COOLna

Joseph Tainter’s explanation for why complex societies collapse in one sentence: the collapse of a society is a response to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.

Tainter uses ‘complexity’ pretty loosely. He’s referring to a broad set of things that include agriculture, fuel extraction, scientific research, education, and sociopolitical complexity. He notes that in any area that produces something good for a society, the lowest-hanging fruit is plucked first, and then value gets harder and harder to extract until there’s little room for improvement. States are the biggest manifestation and driver of social complexity (and I’ll talk mostly about states in the rest of the review) but he’s talking about the abstract property of a society – how large it is, how many specialized social roles it has, how many mechanisms for organizing or doing things.

In Tainter’s model, states exist to solve problems. You can think of them as either solving collective social problems, like getting big irrigation systems to work (‘integration theory’), working to placate / oppress the productive populace enough that the elite can keep extracting surplus from them (‘conflict theory’). Either way, states tend to increase in complexity in order to deal with new challenges. That increased complexity imposes greater costs per capita. When the system hits some critical point on the return curve (highest point the graph below), the next stressor makes the state try to unlock the next stage of complexity, which demands more resources than the population can bear. Peasants revolt, republics break away, and the state falls apart.

Joseph Tainter’s explanation for why complex societies collapse in one sentence: the collapse of a society is a response to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.

Tainter uses ‘complexity’ pretty loosely. He’s referring to a broad set of things that include agriculture, fuel extraction, scientific research, education, and sociopolitical complexity. He notes that in any area that produces something good for a society, the lowest-hanging fruit is plucked first, and then value gets harder and harder to extract until there’s little room for improvement. States are the biggest manifestation and driver of social complexity (and I’ll talk mostly about states in the rest of the review) but he’s talking about the abstract property of a society – how large it is, how many specialized social roles it has, how many mechanisms for organizing or doing things.

In Tainter’s model, states exist to solve problems. You can think of them as either solving collective social problems, like getting big irrigation systems to work (‘integration theory’), working to placate / oppress the productive populace enough that the elite can keep extracting surplus from them (‘conflict theory’). Either way, states tend to increase in complexity in order to deal with new challenges. That increased complexity imposes greater costs per capita. When the system hits some critical point on the return curve (highest point the graph below), the next stressor makes the state try to unlock the next stage of complexity, which demands more resources than the population can bear. Peasants revolt, republics break away, and the state falls apart.

(Tainter is clear that he doesn’t think collapse is always bad – sometimes it just means that the state falls apart into smaller components that are more the correct size to look after itself.)

At the critical point:

A complex society experiences increased adversity and dissatisfaction. Stress begins to be increasingly perceived, and if modern history is any guide, ideological strife (for example, between growth and no-growth factions) may become noticeable. The system as a whole engages in ‘scanning‘ behavior, seeking alternatives that might provide a preferable adaptation. This scanning may result in the adoption by segments of the society of a variety of new ideologies and life-styles, many of them of foreign derivation (such as the proliferation of new religions in Imperial Rome). … there may be increased investment in research and development (to the extent that declining resources permit), as solutions to declining productivity are sought, and in education, as individuals position themselves to reap a maximum share of a perceptibly faltering economy. Taxes rise, and inflation becomes noticeable. … productive units across the economic spectrum increase resistance (passive or active) to the demands of the hierarchy, or overtly attempt to break away. Both the lower ranking strata (the peasant producers of agricultural commodities) and upper ranking strata of wealthy merchants and nobility (who are often called upon to subsidize the costs of complexity) are vulnerable to such temptations.