[Analysis/Review] The Collapse of Complex Societies

A study on the structure of societal collapse in the context of changes in complexity and the declining marginal return-on-investment of complex civilizations

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Originally published in 1988 by Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies presents one of the most comprehensive analyses of societal decline published in the 20th century. It is a comprehensive work that includes discussions of prior authors such as Spangler, Marx, and others. The well researched work attempts to build up a perspective of societal collapse focused on social structure and economic perspectives.

The book is a pivotal piece of academic literature. Importantly, it’s ideas apply to both to large scale historic civilizations like Rome and Qin Dynasty China, and civilizations of smaller scales like the Mayan Lowlands and Tribal societies. Tainter observes that complex societies exist as problem-solving human organizations structured to provide enhanced returns on limited resources. In essence, the argument of Joseph Tainter is based on the following principle:

• Human societies develop complexity as a problem-solving mechanism

• Societies can improve resource abundance via increased complexity (hierarchies, organizational systems, military standardization, social legitimization, etc.)

• Additional complexity comes with additional costs levied against a population

The marginal return-on-investment of complexity eventually begins to decline past a critical threshold, depending on availability. When complexity is low, a small investment in complexity can result in significantly increased resource production. When complexity is already high, a large investment in additional complexity is required to generate a small improvement in resource production.

Societies grow first until the scale of the society matches available resources. Historically this was in the form of farm land, but in the modern world, petroleum and electricity are of primary inputs. A civilization suffering shortages will seek additional resource inputs and increased complexity to make more efficient use of available resources. The result is that marginal return-on-investment decreases as societies scale and age and deal with various crises by increasing in complexity. Eventually increasing complexity is no longer a good investment and de-complexifying the society becomes a rational and favored option. A sudden de-complexification of a society is what historians tend to refer to as “collapse.”

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In the example of Rome: conquest provided additional resources in terms of manpower and arable land. Conquest injected new resources into the Empire which would fund future-growth. Over time, each of these new provinces needed to be administrated. That means an increase in complexity and increase in the cost of administration. As the empire got larger, the return-on-investment for conquest decreased. Distance from the capital, cultural integration, administration and taxation. All of those bare associated costs. Eventually the Empire was in a position where additional funding for conquest became tied up in administrative costs instead. At that point, any surplus became part of the operating budget.

Once stretched-thin like this, a crisis will incur additional costs that must be leveraged from the operating budget. When faced with crisis, the Empire would increase its managerial overhead to squeeze more efficiency out of available resources. This worked for a while. Additional costs were leveraged against the working population by taxation or put off to the future by monetary inflation. A demographic crisis began around this time, and the Empire began siphoning more resources from a declining productive population. Additional resources were used for additional legitimization (bread and circuses), and management and other costs. The costs for the population eventually grew so high that radical de-complexification was preferable to continuing as-is. At that point, the Empire grew weak to external threats and eventually collapsed to a lower level of complexity: city-states, farming villages, kingdoms. Rome permitted in barbarian tribes as it could no longer defend its borders while citizens would side with frontier barbarians as the taxes were so burdensome they’d rather give up on Rome entirely.

It is notable that collapse is universally heralded as a negative… though for local populations at the time of occurrence it almost always indicates a greater return-on-investment for what complexity remains. Improved production for minimal costs as the overhead of a complex society no longer needs to be paid. The distinction is made because the academic and managerial classes that study civilizations and collapse exist as a part of the high-cost overhead of complex societies. Thus, while a the de-complexification of a society is seen as its catastrophic end by a historian, it is often taken as an overall improvement when experienced by a farmer.

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Overview

Tainter discusses the other explanations for societal collapse as given by other authors throughout recent history on the subject, often falling into one or more of the following categories:

1. Depletion or cessation of a vital resource or resources on which the society depends.
2. The establishment of a new resource base.
3. The occurrence of some insurmountable catastrophe.
4. Insufficient response to circumstances.
5. Other complex societies.
6. Intruders.
7. Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior.
8. Social dysfunction.
9. Mystical factors. (i.e. in light of the work of Spangler).
10. Chance concatenation of events.
11. Economic factors.

