[HN Gopher] The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)
___________________________________________________________________
The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 165 points
Date : 2022-08-20 07:55 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (continuations.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (continuations.com)
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think the mechanism is simple "imperial overstretch." Societies
| that go to war give a lot of their resources to the people who
| produce military material. Those people's disproportionate
| control of resources gives them a disproportionate influence in
| politics, which they then use to encourage more wars, creating a
| virtuous circle. As long as war delivers plunder and expansion,
| society has the resources to continue this.
|
| But the incentive of war suppliers to encourage war is not the
| same as an incentive to win wars. War suppliers profit more from
| wasteful use of the military, and endless _extension_ of wars,
| than wins (which replace them with peacetime producers.) This
| slows down the rate of plunder and expansion until the resources
| expended on war material become a huge drain on the rest of
| society.
|
| This brings general unrest as the lower classes become desperate,
| civil war when different factions argue about which wars to
| pursue or end and on strategy, and secession at the borders,
| especially the areas that were the fruits of expansion. This is
| weakness, and invites invasion by a neighboring society in the
| growth phase of the same process.
|
| I think the association with complexity is just because
| complexity in society rises with the size and organization of the
| military and its infrastructure.
| [deleted]
| gtsnexp wrote:
| Just a very superficial comment/thought after reading the review:
| There seem to be an underlying implied correlation between
| complexity and failure (or collapse). If that premise is, indeed,
| part of the book's thesis then, in this context, would be fair to
| say that "simple" societies are less prone to collapse?
| bratbag wrote:
| In the same way that a boulder at the bottom of a valley is
| unlikely to roll downhill.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| To be more exact, primitive societies can still collapse
| demographically (e.g. through a widespread plague or famine),
| but they don't have any extra complexity to lose.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Primitive societies do not collapse or grow much. They just
| stagnate. It might be nice living (I would surely enjoy some
| hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle), but there is basically no
| progress over centuries or even millennia.
|
| To look at one extreme example, Neanderthal stone tools
| (Mousterien) haven't changed very much over 100 000 years of
| their existence.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| lol please catch up on modern research, wengrow for instance.
| you're repeating a colonialist distortion
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There is nothing colonialist about the fact that less
| complex societies don't develop as quickly as more complex
| ones.
|
| It is not even about ethnicity. For example, the Incan
| empire developed very fast and reached Roman-like levels of
| complexity and political power in mere decades after its
| founding, in fact _much faster than the Romans themselves
| once did_.
|
| In the meantime, hunters and gatherer's way of life in
| other parts of the world, including Europe (such as the
| Sami in Lappland), barely changed over centuries.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Is it a "fact" though? Human civilization now is arguably
| more complex than it's ever been in the past, yet I'm not
| sure we could argue the pace of change in the last few
| decades is the most rapid/transformative it's ever been
| (which Tainter would presumably see as evidence of the
| reducing gains of increased complexity). Or perhaps like
| in politics, there are decades where nothing happens and
| weeks (well, years at least) where decades happen... And
| we should definitely question the assumption that a
| faster pace of technological change is actually a good
| thing.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| you're still repeating outdated histories
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You might care to demonstrate more substantive discussion
| by detailing your reasoning and linking and citing
| sources.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's profoundly incorrect to say that nomadic societies
| "stagnated". They adapted to incredibly variable and harsh
| conditions from the equator to the Arctic and invented much
| of the technology of the modern world like agriculture.
|
| Archaeological horizons and the lack thereof are only partly
| related to the societies that produced them.
|
| If you're just getting into the subject of what ancient
| societies looked like and how diverse they could be, I'd
| recommend _Dawn of Everything_ as an approachable instruction
| to the topic.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The delta in comparison to the timescale was extremely
| small, though. Stagnation does not necessarily mean
| "nothing ever changes at all", just a very small rate of
| change compared to the modern era.
|
| A life of a person in 8000 BC was not that different from
| life of a person in 7000 BC. For a person from 1000 AD, the
| world of 2000 AD would be wholly unrecognizable.
|
| Highly organized societies tend to transform their
| environment very thoroughly - just look at all the Roman
| buildings and facilities that still dot the landscape from
| Spain to the Levant. A rural society wouldn't be capable of
| building something like that.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > A life of a person in 8000 BC was not that different
| from life of a person in 7000 BC
|
| What about Catalhoyuk? 7000 BC puts you around the
| zenith. Not far away in Mesopotamia, 7000 BC would also
| be about the start of the Hassuna period, the first
| development of pottery in the region [1]. In general,
| 8000-7000BC is seeing major progression in the Neolithic
| Revolution, so the life of a person in 7000 BC is perhaps
| as different from 8000 BC. as 2000 AD would be for
| someone in 1000 AD.
|
| [1] And it's worth noting that pottery is,
| archaeologically speaking, basically the best tool we
| have for identifying changes in illiterate societies.
| Pre-pottery, there usually isn't enough surviving
| remnants of society to make good guesses as to the
| cultural practices of that society.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Don't mistake the limitations of the archaeological
| record for the underlying reality. Humans are distinctive
| from most animals precisely because they have adaptations
| like culture that are perfectly suited to high speed
| adaptations to changing conditions. Someone born
| thousands of years would have found quite a lot
| different, just like you would if you were born in the
| Roman empire.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Suitable, yes. I don't doubt that cultures _can_ develop
| extremely quickly when the conditions are ripe. The
| Japanese dismantled their feudal structure and
| transformed into a major industrial and military power
| within a single generation.
|
| But that happened under a strong, merciless pressure from
| other industrialized nations. Nature acts way more slowly
| that Commodore Perry did and the adaptations are much
| slower, too.
