By the way, good story. Well written and you make several very good points about human nature.
In my earlier note I alluded to an experience I had. The country (Ecuador) actually went through an economic collapse in the late nineties. Their currency failed and they had to shut down the banking system while they figured out what to do. The banks were down a couple of weeks but it was about a month before people started getting paid again.
Accounts were instantly frozen and not returned for a year and a half and then at a fraction of the original value.
So people had to get by with what money they had in their pockets and what food they had in their pantry for about a month. So I usually use that as my mental benchmark for what a banking collapse looks like.
The thing is, people did make it through; neighbors and family pulled together. I remember guys disappearing off the job for a few days to take what money they had home to their wives. It was spooky but people there are used to hard times and it all held together. There wasn’t much more than the usual civil unrest.
Tourists probably didn’t notice. The homesteaders out in the boondocks didn’t notice.
Katrina is my other benchmark. It took about a month for things to get rolling again. Where neighbors pulled together, things seem to have gone passably well. Where they didn’t, it was hell on earth. The police were part of the problem, out of control.
When I think of economic collapse, I usually envision a third world situation after it stabilizes. Different, harder, but livable. The problem is the transition, where people do not yet know how to live, they don’t yet have the familial relations you have to have to survive, they don’t have the practical skills you have to have, and they haven’t yet formed the power hierarchy that fits the new reality. Until that happens, some people go bananas and the rest have to defend themselves from open banditry. Its that in-between between the old system and the new that is most dangerous.
But its remarkable to me the difference between Katrina, where people went crazy, and Ecuador’s complete economic meltdown that didn’t even hardly make the papers here, where people just pulled together and got on with things.
Of course, in a collapse as complete as the one you describe, the transition isn't a month, its a generation.