Declining marginal-return on investment for complexity is a causation for collapse that seems to combine many of these categories into a single narrative. At heart, the marginal-return-on-investment for complexity is initially high. As societies become more complex, they become more efficient at utilizing local environmental and human resources. Complex societies can more optimally distribute goods and services to those who need them and maintain a higher overall quality of life, especially when ascending the marginal-return curve shown above.

Peoples behave in a way that is thermodynamically rational: Resources are extracted first that are easiest to use, farmland is used first that is the most fertile. Minerals are mined first that are most easily accessed. For additional investment, increased (marginal) returns decrease as less-optimal systems are exploited. This results in eventually descending the marginal-return curve and entering a state where radical de-complexification of society is rationally favored.

To maintain complexity, governments engage in legitimizing activities, coercion, administration, management, information collection, innovation, infrastructure creation, legal codification and a other actions. When a new crisis appears, societies generally respond by increasing their level of complexity to increase net efficiency. Doing so, however, requires that productive capacity be leveraged from base resource production (farming, historically) and used instead to maintain the newly attained higher complexity level.

Eventually a state is reached where the amount of productive capacity to acquire additional resources no longer pays for itself. This places an extreme pressures on those people that actually produce the resources. That pressure leads to political instability and bureaucratic stagnation as those in managerial positions attempt to pressure society into maintaining said managerial positions. The end-position for civilization is social duress, demographic decline (plague, famine, or just people leaving), and general disengagement.

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What has been historically described as a collapse is a rational restructuring of a human society to a lower degree of complexity requiring vastly reduced operating costs; return to a thermodynamic equilibrium when it comes to resource acquisition. The restructuring may occur quickly (over a generation or so) or slowly.

The nature of this type of marginal-return-on-investment collapse explains the cyclic nature of human history as identified by authors like Spangler. It also describes how a civilization may suffer any number deathblows depending on circumstance; the underlying cause remains, even as the final days of a civilization are unique in a historical context. After the restructuring, a lower-level of sustainable complexity is achieved. This is a rational restructuring of society, not a storied apocalyptic collapse. The transition from Empire back into local city-state was a rational and economically favorable transition from the perspective of a citizen at the time.

Of note is the fact that, if critical resources were consumed during the height of the society, then the complexity level sustained afterwards will be lower than the complexity level that the previous society began with. Maintaining a powerful civilization requires constant energy and resource injections from somewhere. Farmland may have become barren, or critical social institutions may have collapsed under the stress, or there may be a lack of critical metals or minerals.

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Application to the Future

The work of Tainter suggests that most societal collapse occurs in a power vacuum. That is, there are no equally powerful competing societies. In the face of equivalent competition the collapse of a society results in the population becoming subsumed by a competitor. There is, therefore, little net change to overall complexity.

Due to competition between societies, however, each competitor becomes locked into an upwardly spiraling system of administrative and military costs: an arms race. This can be seen in locally competing tribes and in internationally competing nation-states. The upward spiral ends in one of two ways: either one of those civilizations becomes dominant and then proceeds to exist in an equivalent vacuum, or all of the competing civilizations collapse at once as with the Mycenaeans.

Tainter proposes that modern development on Earth consists of multiple societies in competition with one another. That may have been true in 1988. The current year, is 2024 (nearly 2025). One could make a reasonable argument according to Tainters definitions that the modern global industrial society exists in a vacuum. While “modern” society exists in many languages and different competing spheres, there is a single overall economic structure to human society in the 21st century. It may be that the global industrial society is entering a period a period of societal decomposition.

From 2008 to 2024, there has been a sudden growth of political “extremism” across the industrialized world. In the industrializing world, there’s been a similar growth in national sentiment. It seems likely that the first stage of collapse will consist of a de-complexification from the post-war 21st century global system. Instead, a nation-state system of competition is likely to appear through various nationalist political movements. For the largest hegemonic powers, the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction will prevent direct conflict, but will not prevent de-globalization. It is no longer in the interest of the global productive population to support an international system of global industrial uniformity. Hyper-complex systems like the International Monetary Fund, globalized just-in-time trade and international law enforcement, have proven to be only barely-tolerable during a crisis event: The 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Covid Pandemic as immediate examples.

While modern industrial systems have proven to be unbelievably efficient, net global productivity has seen stagnation in most areas. Simultaneously, the complexity of the globalized economic system has dramatically increased between 1988 and 2024. Innovation has stagnated, resources are becoming limited, and the financial system has developed economic tools that even specialists have a hard time understanding.