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| I think there might be room for misreading/misinterpretation of
| that part.
|
| I read that part of the review as saying complex societies have
| 'bucked the trend' by not being -as- prone to collapse; but
| with a big caveat that it looks like complex societies may
| operate on longer time scales, so the collapse might be staved
| off for longer. It's an open question about what 'long enough'
| would look like though, one that's probably beyond the author's
| scope.
| triska wrote:
| I also highly recommend this book!
|
| Regarding the sentence _" One that he doesn't discuss much but
| that is particularly pertinent to today, is the accretion of laws
| and regulations."_ which appears in the review: I think all these
| laws and regulations can be regarded as being part of the
| increasing bureaucracy that Tainter identifies as the cause of
| eventual collapse of complex societies.
|
| One thing I would add, in addition to the diminishing marginal
| return of bureaucracy that Tainter mentions, is the tendency of
| contemporary administrations to create more bureaucracy even when
| their own stated goal is to reduce bureaucracy or increase
| efficiency, for example by trying to collect and compare precise
| numbers that show how they have become more efficient at a task
| that is in essence not really quantifiable. A related book I
| recommend particularly in that regard is _Le Regne de la Quantite
| et les Signes des Temps_ by Rene Guenon.
| zwkrt wrote:
| In the book A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge outlines a kind
| of bleak future for humanity in which societal collapse is
| inevitable. Despite interstellar communication and wild
| technology, there always comes a point at which the machinery
| of a given society is too complicated and heavy handed and
| over-fitted to handle some change in circumstances. The result
| is the survivors are thrown back to pre-industrial society. Of
| course in his book the machinery of society is more
| intrinsically enmeshed with high technology--a failure in
| supply chain could result in a failure of resource allocation
| or governance.
| jasone wrote:
| I found the prequel, "A Deepness in the Sky", even more
| compelling. The book's theme is the inevitable collapse of
| legacy software under the weight of its own complexity. And
| the book views codified government as a form of legacy
| software.
| starkd wrote:
| There is also the phenomenon of regulatory capture, when the
| bureaucracy responsible for implementing regulations gets
| captured by the corporations and entities involved. Very
| relevant to what's happening today.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I can't say much about the veracity of her arguments, but
| there is a journalist named Sarah Chayes that has been
| investigating the US failures in Afghanistan as, primarily, a
| reflection of America supporting (and helping to build) a
| culture of corruption that undermined our primary nation
| building objectives in that country. She extends this
| argument to American political and business culture that
| shares these same qualities of corruption (that we
| conveniently label as something other than "corruption").
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| > trying to collect and compare precise numbers that show how
| they have become more efficient at a task that is in essence
| not really quantifiable
|
| For me this is particularly maddening as I run into it
| frequently. Managers/bureaucrats want to make decisions based
| on 'metrics', primarily because it gives them cover if it
| happens to be the wrong decision. But, many many issues where
| decisions are required are more subjective than objective.
| Meaning there really aren't any metrics that can reliably
| 'measure' them. Instead of just acknowledging this plain and
| simple fact, they just create more metrics and/or define the
| criteria with even more detail. It just makes more work but
| adds no further insight because ultimately, the issue is
| subjective and no volume of measurements will help. Think about
| coming up with a formula about how 'good' art is by measuring
| how many colors it has, how many curves, right angles, etc. It
| just doesn't work that way and but they keep trying.
| jollybean wrote:
| " Managers/bureaucrats want to make decisions based on
| 'metrics', primarily because it gives them cover if it
| happens to be the wrong decision"
|
| My word, no, they want to make decisions based on 'metrics'
| because it validates the 'do or not decision'.
|
| We make hardware based products and have a very real need to
| model component prices, fluctuations, trade/political risks
| etc..
|
| Most things are not 'art'. If someone wants metrics on
| something so fuzzy, put the 'wide error' bars on the
| estimation.
|
| Better yet - don't even talk about measurements, make it a
| 'risk assessment' exercise and identify the key issues that
| go into defining the unknown.
|
| Ontario government is spending a huge amount of money doing
| 'environmental assessment' for high speed rail - it's better
| to do that than to start building and hope they don't come
| across some 'magical wetland' etc.
|
| Granted - they are spending too much money on the assessment
| ...
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| The reason is responsibility, and not one wants to take it,
| especially not politicians or people working for the
| goverment. That is why they need metrics, so they cannot be
| taken responsible for the consequences. "It was not my fault.
| The numbers said it."
| Mezzie wrote:
| I've seen this in academia, for-profit, and non-profit
| sectors as well.
|
| It's what happens when responsibility is not married with
| reward, or worse, is _punished_ by those above you. Why
| take responsibility when all responsibility gets you is
| fired, scolded, blame, or a bunch of additional work but no
| accolades, pay raises, promotions, etc?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Managers/bureaucrats want to make decisions based on
| 'metrics', primarily because it gives them cover if it
| happens to be the wrong decision.
|
| That might be true, but "making decisions based on metrics"
| is also the core idea of the meritocracy/technocracy. Rather
| than claiming that a person has special insight or superior
| intuition, and should thus control the decision, there's this
| contemporary (post-Enlightenment?) idea that we could instead
| systematize decision making and thus avoid or at least reduce
| cognitive bias, corruption and nepotism.
