much?
Swapping nuclear warfare for end of third world poverty would be a good exchange for most people. And nuclear warfare is a remote possibility, while third world poverty is real and here with us now.
Also notice how much better is life in Hiroshima compared to Congo.
What should be realized here, however, is that Hiroshima could become a relatively ok place because it could receive a huge amount of help for being part of the country with such a high GDP.
Hiroshima didn’t magically get better. A large scale nuclear war would destroy our economy, and thus our capability to respond and patch the damage that way. For that matter, I’m not even sure our undisturbed response systems could be able to deal with more than a few nuked cities.
Also please consider that Hiroshima was nuked by a 18 kt bomb, which is nothing like the average 400 − 500 kt nukes we have now.
How could it receive huge amounts of help if in 1949 where rebuilding started Japan did not have high GDP? Now we have a lot higher GDP, and if all our major cities are too expensive to rebuild, we can just move to other cities.
Based on similar situations (WW2, fall of Soviet Union), disruption of economy will most likely not last long, so people after global nuclear war will most likely have plenty of money to use.
Yes indeed. Do you expect that to remain true after a nuclear war too ? More basically, I suppose I could resume my idea as follows : you can poke a hole in a country’s infrastructure or economy, and the hole will heal with time because the rest is still healthy enough to help with that—just as a hole poked into a life form can heal, provided that the hole isn’t big enough to kill the thing, or send it into a downward spiral of degeneration.
But yes, society isn’t quite an organism in the same sense. There you probably could have full scale cataplasia, and see something survive someplace, and perhaps even from there, start again from scratch (or better, or worse, than scratch).
As I said, economy of countries destroyed after WW1 and WW2 picked up where it left extremely quickly, and definitely did not result in lasting return to stone age as some imagine. This makes me guess the economic disruption of a global thermonuclear war wouldn’t be that long either.
This is an outside view, and it’s pretty clear, but I understand some people would rather take an inside view, which would be much more pessimistic.
I think you have some typos in your last paragraph that may reverse some of the meaning. So I can’t tell if I agree with you. In particular, I’m concerned with the conjunction of totalitarian issues with standard of living.
It’s certainly true that China and the USSR give examples of peaceful rollback of totalitarian regimes (partial in the USSR and complete in China). The USSR looks to me to have had continually increasing standard of living, including under Stalin, with the lone exception of the war. So totalitarian aspects of a regime may be rather independent of wealth.
You cannot use anthropic principle here. Unless you postulate some really weird distribution of risks unlike any other distribution of anything in the universe (and by the outside view you cannot do that), then if risks were likely we would have many near misses—either barely getting away from total destruction of humanity, or events that caused widespread but not complete destruction. We have neither.
Global warming and Iraq war are tiny problems, vastly below any potential to threaten survival of civilization. Totalitarian regimes have very short half-lifes. Threat of the Cuban missile crisis seems vastly overstated, especially considering how many wars by proxy United Stated and Soviet Union fought without getting anywhere close to using nuclear weapons, and how nothing indicated intention of either party to resort to nuclear attack.
Communist Russia didn’t went that badly by historical standards—standards of living when it ended were a lot higher than standard of living when it started, and if it shows anything is how remarkably resistant civilization is, restoring itself so smoothly after Stalin in such a hostile environment. You see the same pattern in China and so many other totalitarian regimes worldwide—how they get softer and more civilized given time, peace, and economic prosperity. We seem very well protected here.
Agreed that we have evidence about the distribution of risks for asteroids, nuclear war, etc, based on historical data. But we also have empirical experience with disasters that follow power-laws, so that most of the expected damage comes from the most extreme disasters:
http://hanson.gmu.edu/collapse.pdf
Thanks Carl, that paper is extremely relevant
It seems reasonable to me that the distribution of risks will change as technology improves. And technology is improving faster and faster.
correct
THERE HAVE BEEN NEAR MISSES!
We nearly nuked ourselves on 4 occasions that are public knowledge in the cold war.
Nazi Germany only lost WWII because Hitler made very silly mistakes. [leading plausibly to a Eurasia wide totalitarian state, which may have been stable] - I would regard the survival of neo-enlightenment Europe from WWII to be a lucky event.
Russia is still a big mess, but I must admit, however, that the collapse of the USSR is a very encouraging data point. It seems that there are certain stability providing mechanisms, thanks.
No, I disagree. Look at Africa, for example, which seems to get more screwed over time. Also, China seems to be on the knife-edge between actually evolving to a liberal democracy and evolving to a techno-enabled totalitarian dystopia. Look at the great firewall, Tinanamen square, organ harvesting from political dissidents, etc.
Toba supereruption and genetic bottleneck probably strongest example of near-miss.
The genetic bottleneck around the time of the eruption was not as “near” as all that—in part since there were Neanderthals around at that time as an additional backup mechanism, complementing the surviving humans. Plus, of course, Homo floresiensis! ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory estimates we got down to the last 5,000-10,000 backup copies of the human genome.
Figures from before the eruption appear to have not been dramatically higher:
http://www.physorg.com/news183278038.html
There just weren’t that many homos around at the time.
