So if this is applicable to human societies and not just to mice (which is highly, highly suspect due to the fact that mice are creatures that lack higher brain functions and humans... well, aren't), how exactly do you plan to prevent the eventual extinction of humanity? Because bearing in mind the propensity for advancing technology to create material abundance, the fact that human nature drives people to seek a better life for themselves and their children (as seen in East Germany which despite having a communist culture still had people trying to flee over the Berlin wall to West Germany), and natural human aggression that leads to societies attempting to exploit other societies that limit themselves or otherwise are reduced in some capacity (see colonialism and slavery). How exactly do you plan on creating a stable society that both will not fail due to material abundance and not be conquered militarily, culturally, or economically by those that will?
Well, Detroit is not exactly going to out compete, well, anyone in its current situation. Same with a New York that didn't suspend the trend lines and was now suffering Big Mexican city murder rates killing some 5,000 people a year by itself (about 10x as many murders for the city itself as are currently killed in the entire state: at 70 trend line murder rates of about 100 per 100,000, you would expect about 300,000 murders in the US per year if it applied to everyone).
A mouse Utopia like collapse is the weakness which leads you to be conquered, not the strength that allows you to conquer. Slums and social decadence are a weakness which hold back a country, not strengthen it.
Abundance is not really the main issue I think highlighted by the Mouse Utopia (though the mouse Utopia is of course open to interpretation). I think the bigger take away is that too dense living often, or at least can, triggers self destructive behavior: mouse utopia just shows that such a situation can produce such pathological and destructive behavior that they can even lead to the complete extinction of the colony, despite absolutely no outside pressure.
The "abundance" of the Mouse utopia I think more of an enabler of the pathology and self destructive activity rather, than a cause. For a real world example, Venezuela I think was able to become so much worse than many other "socialist" countries because the oil money provided a cushonary abundance: It sufficiently delayed the Venezuelan's from having to actually deal with the reality of what their policies and behavior was doing so that when things caught up with them, it was far too late to do any sort of easy fix: things had degraded too far for easy fixes.
I wonder if there is something like that going on in Silicon Valley, and specifically those famously gay/decadent areas of San Francisco: A gay guy who left that area looking back on the culture of it found it utterly disgusting and the culture immensely broken and self destructive. And separate from any criticism of gay/San Francisco in general culture, a large portion of your population being gay would by simple logistics pose a problem sustaining your population. But, since Silicon Valley is sucking in seemingly infinite wealth from the rest of the world, and places like San Francisco can suck up the gays of the Entire US for replenishment rather than relying on "local" sources or replacement, the general degeneracy of the West Coast which so often freaks everyone else out is much more sustainable there than elsewhere, which lets it develop to a far higher degree there than other places.
But, the problem isn't wealth itself, but "decadence" as trad-cons would say. I believe the ditributist said it something like this: "A puritan was likely much richer than a Roman, but the Puritan was much less decadent". Queen Victoria in London was probably vastly wealthier than the Ottoman Emperor in Constantinople, but the Ottoman court was much more decadent.
In summary, the Mouse Utopia mostly serves as a warning that certain living arrangements can cause such social damage that no amount of material wealth can counteract it, potentially leading to total doom. Its thus something to be aware of, and suggests additional concerns when doing urban planning. For example, living in a crowded archalology as Zor and others championed may be more destructive for human thriving and a functional human society as to more than negate, I don't know, slightly lower transport costs or less land use.
It also warns against the ways such dysfunction manifests and how dangerous to overall societal health some behaviors may be. For example, the potential that mouse Utopia shows that Gays may really be a sign of social degradation and eventual collapse: an actual harm on society, or at least a symption of a sick one, rather than a totally benign life choice.
Which of course bring you to the second solution to mouse utopia, and by far the more controversial one: moral discipline. So, for example, if children growing up in dense urban areas encourages the creation of "juvenile delinquents" as Calhoun called some of the mice in the experiments, while more ideally you change the environment in some way to make the environment less supportive of troubled youth, the other option is to simply crack down on it. In reality we do both.
Take for example New York in the 1970s: lets say that was "peak mouse Utopia" and a fair amount of the problems really were overcrowding related. Just for the sake of this excersize: the solution to this problem was two fold: first, a lot of people moved out of the city itself into the much less dense suburbs, which generally seem to be healthier places to raise families than inner cities. Two, the police force was dramatically expanded, upgraded, and began cracking down on every violation (the broken window policy) hard. So, if a city is harmful to natural social harmony and order, but they're too valuable as concentrations to let people spread out more, you can just invest into more official, formal authority to crack down forcibly on disorder before it can spiral out of control.
So, while a more rural/suburban area can get away with the police being a sheriff and a couple of deputies, an urban area may need much more forceful, aggressive law enforcement in order to maintain an acceptable amount of order.
So, those are the two solutions to Mouse Utopia problems
1) Better urban planning, which generally means something like "less dense"
2) Harsher and harder enforcement of moral discipline to counteract any "disgenic" (not the right word, but I can't think of a better one) element of city living, if city living does on its own tend to produce less functional and more self destructive people.