| gopher_space wrote:
| "Metrics" as a concept is not under attack just because
| someone ginned up a false one to save money.
| adverbly wrote:
| Imo it is not the existence or ineffectiveness of complex
| laws/regs that leads to problems. Rather, their lack of
| understanding among the population, and difficulty of
| execution/implementation.
|
| I actually had a startup project the I shelved specifically
| aimed at addressing this. Wonder if I should revisit it...
| oblak wrote:
| Not sure you had to be downvoted for stating a simple
| opinion. While I don't believe you are right, I'd like to ask
| for the reasoning that led you to this conclusion.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > One thing I would add, in addition to the diminishing
| marginal return of bureaucracy that Tainter mentions, is the
| tendency of contemporary administrations to create more
| bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce
| bureaucracy or increase efficiency
|
| Hello, Agile.
| agomez314 wrote:
| I also focused in on this sentence. How difficult it becomes
| for an average person to start new things on his/her own
| nowadays! The only solution to the diminishing of widespread
| bureaucracy i can think of is war - but is costly, can take a
| long time, and most societies don't make it past a civil war.
| Like a forest fire, it clears away the hubris and overgrowth of
| process that accumulates over time.
| selimnairb wrote:
| What people arguing against accretion of regulations tend to
| miss is that this accretion (as currently experienced in the
| US at least) goes hand-in-hand with accumulation of capital
| and consolidation of industries. The large corporations can
| afford to comply with complex regulations. For them,
| maintaining complex regulatory regimes (through legalized
| bribery and regulatory capture) is part of the defensive
| fortifications that maintain their monopoly/oligopoly
| positions. As an optimist, I believe we can reform the system
| (e.g., through antitrust enforcement, which the FTC under Ms.
| Khan is doing more of than in recent decades), rather than
| burn it down.
| starkd wrote:
| I applaud your optimism, but don't let optimism cloud
| realism. There's comes a point when war is the only path
| that can relieve the accumulated stresses.
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _comes a point when war is the only path that can
| relieve the accumulated stresses_
|
| This is historically untrue. When complex societies civil
| war, they tend to fall apart. (Wars of unification being
| an exception.) Their citizens' living conditions
| permanently fell, often for generations, until an outside
| power subsumed them.
|
| This trend looks to be strengthening as time goes on,
| probably on account of increasing species-wide firepower
| and mobility. Instead, peaceful (if politically violent)
| "revolutions" reboot the society from time to time. One
| could argue the Great Depression was the last such
| restructuring of the American system.
| jdkee wrote:
| "One could argue the Great Depression was the last such
| restructuring of the American system."
|
| A better argument would be the case that American
| involvement in WWII resulted in a larger restructuring of
| American lives.
|
| Women entering the workforce.
|
| The U.S. military fighting racial segregation.
|
| The resultant boomer generation and the rise of labor
| until 1980.
|
| Lowered income inequality.
|
| The GI bill providing affordable higher-ed to a broad
| swatch of the populace.
| jollybean wrote:
| Regulations go hand-in-hand with creating a safe and
| functioning civilization.
|
| Just look at the crypto market and imagine if we all had to
| use those zany tokens to do things. We couldn't get
| anything done.
|
| That used to exist back in the 1800's.
|
| Our financial systems are very stable and far more
| resilient than we recognize. We take that for granted.
|
| When is the last time depositors arbitrarily lost a pile of
| cash while not investing in risky things?
|
| That's a 'new financial innovation' largely enabled by laws
| and oversight etc. that your great-great grandparents
| didn't have the luxury of having.
| jollybean wrote:
| There are more opportunities for 'regular folks' to do
| something on a 'grand scale' than at any time in history, but
| not everyone can do it.
|
| Paradoxically, starting your own business in the 'old time'
| way, i.e. plumbing or roofing contractors ... it's like
| guaranteed work for great income. Plumbers are the new
| Dentists.
|
| That said, there are areas in which regulatory issues are
| obviously a problem.
|
| This talk of 'war' is hyperbolic.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I don't think war is necessary (and looking at things like
| the "war on terror" that spawned a lot of rules, it might
| even do the opposite).
|
| Societies can do "de-sprawling" of rules, but it isn't a
| frequent thing (the German civil code is kind of a reduction
| of lots of several codes into one, for example).
|
| There is probably also an element of aging societies becoming
| more risk averse, hence more rules and regulations.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Notionally the "wars" on drugs and terror are more akin to
| the Islamic principle of _jihad_ , in the sense of a
| struggle, rather than of military domination, occupation,
| and conquest.
|
| In the case of World War II, numerous governments were
| created from whole cloth following the war, amongst
| conquored territories, in newly-created states, and even
| amongst some of the winners.
|
| Notably, Japan had a constitution imposed on it by the
| United States, which largely exists to the present day.
| Some traditional institutions were preserved (e.g., the
| emperor), but in almost entirely symbolic form. Germany
| likewise was reconstituted under a new government, as was
| Italy. Even France saw a new government formed (the Fifth
| Republic) in 1958. The states of the Eastern bloc were
| reconstituted under Communist rule as Soviet satellites.
| India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and several Arabic
| states received independence. The state of Israel was
| formed. Much of Africa decolonised in the 1950s and 1960s.
|
| There was of course _some_ continuity through all of this,
| but in large part, new governments emerged and old laws
| were often voided.
| _alxk wrote:
| The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs", is a misnomer
| though; it's not really a war (although a couple of wars
| were waged as part of it, or alongside it).
