PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXVI: Four Lost Cities, by Annalee Newitz "Hexapodia" Is the Key Insight: by Noah Smith & Brad DeLong

Key Insights:
* There is a perspective from which “today” means “post-Ordovician”
* Catul-Huyuk as 900 families living cheek-by-jowl, and after 1500 years… people leave…
* Angkor’s uniquely vulnerable water reservoirs… and eventually… people leave…
* Cahokia’s sophisticated organization of labor… but eventually… people leave…
* Pompeii… well, we know why people flee all-of-a-sudden…
* Cities are magical places, but not always, and not forever…
* Cities suffer from abandonment when an overdetermined disaster hits a sclerotic system: you can deal with politics, you can deal with climate change by themselves, but…
* Question: Will Detroit or Miami or Houston be the next “lost city” in the U.S.?
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Annalee Newitz: Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021) https://www.google.com/books/edition/Four_Lost_Cities_A_Secret_History_of_the/l6K6DwAAQBAJ>
* Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies/YdW5wSPJXIoC>

+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (New York: Tor, 1992) https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>





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