Review: Joseph A Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

The Collapse of Complex Societies (1st paperback ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tainter aims to provide a theory as to why most complex societies so far have not just faded away but abruptly collapsed, short of the current world-wide one, there we don't know yet. But he fails. He repeats the phrase "diminishing marginal returns on complexity" a lot but it sounds like something he overheard someone in the economics department saying (which he is not from, he's an archaeologist) and now just repeats it. Just repeating it doesn't make it true.

However in the course of building his case for his theory, he's providing a lot of detail about societies past & current that you can use to come up with your own theory. Now here is mine: Complexity requires a lot of communication and, short of the Internet, communication is expensive, so they start building hierarchies. A society's political/social/economic hierarchy is simply a communication hierarchy the same way we build our star-shaped networks, hierarchical DNS etc. Any more decentralized communication structure requires redundancy and that was too expensive in the old times and may or may not be too expensive in our time, time will tell.

Now with hierarchies, they were put in place to deal with a certain situation at a certain time, e.g. the Chacoans in Arizona lived in an environment where there was a good harvest one year in this valley, the next year in that, and their society served to equal out the variations for everyone's greater good. These hierarchies, the people they are composed of, are like computer programs that have simple functions that they have been told to perform. But like a computer program without an auto-updater, they don't have a meta communication mechanism in place to change the existing communication mechanism when the situation changes. So as the situation changes, such as changes in population, in food supply, new enemies, etc. etc. those are being dealt with by workarounds the same way you work around a piece of software that doesn't quite fit what you want to do. As the situation differs more and more the effort and energy required to work around the hierarchy gets more and more to the sudden inflection point that it is better not to have a hierarchy in the first place, which then gets abandoned, hence collapse.

The whole thing is made worse by most people in the hierarchy being career-politicians, career-managers, career-idunnowhats, meaning that they derive their living from this complex management, often for generations, and cannot downscale. An example would be a farmer selling his farm to become a bureaucrat in the city. If the situation that involved the bureaucracy in the first place is not there anymore he cannot go back to the farm, it now belongs to someone else and he has forgotten or his children have forgotten how farming worked in the first place. So the response to changes is always to create more complexity. Now this extra complexity may end up requiring more of society's energy and effort than the problem it solves ostensibly, i.e. it is net negative, so here is where Tainter's mantra of "diminishing marginal returns of complexity" comes in. He's right in that this happens and causes collapse but he doesn't explain why societies strive for more complexity in the first place even if this extra complexity doesn’t pay off, my theory above does explain that.

Now one more interesting thing about the book, in the last chapter he touches today's society and predicts many things (in 1988!) that today are known to be true.
a) He says in today's society no individual country can fail anymore because we're all in it together and one country will bail out a failed other. Hm where have I heard that. Greece anyone? In any case the result is that the whole thing will fail altogether.
b) He says triggers for failure of all of today's whole world wide society would be, amongst others: National debt that can't be paid back, and climate change. You aren't saying!