In 2017, Bardi published a book titled The Seneca Effect: When Growth is Slow but Collapse is Rapid, named as the Roman philosopher and writer Seneca, who wrote Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid (Letters to Lucilius, 91.6):[1] Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed by a single day.
Nay, he who has said "a day" has granted too long a postponement to swift-coming misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires!
Bardi concluded that rapid collapse is not a flaw, or "bug" as he terms it, but a "varied and ubiquitous phenomena" with multiple causes and resultant pathways.
[1][3] One of the model's main practical applications has been to describe the resultant outcomes given the condition of a global shortage of fossil fuels.
[1] Unlike the symmetrical Hubbert curve fossil fuel model, the Seneca cliff model shows material asymmetry, where the global rate of decline in fossil fuel production is far steeper than forecasted by the Hubbert curve.