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Fair enough. WW1 spawned things like DORA in the UK, for
| example.
|
| Edit: And WW2 saw another massive increase of the
| "state", so not sure war does generally shrink
| administrative systems.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| If you lose the war decisively, you have a chance to
| rebuild the state from scratch, including the legal
| system.
|
| As a winner, though, you face the task of trying to
| shrink an administrative system _that just won a war_.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Obvious examples are Germany and Japan after WW2.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Another interesting point is Switzerland after 1848.
|
| They had a very small-scale civil war which made them
| rethink their political structure.
|
| Or the Austrian empire in 1866, which lost a major war
| against Prussia and was forced to reform itself into a
| dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Which was somewhat more
| competitive and liberal than its predecessor and if it
| avoided other wars, it might in some form survive until
| today.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Neither Germany or Japan stand out as being societies
| with minimal bureaucracy and unnecessary/intrusive
| regulation. Singapore (as a state that had to rebuild
| considerably after war) is arguably an even more extreme
| example.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The point is that any such bureaucracy is recently formed
| and _not_ a legacy of pre-1945 statutes.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Perhaps but war was posited of a method of "clearing the
| books" and allowing significant reform. If that were true
| you'd expect such societies to be less weighed down by
| bureaucracy than others that had no such opportunity.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Clearing of books has no bearing whatsover on subsequent
| re-writing of them.
|
| However if the present legislative burden is excessively
| oppressive, a war, revolution, or reconstitution might
| address same.
|
| Your argument is a non sequitur.
| WalterBright wrote:
| They were post-WW2. The German Miracle in particular came
| about when Germany went full free market as a way to
| recover from the economy being burned to the ground. This
| boom lasted until 1970 when the socialists were voted
| into power, and on came the taxes and hamstringing. The
| Japanese economy immediately after WW2 was run by
| American leftist academics, who refused to allow big
| business to operate. The economy flatlined. Until that
| was rescinded, and the Japanese free market economic boom
| began and ran up into the 80s.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Huh?
|
| I started a company for a small project on Tuesday. It took
| me 30 minutes and I never left my chair.
| recyclelater wrote:
| Get some employees, have some of them turn out to be pain
| in the ass, then find out how annoying west coast labor
| laws are.
|
| Hire some employees, spread them across multiple states,
| find out the complexities of employment law in multiple
| states.
|
| Start up a health plan, same thing.
|
| There a million examples, none of them are bad by
| themselves, but every aspect of a multi employee business
| has rules and regulations that if you run afoul of, there
| are consequences. No one gives you a manual of these, you
| find them out along the way and it costs you money and
| time.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I was an exec at a small company in a union building in
| Manhattan. I'm familiar with annoyances.
|
| That's life. It's full of annoyances. Our forebearers had
| a lot more.
| paganel wrote:
| Maybe the OP hadn't in mind the actual process of
| incorporating a company per se, but the process of
| "starting" a company as in getting it off the ground in
| terms of money coming in/revenues. And, imo, it's more
| difficult now to do that compared to 10, 20 years ago, and
| not only because of increased competition.
| jxramos wrote:
| reminds me of that Elon Musk quote
|
| > "Rules and regulations are immortal. They don't die ...
| there's not really an effective garbage collection system for
| removing rules and regulations." Piling rules upon rules
| instead gradually "hardens the arteries of civilisation, where
| you are able to do less and less".
| teddyh wrote:
| " _Pournelle 's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any
| bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:_
|
| _First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of
| the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in
| an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch
| technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural
| scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective
| farming administration._
|
| _Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization
| itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the
| education system, many professors of education, many teachers
| union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc._
|
| _The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will
| gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the
| rules, and control promotions within the organization._ "
|
| -- https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
| jollybean wrote:
| There is some insight in this, but it's also deeply cynical
| to the point of being very misleading and maybe a bit wrong.
|
| Teachers and Administrators are equally as committed to
| 'keeping their jobs'.
|
| It just so happens that 'teaching' is mostly 'teaching' and
| all you can do is 'teach' and so long as you have kids in
| front of you 'it's working'.
|
| The scope of their roles doesn't allow for them to go too far
| away from 'the mission'.
|
| Administrators are not default committed to the 'org' they're
| just in a position where their decisions and actions may or
| may not further the mission.
|
| 'Very Bad Teaching' is rare and usually self evident. With
| administration, it's not so clear.
|
| NASA Engineers are not like teachers, in that, the could be
| wasting a lot of time and energy. Maybe the risk is worth it
| in some cases (?) in others, maybe not so much.
|
| FYI - in teaching, the biggest costs are generally the
| 'teachers'. etc..
|
| Regular Public Schools aren't a good opportunity so much to
| demonstrate this 'Law'.
|
| A not-quite-independent entity like a Post Office might be.
| They often fight directly against innovation due to the risk
| it may create to jobs for rank and file, and don't quite have
| the same competitive basis as others.
| pbronez wrote:
| > the tendency of contemporary administrations to create more
| bureaucracy even when their own stated goal is to reduce
| bureaucracy or increase efficiency, for example by trying to
| collect and compare precise numbers that show how they have
| become more efficient at a task that is in essence not really
| quantifiable.
|
| Helloooo paperwork reduction act
|
| https://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/2017_FFIEC_EGRPRA_Joint-Report_to_...
