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Name a "pure democracy" that has ever "collapsed."
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Name me a scenario in which the tragedy of the commons would not apply. Given enough time, any pure democracy will fail. It's like the sun coming up tomorrow.
The purest democracy would be one in which people vote for everything by referendum. How long could a country that did that survive? Maybe a century?
And "collapse" should include "morph into something else" or "require bailout" to survive.
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I pointed to the Nordics because they should be closer to "collapse" than us, having voted themselves more benefits.
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Give them time. If the oil were to run dry, do you think the people would stop voting themselves more benefits? Not a chance.
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To your way of thinking, they are "mature" and we are "crass and class ambitious" (? to all of the above) so somehow your theory is that mature pure democracies are slower to collapse than crass ones except that still if they are pure then the collapse is coming inevitably just like the Incas and the Hapsburgs, except those weren't pure democracies so uh, hey, look over there!
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The tragedy of the commons problem moves slower in European countries because they are not 70% consumer driven economies. Their "maturity" also includes less class friction and antagonism toward government.
In Europe, where people have gone through millennia of wars, the ability to adapt is greater. Our history is much shorter, we've been trained to expect more (we are a spoiled culture), we've not been compelled to adapt to lower living standards very much, and distrust of authority and revolt at class stratification are defining traits of the national character. This leads me to believe that we'll vote ourselves into bankruptcy if allowed (both the rich through tax breaks and the poor through benefit demands) more quickly than a Nordic country.
Also, we're 30X, 40X the size of those countries? And we're a much more diverse population. We don't rally together and sacrifice as easily.