True. I had forgotten the genetic bottleneck. Also I think I conflated the risks that will increase with technology (Nukes, Bio, Totalitarian) with the risks that were the actual closest near misses—the anthropic principle doesn’t care.
The proposed genetic bottleneck around the time of the eruption was long ago—when the human population may have been very small anyway. Today, we have six billion humans. There are better defenses against such things—in terms of stocked underground bunkers. So: a modern volcanic eruption would have to be vastly more destructive to kill all humans. The probabilities involved are miniscule, and shrink with every passing day. It is only because of a “Pascal’s wager”-style argument that people can be made to consider such risks.
I can’t find it, but there’s an article explaining how the Axis was more or less doomed from the start. In short, United States had twice the production capacity than all other participants combined. I’m saying Hitler’s mistakes only hastened the inevitable.
I’m not sure we should argue politics but… American intervention was not inevitable. Even merely materiale supply wasn’t inevitable. There were a number of ways America could’ve been out of the picture or impotent; one of the cited turning points/mistakes was the failure of the Battle of Britain to bring England to terms, or the escape of their army at Dunkirk.
Letting America into the war was arguably one of Hitler’s greatest mistakes (either by commission or omission, and there was even a historical parallel warning against America that Hitler was intimately familiar with—WWI).
America may’ve been tops in industry, but it’s hard to see it launching a transoceanic invasion into Europe with no allied powers closer than… Africa? Asia?
Seems implausible to me, and also it seems to me that this would not be sufficient evidence to claim that Axis was almost certainly doomed from the start, though it would push that way.
Also, consider this in relation to Carl’s point about long-tailed power-law risk distributions. The fact that WWII was only a quite near miss as opposed to a very very near miss then looks less reassuring.
Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
I see that the US’s GDP (a good proxy, I think, for industrial production, was 800 at the start of the war, while total Axis GDP was 685. The rest of the Allies represented 829. So by itself, the US was 17% more than the entire Axis alliance, and just under half of the Allies (ie. the rest of the world). Pretty impressive.
The last column has the USA at 1474, or >3x total Axis output (466), and is at 64% of Allies. Incidentally, this means at the end of the war, the US was >2x what the Axis were at the beginning of the war. So the US did not have twice what the rest of the world had; but it did have twice the Axis by the end, and presumably this was foreseeable. So we can change Smith’s point from being that the USA could industrially epic pwn the Axis, to merely pwn them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
(fixed link)
Thanks; edited.
Thank you for providing Data.
We /did/ nuke each other—in Japan. Some people even died. Civilisation however, did not end. It seems pretty speculative to classify 20th century history as some sort of “near miss”. 6 billion humans represents the enormous success of our species—each human is a backup copy of our DNA. To classify this as a “near disaster” seems strange.
The use of two kiloton yield weapons in a one-sided war in Japan is not exactly the same thing as the use of nearly 100,000 megaton yield weapons in the cold war. In terms of pure explosive yield, the situations differ by a factor of 100,000,000, so I call bullshit on your analogy.
That hypothetical explosion never happened. Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me. If you want to “establish that there are actually such things as serious existential risks and major civilization-level catastrophes” then invoking things that never happened seems like rather weak evidence.
I am invoking the near misses in the cold war. But now you have changed your tack from “Civilisation however, did not end” (i.e. the effect of a nuclear war is not an existential disaster) to “Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me”, which doesn’t really matter. What the probability is is what matters, which you didn’t comment about.
I did—I said your estimate of a “near miss” was “speculative”. In fact, the world didn’t end, and you haven’t presented evidence that that was actually a likely outcome. Calling the “cold war” a “near miss” doesn’t count for very much. We had zero use of nuclear weapons in anger during that era.
Well, there possibly was the Toba supereruption, which would fit being a near miss.
Arguably, we were very close too during the cold war, and several times over—not total extinction, but a nuclear war would’ve left us very crippled.
We’re much safer against even very rare natural disasters like Toba (and others that act through climate) than it was historically. The kind of disaster that could wipe as out gets less and less probable every decade. I’m not even sure if the kind of asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs would be enough to wipe out humanity now, given a few years of prior warning (well, it would kill most people, but that’s not even close to getting rid of the entire humanity).
I seriously dispute the idea that we were very close to nuclear war. I even more seriously dispute the idea that it would have any long term effects on human civilization if it happened. Even in the middle of WW2 people’s life expectancy was far higher than historically typical, violence death rates were far lower, and I’d even take a guess that average personal freedoms compared quite well to the historical record.
Whether those catastrophes could destroy present humanity wasn’t the point, which was whether or not near misses in potential extinction events have ever occurred during our past.
Consider it that way : under your assumptions of our world being more robust nowadays, what would count as a near miss today, would certainly have wiped the frailer humanity out back then; conversely what counted as a near miss back then, would not be nearly that bad nowadays. This basically means, by constraining the definition of a “near miss” in that way, that it is impossible to show any such near miss in our history. That is at best one step away from saying we’re actually safe and shouldn’t worry all that much about existential risks.
