Nov 05 2021 13 mins
As society becomes complex, it reaches a point where the cost of coping with problems exceeds the benefits. Then, people may choose collapse as the lesser evil. But in a globalized world, no society can collapse in isolation. The alternative is the progressive immiseration of the population to preserve the rickety complexity of the system and the privileges of the few who benefit.
This is the argument of Joseph Tainter in his classic book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. All societies (or civilizations) face challenges. To meet these challenges, they develop complexity: armies, technologies, institutions. At first, the benefits are clear, but as complexity mounts, the costs of maintaining it grow even faster.
Whatever its benefits, complexity is a burden on the population. They have to work harder, pay more taxes, or suffer more privation. A point is eventually reached, at least for some of them, when the costs of additional complexity start to exceed the benefits.
There is a final crisis - a challenge that demands yet more complexity solve. Those who pay the price may figure they are better off accepting collapse. They might prefer barbarians rulers to Rome, if it means lower taxes. They might be better off keeping their crops for themselves rather than feed the system. They want to defect: to prevent them, the system must implement yet more complexity, heightening the risks.
Technology can't solve the problem: it is subject to the same diminishing returns. Only a new source of energy can roll back the clock.
Though collapse is seldom good, it may be less bad than sustaining a decrepit system. But in an integrated world, it cannot happen: were a society to collapse, it would only be taken over by its competitors, and complexity would remain high. In a globalized world, Tainter thinks, no-one can collapse until everyone collapses. In the mean time, the lot of the population steadily worsens as they work harder and harder for less and less to sustain a system that no longer benefits them.