People in societies where living standards are falling and there are way too many legal regulations always love to yell for "reforms", without realizing that they're just asking for a different set of regulations. The only real, sustainable "reform" would be to roll back a majority of regulations, put faith in citizens' maturity, and punish individual violations of general morality more consistently. After all, the only truly universal moral principle is: "Your freedom only goes as far as it touches someone else's freedom."

But that would take a deep understanding of how things connect, like the way morality shapes people's everyday realities. And as a species, we're nowhere close to that yet. So this cycle of rise, fall, crisis is gonna keep repeating every 80 to 100 years for a good while longer.