The Collapse of Complex Societies
One of Clay Shirky’s all-time great blog posts is The Collapse of Complex Business Models. As the title indicates, it’s about business, but he starts off by ripping a much broader thesis by Joseph Tainter:
In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.
The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.
Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.
Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.
When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.
Please write an essay describing whether and how Tainter’s thesis applies to welfare states undergoing demographic slide. You have four hours.
Clay Shirky is a fool and a fraud.
— Freddie · Aug 6, 01:15 PM · #
I suppose this supports my oft-stated thesis that if we’d eliminate agricultural subsidies and price supports, the entire welfare-police state establishment would collapse.
Well, I was kind of hoping it would just be the corrupt, leftwing power structure that would collapse, and that it wouldn’t take all of society with it. But I’m reading Pier Vitebsky’s book about the “reindeer people” of Siberia. He explains how the Soviet Union tried to destroy the Eveny and Evenky reindeer-herding societies (not completely unlike the way we destroyed Native American societies in our country, even if we in the U.S. used the technique of denunciation and summary execution to a lesser extent). It broke up families as economic and social units, sent kids to boarding schools so they would be away from the influence of their parents, made everyone dependent on state-run management and provision of goods. But when the Soviet Union collapsed (i.e. when the value of their system turned negative) these communities didn’t recover and get their old relationships back. They instead accelerated the pace of self-destruction.
— The Reticulator · Aug 6, 01:41 PM · #
“Well, I was kind of hoping it would just be the corrupt, leftwing power structure that would collapse, and that it wouldn’t take all of society with it.”
Considering that Sarah Palin is one of the leading contenders to lead the right wing power structure, I’d say collapse on that side is already well underway.
Mike
— MBunge · Aug 6, 02:44 PM · #
We can muddle through the massive economic body-blow the combination of demographics, deficit spending and lack of foresight will deal us in the next 10-20 years. Once the challenge becomes blindingly obvious, we’ll act – if though the price we pay for waiting until the last minute will be high. What the West can’t overcome is the demographic challenge. The U.S. will muddle through with later retirement ages, much higher taxes and lower standards of living, but quickly cease to be the superpower it is now. How can we afford to police the world when Medicare / Social Security will make up our entire current federal budget? We’ll hunker down and let the world do what it will.
The welfare states in Europe could also survive,albeit with lower standards of living, but their demographics mean that they will simply be swamped by Islam. They have no culture-wide desire to exist and soon won’t.
In our lifetime, the world will be mostly post-Western as Enlightenment based societies wither away with a whimper.
— Josh · Aug 6, 03:13 PM · #
From Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:”
“The conduct which the emperor Probus had adopted in the disposal of the vanquished was imitated by Diocletian and his associates. The captive barbarians, exchanging death for slavery, were distributed among the provincials and assigned to those districts (in Gaul the territories of Amiens, Beauvais, Cambray, Treves, Langres, and Troyes are particularly specified) which had been depopulated by the calamities of war. They were usefully employed as shepherds and husbandmen but were denied the exercise of arms, except when it was found expedient to enroll them in the military service. Nor did the emperors refuse the property of lands with a less servile tenure to such of the barbarians as solicited the protection of Rome. They granted a settlement to several colonies of the Carpi, the Basternae, and the Sarmatians, and by a dangerous indulgence permitted them in some measure to retain their national manners and independence. Among the provincials it was a subject of flattering exaltation that the barbarian, so lately an object of terror, now cultivated their lands, drove their cattle to the neighboring fair, and contributed to his labor to the public plenty. They congratulated their masters on the powerful accession of subjects and soldiers; but they forgot to observe that secret enemies, insolent from favor or desperate from oppression, were introduced into the heart of the empire.”
— Steve Sailer · Aug 6, 05:37 PM · #
This post is fine if you look past the misuse of the term ‘complexity’ and the overstated imprecision of the term ‘collapse’, along with the absence of rigorous, systems theoretical terms like ‘phase’, ‘attractor’, and ‘self-organized criticality’. I would have even settled for ‘accretion’ and ‘intertia’ and something kinda sorta about thermodynamics.
— KVS · Aug 6, 09:34 PM · #
Actually, PEG, I apologize. I’m glad you posted this. The contempt of the specialist is one of the worst things in the world.