Speaking of which, when arguing the definition of an existential risk, and from that arguing that such catastrophes as a nuclear war, aren’t existential risks, blurs the point. Let us rephrase the question : how much would you want to avoid a nuclear war, or a supereruption, or an asteroid strike ? How much effort, time, money should we put into the cause of avoiding such catastrophes ?
While it is true a catastrophe that doesn’t wipe out humanity forever, isn’t as bad as one that does, such an event can still be awfully bad, and deserving of our attention and efforts, so as to prevent it. We’re talking billions of human lives lost or spent in awful conditions for decades, centuries, millennia, etc. If that is no cause to serious worry, pray tell what is ?
Total extinction has expected value that’s pretty much indistinguishable from minus infinity.
Global thermonuclear war? Oh sure it would kill some people but expected number of deaths and amount of suffering from let’s say malaria or lack of access to fresh water in the next 100 years is far higher than expected death and suffering from a global thermonuclear war in the next 100 years.
Even our most recent total war, WW2, killed laughably small portion of the fighting population relative to historical norms. There’s no reason to suspect WW3 would be any different, so number of deaths would most likely be rather limited. And as countries with low birth rates (that is pretty much all countries today) have historical record of trying very hard not to get into any war that could endanger their population (as opposed to send bombs to other countries and such), chance of such a war is tiny.
So let’s say 1% chance of global thermonuclear war killing 100 million people in the next 100 years (expected 1 million deaths) versus 1 million deaths a year from malaria, and 2 from diarrhea. I think we have our priorities wrong if we care about global thermonuclear wars much.
(of course people might disagree with these estimates, in which case they would see a global thermonuclear war as more important issue than me)
Under those assumptions your estimates are sound, really. However, should we only count the direct deaths incurred as a consequence of a direct nuclear strike ? Or should we also take into account the nuclear fallout, radiations, nuclear winter, ecosystems crashing down, massive economy and infrastructure disruption, etc. ? How much more worse does it get if we take such considerations into account ?
Aside from those considerations, I really agree with your idea of getting our priorities right, based on numbers. That’s exactly the reason why I’d advocate antiagathic research above a lot of other things, which actually kill and make less people suffer than aging itself does, but not everyone seems to agree to that.
Right now 350–500 million people a year suffer from malaria, billions live in places of massive economy and infrastructure disruption, and with health prospects most likely worse than first world person would have in post-thermonuclear-war environment.
I doubt fallout would be that bad in the long term. Sure, there would be higher cancer rate, but people would abandon the most irradiated places, take some precautions, and the overall loss of healthy lifespan would most likely be of the same order of magnitude as a couple of decades of progress of medicine. For all I know people after a potential 2100 thermonuclear warfare might live longer and healthier than us.
And what do you think the effect of a full-scale global nuclear war on the poorest one fifth of the world would be?
Do you think that they would be unaffected or not affected much?
By 2100 hopefully we won’t have the third world any more.
Swapping nuclear warfare for end of third world poverty would be a good exchange for most people. And nuclear warfare is a remote possibility, while third world poverty is real and here with us now.
Also notice how much better is life in Hiroshima compared to Congo.
What should be realized here, however, is that Hiroshima could become a relatively ok place because it could receive a huge amount of help for being part of the country with such a high GDP.
Hiroshima didn’t magically get better. A large scale nuclear war would destroy our economy, and thus our capability to respond and patch the damage that way. For that matter, I’m not even sure our undisturbed response systems could be able to deal with more than a few nuked cities. Also please consider that Hiroshima was nuked by a 18 kt bomb, which is nothing like the average 400 − 500 kt nukes we have now.
How could it receive huge amounts of help if in 1949 where rebuilding started Japan did not have high GDP? Now we have a lot higher GDP, and if all our major cities are too expensive to rebuild, we can just move to other cities.
Based on similar situations (WW2, fall of Soviet Union), disruption of economy will most likely not last long, so people after global nuclear war will most likely have plenty of money to use.
Yes indeed. Do you expect that to remain true after a nuclear war too ? More basically, I suppose I could resume my idea as follows : you can poke a hole in a country’s infrastructure or economy, and the hole will heal with time because the rest is still healthy enough to help with that—just as a hole poked into a life form can heal, provided that the hole isn’t big enough to kill the thing, or send it into a downward spiral of degeneration.
But yes, society isn’t quite an organism in the same sense. There you probably could have full scale cataplasia, and see something survive someplace, and perhaps even from there, start again from scratch (or better, or worse, than scratch).
As I said, economy of countries destroyed after WW1 and WW2 picked up where it left extremely quickly, and definitely did not result in lasting return to stone age as some imagine. This makes me guess the economic disruption of a global thermonuclear war wouldn’t be that long either.
This is an outside view, and it’s pretty clear, but I understand some people would rather take an inside view, which would be much more pessimistic.
I think you have some typos in your last paragraph that may reverse some of the meaning. So I can’t tell if I agree with you. In particular, I’m concerned with the conjunction of totalitarian issues with standard of living.
It’s certainly true that China and the USSR give examples of peaceful rollback of totalitarian regimes (partial in the USSR and complete in China). The USSR looks to me to have had continually increasing standard of living, including under Stalin, with the lone exception of the war. So totalitarian aspects of a regime may be rather independent of wealth.