| wjnc wrote:
| Perhaps you know since you've read the book: Does the book
| _really_ decide on declining marginal returns to complexity as
| an ultimate factor? Or is that the interpretation by the
| reviewer? The bridging of sociology, history and economics was
| somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a
| notable exception, obviously not alone.) If the author does,
| now I'm wondering why I missed this book & going to read.
|
| First thing as a counterpoint that comes to mind is biological
| complexity. There are marginal diminishing returns to
| complexity in biology as well, but not a rise / collapse rhythm
| in biological complexity outside of external events that I know
| of.
| najarvg wrote:
| This is a great point of comparison. I feel that societal
| systems (and associated complexities) are more rigid than
| biological systems in the sense that a biological systems
| evolve efficient solutions in response to changing internal
| and external stimuli while societal systems cannot/will not
| due to man-made laws, norms, expectations etc. The latter
| (biological systems) shows first order adaptation while the
| former (societal) shows, at best second and third order
| adaptations, if it even adapts.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| On the bridging of economics and sociology, I'd strongly
| recommend Charles Perrow's _Complex Organizations: A Critical
| Essay_ (1986), which is a tour de force survey of the
| literature.
|
| Notably, Herbert Simon spanned multiple domains (economics,
| psychology, sociology, organisational behaviour, AI,
| mathematics, ...), though comes off somewhat poorly in the
| text.
|
| https://www.worldcat.org/title/complex-organizations-a-
| criti...
|
| On Tainter, he specifically assesses eleven factors: resource
| depletion, new resources, catastrophes, insufficient response
| to circumstances, other complex societies (e.g.,
| warfare/invasion), intruders, conflict / contradictions /
| mismanagement, social dysfunction, mystical factors, chance
| concatenation of events, and economic explanations.
|
| Chapters 4 & 5 specifically address marginal productivity.
| They are titled "Understanding collapse: th emarginal
| productivity of sociopolitical change" and "Evaluation:
| compelxity and marginal returns in collapsing societies".
|
| Yes, declining marginal returns to complexity is Tainter's
| principle thesis.
| archduck wrote:
| > The bridging of sociology, history and economics was
| somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a
| notable exception, obviously not alone.)
|
| So Karl Marx and Max Weber are just chopped liver?
| wjnc wrote:
| Ah true point. Perhaps the addition /in the modern
| scientific era/ would be in place. Begging the question
| when that starts of course. Let's say that economics was
| earlier embracing quantitative techniques in the 20th
| century and that there was a rift between the fields
| especially when sociology was young that nowadays is less
| pronounced. It's all interpretation.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I would have said that the 1960s and part of the 1970s
| were filled with attempts to synthesize, among other
| things the fields you've mentioned. It wound down with
| Reagan and Thatcher's elections, which may or may not be
| proximate cause - the new right at that time were
| certainly not fond of the humanities in any way.
| jdkee wrote:
| "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the
| expanding bureaucracy."
|
| -Oscar Wilde
| jason-phillips wrote:
| > First, there are way more examples of complex societies
| collapsing than I was aware of.
|
| To add to the discussion, I submit this entertaining docu-
| series[0] describing the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations
| around the eastern Mediterranean.
|
| The authors proffer that one possible cause for their near-total
| collapse could have been a breakdown within Bronze Age society's
| well-structured and complex systems from which recovery was
| simply not possible.
|
| Apologies to the history purists for the inevitable inaccuracies
| to be found herein but this was an approachable series for me as
| a codemonkey.
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q
| udkl wrote:
| I thought about posting this exact video, but you beat me to it
| ! Extra credits really has some very well done entertaining
| historical docu-series .... I recommend other historical buffs
| to subscribe and go through their videos
| Muehe wrote:
| I can also recommend the FallOfCivilizations channel on
| YouTube.[0] It's basically a podcast that later started adding
| video footage to its episodes. As the name suggests each
| episode deals with the rise and fall of one specific
| civilization.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast/videos
| emiliano2022 wrote:
| Society is a dissipative structure, and there is a thermodynamic
| logic that applies to it. Energy goes into a society, and outputs
| are metastable systems and the inevitable entropy. And sooner or
| later the amount of energy needed to maintain that metastability
| will exceed the energy available, this is in rough analogy to the
| Carnot engine efficiency, where efficiency is proportional to the
| temperature differences along the system boundaries. Everything
| makes perfect sense if you cast it in this heterodox framework.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| Diminishing returns on complexity might just mean that when thing
| get complex, they get harder to figure out, so a larger
| percentage of attempts at improvement (even attempts at
| simplification) are likely to fail. Given that complex societies
| take a long time to rise, the perpetrators thereof may see the
| long-term upward course as a law of nature, and become a little
| over-optimistic about the advantages of change.
|
| The most universal law of nature: Periods of exponential growth
| always end.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I am reminded of software that has entered its "Big Ball of
| Mud" phase, where it has become impossible to understand, even
| to debug or simplify, and so it can no longer evolve to meet
| changing needs, and is eventually replaced with something newer
| (and, for the moment, simpler).
| drivebycomment wrote:
| I am highly skeptical there'a any clear causal relationship
| between complexity and collapse, but let's say there's some. I
| would rank nuclear war and a few others (climate change, or more
| broadly environmental imbalance caused by humanity) much more
| plausible and realistic cause for the collapse, way higher than
| what meager change this has, and thus this is mostly a
| distraction and intellectual pastime than something that is worth
| our collective attention.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Long, slow, persistent frictions and rot tend to be more
| destructive over time than sudden attack or incident, though
| the rot may enable a specific incident to become a
| determinative trigger.