And watch out for that intertia.
— KVS · Aug 6, 09:37 PM · #
Welfare states are choices of the citeznery. They choose to tax themselves to pay themselves benefits. Since the levels of taxation and benefits are voluntarily selected—through very complex political mechanisms, I’ll grant you—the levels can also be adjusted voluntarily as long as 1. the citizens remain somewhat accurately informed about their collective financial state and 2. they act on that information rationally, and 3. the political mechanisms they act through remain functional.
1,2,and 3 are all somewhat questionable at the moment, but this moment is not the moment of truth. I think as the pressure rises, the citizenry will act and adjustments will be made and life will go on more or less as usual.
— cw · Aug 7, 10:55 PM · #
cw, In our society people don’t actually get to make choices the way you state. The problem isn’t that the mechanism is complex. The problem is that it’s far too simple. In fact, PEG’s article might be better titled, “The Collapse of Over-Simplified Societies.”
We don’t get to adjust levels of taxation voluntarily. What we get to do is choose one monster package, that includes several parts taxation, several parts benefits, several parts foreign policy and warmaking, several parts social policy, take it all as one huge package or leave it.
The mechanism is far too simplistic considering the complexities of human relationships.
We have idiots standing up in the presidential pulpit denouncing special interests, as if there is one common interest. There isn’t. Life isn’t that simple.
— The Reticulator · Aug 8, 04:48 AM · #
Reticulator,
What you call simple, I call complex. We choose representatives who choose tax packages. If we don’t like the tax packages they choose, we choose other representatives. The complicated part comes in the tax packages and the politics. It is dificult to know what is in the packages (becasue they are complicated) and how they will affect us, it is difficult to know which repesentatives or parties will do what we want or even be able to do what we want (becasue of the complicated web of interests).
But, pressure from the public does eventually (and sometimes very quickly) get through and the government responds.
I may actualy be more pessimistic than I sounded in the last comment. It is very possible that we, both as a nation and as individuals, will make chosices, both political and policy, that will make it impossible for us to adequately respond to the entitlement problems. We may have done that with global warming. We could, I guess, keep borrowing and borrowing until we are so far in debt that we default and there is some kind of calamitous financial crisis.
But my point was that the public has more control over this issue than something like global warming. We can decide to spend less and borrow less and/or tax ourselves more. We don’t have to spend the way we do on health care, which is where the big entitlement problem lies (SS is a relatively small fix, as I understand it).
On the other hand medicare pits the generations against each other. Using their political power the older generations could insist on borrowing money to maintain the status quo, leaving the younger generations with an impossible bill. But at a certain point, 10-15 years from now, I imagine the younger generations will have enough political power to pull the plug. That would be interesteing. That’s right around when I would supposedly start collecting my checks. I need to mobilize now so that I don’t end up on the street.
— cw · Aug 8, 07:08 PM · #
PS.
I meant to congratulate PEG. This is an excellent post. Supremely relevant to our situation today.
— cw · Aug 8, 07:10 PM · #
Re: The welfare states in Europe could also survive,albeit with lower standards of living, but their demographics mean that they will simply be swamped by Islam.
Why Ialam? There are other peoples, even Christian ones, immigrating to Europe as well. Along with Eurabia, there will be Eurindia, Eurafrica and Euribbea (maybe even Eurmerica). Morever if past history in such things is any indication the native Europeans will persist as an elite caste amid the foreign descendants, and the latter will prosper only to the extent they are able to assimilate at least partly to European awys.
— JonF · Aug 8, 09:03 PM · #
Its strange that when the author thinks about the collapse of past societies this leads to fears about the welfare state. This is strange because none of the examples of past collapsed societies were welfare states. They were imperial, aristocratic states that eventually hollowed out their economies by diverting all wealth to the elites and turning everyone else into either soldiers, slaves, or contract labor.
It seems to me that the only hope we have of avoiding this fate in 21st century America, with our endless wars, bailouts for corporations, and tax-cuts-for-the-rich, is the welfare state. Its this social contract that is the only thing that keeps the American imperial, aristocratic elite from hollowing out our economy for their own benefit. I am not saying they do this out of malevolent intentions, the elite simply make the assumption, natural to all humans, that what is good for them is good for society. Unfortunately conservative ideology such as the author’s have fed this belief and led us far down the road to collapse.
Now, the hard part is that this requires a welfare state that acts intelligently in setting benefit levels, and that means a functioning democracy, and that means an active and informed citizenry, and I am pessimistic that we have any of those things. But trying to build and maintain this kind of democracy is really our only hope in the long term.
But, for the author to read about Ancient Rome and become concerned about the welfare state—and not the military-industrial complex—its just ideological blindness.
— nathanlindquist · Aug 10, 03:24 PM · #
This is adjunct academician Gondry’s TA with your grades to last week’s assignment.
Many of you ignored the deadline, but we let it slide. Counting hours was the obsession of western civilization on the upswing. Why bother now?
Reticulator –Again, you mention this “oft-stated” thesis that has yet to be turned in. So leaving it aside for this assignment, you concentrate mainly on the plight of reindeer people in Russia. Are we to assume, then, that in your mind, the most significant collateral damage to America’s decline will be the inability of the Choctaw to re-mobilize? In fact, their already robust casinos will do more than merely weather any pending welfare state convulsions and thrive. Why not observe their cutthroat and oxygen-enriched embrace of Capitalism and Googlemap directions to Durant now? Foghat, symbol of American resilience/desperation, is playing there Friday. D.
Steve –You always answer the same question: “How does a Western nation with open borders resemble a white virgin who spreads her legs to Huns?” Here’s the thing, it was never asked. But if you’re determined to pursue this topic, anyway, let me recommend a correspondence course at Regent or Bob Jones. F.
(In the meanwhile, your body odor, untreated dandruff and occasional efforts to light your pipe at your desk make everyone around you unhappy. Respect your peers and practice some hygiene, please!)
KVS – I’m all for parsing/disputing terminology, but in this case you only nibbled at the pilings, then slumped at your ashtray where you released a jaded moan. Enough shallow, promiscuous erudition, already. . . dude, pick a major! C-.
Josh – An okay start, I guess, but then according to you, Western civilization goes kaput “in our lifetime?” It not only whimpers, ala Frost, it withers, also? You’re an impressive killjoy. Remind me not to attend a Who—or what remains of the Who— concert with you. C.
cw – Fine effort, but realize the instructor’s question was meant in a twitting spirit. Be good enough to leave your earnest replies in Manzi’s course on hedging your expenditures in the face of doom. C+.
nathanlindquist – A shade better, but see cw. B-.
Freddie – I’m contacting admissions to confirm your GED. F.
— Tony Artaud · Aug 11, 04:12 AM · #
Correction: the Foghat observation should have read, “symbol of Anglo resilience/desperation.” My regrets. If you have a problem, take it up with Dave Edmunds.
— Tony Artaud · Aug 11, 04:31 AM · #
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now. Keep it up!
And according to this article, I totally agree with your opinion, but only this time! :)
— supra skytop · Aug 11, 06:52 AM · #
cw: “What you call simple, I call complex. We choose representatives who choose tax packages. If we don’t like the tax packages they choose, we choose other representatives. The complicated part comes in the tax packages and the politics. It is dificult to know what is in the packages (becasue they are complicated) and how they will affect us, it is difficult to know which repesentatives or parties will do what we want or even be able to do what we want (becasue of the complicated web of interests).”
No, we don’t choose other representatives if we don’t like the tax packages they vote for. You’re oversimplifying. There are a whole lot of other considerations that go into choosing a representative than just that, such as did the representative help bring government pork to the community; did s/he help grandma get her social security; did s/he vote the right way on warmongering in Iraq.
It’s not like how if we don’t like BP’s environmental misdeeds we can take our business elsewhere. By voting to buy/boycott BP gasoline, we don’t also have to accept a whole foreign policy in Latin America and also a policy on funding of abortions. In the market we can pick and choose which things we support and which things we don’t. When we make these choices political, we oversimplify them.
— The Reticulator · Aug 13, 04:36 AM · #
Please write an essay explaining whether and how Tainter’s thesis applies to societies with unprecedentedly large and complex financial sectors.
— Steve Roth · Aug 13, 02:37 PM · #