|
| C.f., Bonhoeffer on the danger of stupidity --- unlike
| determined malice, it never rests and knows no bounds or
| restraints:
|
| _Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.
| One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need
| be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within
| itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind
| in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity
| we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force
| accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that
| contradict one's prejudgment simply need not be believed- in
| such moments the stupid person even becomes critical - and when
| facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as
| inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person,
| in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied
| and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the
| attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than
| with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the
| stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
| ..._
|
| https://www.platoscave.org/2021/10/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity-e...
|
| (The essay continues, I strongly recommend it.)
| wizofaus wrote:
| Arguably our inability to reform our economies to be more
| compatible with ecological sustainability is partly due to the
| level (and consequent inertia) of complexity in our systems
| though. Though I'd say the lack of motivation is largely due to
| human nature (there's presumably never been sufficient
| selective pressure to favour genes linked with the ability to
| properly plan for futures beyond our own lifespans or to be
| concerned by global-scale long term threats).
| yomkippur wrote:
| Chance of nuclear war is low.
|
| Climate change exasperates the underlying scarcity of resources
| that pressures those not at the top.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NB: _exacerbates_.
|
| https://www.dictionary.com/compare-words/exasperate-vs-
| exace...
| vkou wrote:
| The chance of nuclear war in any particular year is low, but
| I wouldn't say that the chance of a nuclear war is low. We
| were seconds away from midnight multiple times in the
| twentieth century.
|
| The political and technical failsafes against it need to work
| every time.
| Animats wrote:
| There's now a movement trying to accelerate the collapse:
| "accelerationism".[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah, I know. People without a functioning moral compass, to
| whom all the pain and death involved mean nothing? Romantic
| dreamers, who think that it will make everything better? Short-
| sighted escapists, who think that to not have their current set
| of problems means not having problems? Revolutionary true
| believers, who think that we will inevitably wind up at their
| version of The Way Things Should Be? Egotists, who think that
| sure, there will be lots of pain and suffering, but _they_ will
| be fine? A mix of all of the above?
|
| Whatever, it's a view that seems blind to all the death
| involved. Do they just think all that death won't happen? Or do
| they think "it will be worth it"?
|
| I am profoundly uneasy with accelerationism. It seems like a
| view for sociopaths.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| It's my opinion, having worked in IT in various roles, that there
| are 3 kinds of systems. First, the informal systems, which are
| just everyone doing whatever works for them. Those systems are
| flexible, simple, and inefficient. Second, the rigid systems,
| which tend to crop up when the org grows big enough that the
| informal systems start getting in their own way. Those are
| simple, inflexible, and efficient. Third are the complicated
| systems, which happen when the simplifying assumptions in rigid
| systems become problems. These are complicated, a bit less
| efficient than rigid systems, and a bit less flexible than
| informal systems.
|
| Now, the problem with the complicated systems- which tend to
| become more and more complicated over time- is that they require
| a dedicated staff to maintain, which tends to grow over time, and
| so the organization has to be big, and needs to have access to a
| big profit margin/energy surplus. If that goes away, then yes you
| have to collapse down to rigid or informal systems.
|
| The same process no doubt plays out on a civilizational level
| too.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| I notice that the people who tend to be pessimistic more often
| than not are those that don't have much direct exposure to
| technology (whether through work or interest) in their daily
| lives.
|
| I personally would be somewhat pessimistic as well if not for
| technology (energy generation/storage and AI primarily in terms
| of resource creation, though improved AI without a corresponding
| implementation of some form of basic income would be worrying).
| zionic wrote:
| FWIW The most pessimistic person I know is a ruby developer.
| Great guy, just very skeptical and pessimistic about just about
| anything.
| havblue wrote:
| At the risk of mentioning Trump, I thought this was what
| executive order 13771 was supposed to alleviate: make the
| regulatory state self-pruning by forcing it to repeal two
| regulations for every one that was passed. It was environmentally
| controversial, certainly. I don't see how the government will
| ever reduce its complexity unless it has a similar mechanism in
| place to force existing regulations to be removed to make room
| for new ones.
| objectivetruth wrote:
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| >One that he doesn't discuss much but that is particularly
| pertinent to today, is the accretion of laws and regulations.
|
| Tainter does discuss this, and rejects it (incorrectly imo).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Could you be more specific as to where and how?
| oblak wrote:
| D-D-Don't quote me regulations. I co-chaired the committee that
| reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that
| regulation's in... We kept it grey
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"While these are essential tools for maintaining complex
| societies it is particularly easy to see how over time their
| benefits decline and their costs rise when you only ever add laws
| and regulations but never do a partial or complete rewrite.
|
| It is the _societal equivalent_ of the accumulation of _technical
| debt_ in startups. "
|
| What a great analogy!
|
| At least for people that truly understand what technical debt
| is...
| dial9-1 wrote:
| there are many analogies that could be made comparing software
| development to society. for example, distributed vs centralized
| is akin to communism vs capitalism. web-development, like
| modern-day societies, only want to "scale", but forget that
| scaling goes both ways, up and down.
| amelius wrote:
| And using laws in ways they were not intended to be used
| (loopholes) corresponds to hacking.
|
| It's never punished in the same way as hacking, though. In
| fact, it's often considered a fair practice.
| BMc2020 wrote:
| _Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New
| York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive
| networks...Before joining USV, Albert was the president of
| del.icio.us through the company's sale to Yahoo._
|
| Honestly Albert, I'd like to see you working on bringing
| del.icio.us back.
| brakmic wrote:
| Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter:
| https://youtu.be/G0R09YzyuCI
|
| Joseph Tainter on The Dynamics of the Collapse of Human
| Civilization: https://youtu.be/JsT9V3WQiNA
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Joseph Tainter was recently interviewed by Nate Hagens:
| https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/27-joe-tainte...
| ambientenv wrote:
| Came here to mention the interview by Nate and am happy to
| see you did.
|
| In addition, and on a similar conceptual basis, I'd
| recommend:
|
| The Great Simplification [1] The Century of the Self [2]
| Can't Get You Out of My Head [3] The Resilience web site
| content [4] The Consilience Project [5]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4 [2]
| https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/ [3]
| https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/#top [4]
| https://www.resilience.org/ [5]
| https://consilienceproject.org/
| fullstackchris wrote:
| This is just scratching the surface of anthropology, if you
| want to go on a wild ride, read The Dawn of Everything by
| Graeber and Wengrow:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-
| eve... Oxford also has a similar shop to Resilience /
| Consilience, the Future of Humanity Institute:
| https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ Toby Ord is a member, his book
| The Pricipe: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity is
| quite interesting:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50485582-the-precipice
| andrewprock wrote:
| The Dawn of Everything has to be one of the worst books
| on anthropology out there. It's a thing disguised polemic
| dressed up as archeological history.
|
| I find Yuval's work to be more digestible, in part due to
| better writing, and in part due to less pretense.
|
| I would also suggest Susan RiceBauer's The History of
| Ancient Civilizations, Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan
| and the making is the modern world, and Lars Brownworths
| Lost to the West: the forgotten Byzantine Empire.
| jxramos wrote:
| > Second, Tainter proposes a very simple and general mechanism
| leading to collapse: declining marginal returns to complexity.
| Over time the benefits of complexity diminish and its costs
| increase.
|
| This makes me think of the US Federal Tax code, the pure
| opportunity cost of the entire tax industry and legislation that
| could be otherwise spent if we just had a flat tax with it's full
| regressiveness accepted. Any charity, favoratism, etc from the
| government should come in the form of grants etc from some other
| agency--keep the taxes simple.
| rurp wrote:
| Adding a simple floor to the tax rate would solve much of the
| regressiveness. Nobody would pay taxes on their first $40k (or
| whatever number works), and then a flat rate above that. The
| floor could even be done as a prebate to gain some social
| safety net benefits. Every citizen is given $tax_rate * $40k
| every year, doled out as monthly payments, and pays a flat tax
| rate on all income.
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| So, real question, why does the tax code need to be -that-
| simple? Like, we've got computers and stuff to do the math
| these days? It sounds like an easy way to say that one is for
| 'a simple, common sense solution' while papering over the very
| real harm it's going to do to at-risk and impoverished
| communities.
|
| To contribute, why should those communities that a flat tax
| harms be forced to bear that weight of simplification?
|
| It looks like you'd be ignoring the reviewer's second point:
| that the other factor in societal collapse is when those
| portions of society that bear undue weight no longer can bear
| additional burdens.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| We could retain a progressive tax system with or without the
| use of tax incentives. I would personally favor the removal of
| all tax incentives to be replaced as your suggest with grants,
| but would combine that with a continuously valued formula for
| tax rather than tax brackets. It's very simple, except that
| most people don't understand "equations".
| pfisch wrote:
| How can you just have a "flat tax" if you pay employees, or
| have inventory costs? You need deductions so you need to track
| everything anyway. That is the hard part.
|
| So having a flat tax or not barely saves any complexity at all.
| [deleted]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If you are arguing for a flat tax, then simplicity is not
| enoigh to make up for the obvious downsides. Particulalry as
| fixing them isnt conplicated.
|
| If you're arguing for simpler tax systems, which I think I
| agree with, mentioning flat tax ideas in the same post is only
| going to put people off the idea, and see it as a scam to
| reduce taxes on the wealthy and undermine democracy.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > and see it as a scam to reduce taxes on the wealthy and
| undermine democracy.
|
| While the wealthy do pay the majority of taxes - there's a
| shocking number of absurdly wealthy people with low tax rates
| (their overall tax bills are still eye watering to a normal
| pleb).
|
| So it's hard to argue for a flat tax without noting that it
| will lower the average wealthy person's tax bill
| considerably. At the same time, most people who argue for a
| flat tax think it will actually increase wealthy people's
| taxes!
|
| Most people are aware that the rich "cheat their taxes". They
| aren't aware that the vast majority of them are still paying
| above median tax rates.
|
| There's no way around it. The tax bill, currently, is heavily
| footed by the wealthy. If you go to a "flat tax" it's going
| to reduce taxes on the wealthy and increase them on the
| majority.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > So it's hard to argue for a flat tax without noting that
| it will lower the average wealthy person's tax bill
| considerably.
|
| It's also hard because that is basically the only real
| reason anyone has every argued for it.
|
| Lots of ways to 'simplify' taxes that would actually tax
| the rich without raising tax rates:
|
| https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/06/15/raising-
| mo...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The UK and the US differ dramatically in their use of the
| tax code to create behavioral and economic incentives.
| Most of the complexity in the US tax code stems from the
| government's repeated, endless use of "tax breaks"
| (credits, deductions and more) to encourage various
| things, whereas most other governments dispense money to
| people who participate in whatever is supposed to be
| encouraged. In theory the effects are similar; in
| reality, the implications are wildly different.
| euroderf wrote:
| This reminds me of a commentary on the new megalaw - the
| Inflation Reduction Act - that it succeeded (got passed)
| because it wielded carrots rather than sticks.
|
| This approach is compatible with your idea - to keep the tax
| side of the budget super simple, and put all the incentives and
| giveaways in the grants side (fairly transparently).
|
| Property values on K Street would drop :-D
| zzzzzzzza wrote:
| land value tax.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| The author was a guest on the Omega Tau podcast back in 2015 [1].
| There is a sort of follow-up podcast with a different guest on
| the same topic [2].
|
| [1] https://omegataupodcast.net/184-societal-complexity-and-
| coll...
|
| [2] https://omegataupodcast.net/238-societal-complexity-part-
| ii-...
| gtsnexp wrote:
| Super interesting podcast (in general)! Thanks for the links.
| yomkippur wrote:
| Anybody else feel like the advanced economy countries are complex
| and starting to collapse? I do.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This is a fairly broadly-held view, yes.
|
| It's also one that emerges throughout history. The term "Seneca
| Cliff" refers to an observation by the Roman rhetoritician.
| Apocalyptic concepts are common in the Bible. Eastern religions
| tend to take a more cyclical view, of recurring expansion and
| collapse. Oswald Spengler's _Decline of the West_ is a classic.
| There 's a modern literature largely spawning from the Club of
| Rome's _Limits to Growth_ (1972) of which I 'd include Tainter.
| James Howard Kunstler's _The Long Emergency_ is a more recent
| take on that.
|
| Broad-brush observations and gut feelings tend to be less
| substantive and articulable than specific indicia and
| mechanisms. Tainter's work is of interest in that he does point
| to a general rule that is common to multiple instances.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The world seems to be entering a crisis, but I don't see any
| overall trend over "advanced economy countries" (you mean rich
| ones, right?), nor I see reasons for this specific crisis to be
| very different from any other.
|
| You may be thinking about one or two countries, and
| overgeneralizing.
| mrwh wrote:
| Does this cover the Bronze Age collapses, triggered as societies
| moved to iron? That could be a counterexample: the long-range
| trading for copper and tin was no longer required, and that
| _decrease_ in complexity (combined with the increase in killing
| power of iron over bronze) led to multiple collapses across the
| Mediterranean world.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Yes, though quite briefly and indirectly.
|
| The historical cases covered are (chapter 1): The Western Chou
| Empire, the Harappan Civilization, Mesopotamia (includes the
| Bronze age collapse period, though not detailed as such), The
| Egyptian Old Kingdom, The Hittite Empire, The Olmec, The
| Lowland Classic Maya, The Mesoamerican Highlands, Casas
| Grandes, The Chacoans, The Hohokam, The Eastern Woodlands, The
| Huari and Tiahuanoco Empires, The Kachin, and the Ik.
|
| These are brief accounts (14 instances in 13 pages), but common
| themes are highlighted.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| In every complex societal collapse prior to the present day,
| subsistence agriculture was either the most common occupation or
| well-known to a substantial portion of the population.
|
| I caution against turning doomerism into an intellectual fetish -
| unlike past societies, we don't know how to feed ourselves
| without "the system".
| peteradio wrote:
| Is the implication that common people had an obvious choice to
| collapse into, now we don't so we kind of can't?
| Mezzie wrote:
| It's more that 'wandering off into the wild and doing your
| own thing until society settles down/it being worth it to try
| again' was an option.
|
| Now we're at population levels that require some amount of
| technological complexity to maintain and therefore a certain
| level of complex organization.
| yomkippur wrote:
| yes but that was because the lower class was largely
| responsible for food generation. today they are responsible for
| so much more. Technology, especially hi-tech contributes to our
| current complexity.
| t_mann wrote:
| > easy to see how over time their benefits decline and their
| costs rise when you only ever add laws and regulations but never
| do a partial or complete rewrite
|
| written by someone who has thoroughly avoided learning even
| superficially about how laws and regulations are actually being
| created and curated.
|
| or even just thinking it through. how would append-only
| regulation even work? you'd have multiple slightly differently
| worded paragraphs right below each other, and only the last one
| counts? that's clearly not how it's done, also not in the bigger
| picture.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| You're missing the point completely. It's not about law and
| regulation _literally_ being append only, it's rather about the
| number of laws and regulations consistently growing over time,
| with very little repeal of old regulation, which are mainly
| removed only to be replaced by more complex and extensive ones
| on the same topic. If you even superficially learn about how
| regulations and laws are created and curated in the US, you
| will find that this is _exactly_ how things work here.
| t_mann wrote:
| An important counterexample that comes to mind is the Glass-
| Steagall banking act, the repeal of which arguably led to the
| greatest financial crisis in a century https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla...
|
| shows that a) laws do indeed get repealed in the US and b)
| reducing regulation may even increase the risk of chaos, not
| reduce it
| yyyk wrote:
| > arguably led to the greatest financial crisis in a
| century
|
| The act did not ban securitization or buying derivatives.
| Even wiki can't find any justification for this argument
| beyond an unsourced 'cultural shift'.
| andrewprock wrote:
| The repeal allowed banks and investment houses to be run
| under the same roof, changing the aggregate risk profile
| of financial institutions greatly, in the direction of
| significantly higher, and now correlated risk.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-20 23:01 UTC)