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It is likely that global industrial society reached its height around the turn of the millennium and has been decomposing since. Decomposition to a level-down will recreate a more traditional nation-state system that may proceed for decades in competition with one another. Perhaps via digital mercantile trade-systems. Once the complexity of those systems has gotten sufficiently high, or critical resources have grown sufficiently sparse, those nation-states may also collapse.

Regardless, serious societal collapse would require that it not be just a single nation-state collapsing. In both cases, the systems (competing nation states or international global economics) must collapse everywhere all at once. If a sudden de-complexification occurs, it is likely to occur globally and effect every nation and people on the planet. If a single nation collapses, it will be immediately economically colonized by a global competitor and little will change for its citizens.

Innovation: Why It’s Different For Us

It is notable that complex societal systems require energy inputs. With the development of fossil fuels and industrial production, we now live in the wealthiest and most productive society in all of human history. Comparatively speaking we need only a miniscule minority of the global population to be farmers and miners. The vast majority of our societies consist of innovators, business owners, experts, and managerial bureaucrats. In the United Kingdom a full half of their GDP consists of public spending (the UK seems very near collapse right now).

Energy reserves on their own became insufficient to continue growing global complexity sometime around the 1970s. Innovation has continued the complexity growth by increasing resource efficiencies dramatically. Radical innovations in the green revolution not only kept food and resource prices low, the efficiency of farming was improved globally.

In the 1980s, the development of initial digital infrastructure allowed even higher forms of social complexity that resulted in the formation of Global Industrial Society. The 1980s had a public sentiment so self-assured that we’d scarcely understand it today. That level of complexity became unsustainable around 2004 or so, and was quickly followed by the 2008 global financial crisis.

From a philosophical perspective, it’s strange that we were gifted with a glimpse of global civilization: A nearly spiritual form of innovative progress ready to shrug off national boundaries and reach for the stars. We were given one brief look at the heavens before falling back to earth like Icarus. Some men still dream of the stars, and I hope victory is achieved in that desperate race-to-the-finish. A dream lost on waking to again to our tiny world.

A new innovation, the internet, created increased efficiency in global information processing. The increase came just as it was required to maintain the global industrial society. The information processing capacity increased by several thousand fold with limited increased maintenance cost.

Thus, the global industrial society continued to grow and increase in complexity. Every major crisis faced thus far by the global industrial society has been met with increased efficiencies, radical innovation, and increased complexity. The rate of innovation is now also declining toward stagnation. The marginal return-on-investment for academic and scientific study has declined significantly since the 1970s (see above).

The Covid Pandemic shone a light on inefficiencies and weaknesses in global industrial society as a whole. The just-in-time model of global production failed for about two years. Many nations now seek more self-sufficiency and retention of local production. Digital tools are being used to reduce overhead costs: government legitimization, the boosting of economic efficiency, reduction-in-cost for professional specialization. It doesn’t look like the gained efficiencies are enough though.

It is likely that globalized financial systems will soon be replaced with more localized mercantile systems. Global financial systems have themselves achieved a level of complexity beyond the capacity of any nation-state to properly control. Thus, it has become reasonable for nation-states to simplify their systems by switching to cryptocurrency. Nations that have done so, like El Salvador, have seen dramatic gains in economic marginal-return-on-investment by cutting out parasitic middlemen.

The collapse of civilization is happening right now, but it is not a dramatic Burning of Rome. The desire to de-complexify the international global society we live in is re-birthing nation-state politics. This is locking many nations into an armament spiral, but that spiral (in the short-term) is preferable to continued global complexity.

Local wars are breaking out between adjacent nations of similar wealth and power. Global economics are re-nationalizing. We are seeing on the horizon a demographic-decline that generally precedes periods of dramatic societal collapse throughout history. The global industrial society whose height was from 1980 to 2020 is ending.

A world of nation-state competitors is recreating itself, and resource shortages may cause those to de-complexify over time too: A feudal system is easier to manage than an international corporate system. Land-bound serfs are easier to manage than massive homeless populations and indebted aspiring elites. The changes undertaken through the coming century must radically change the face of civilization.

That said, a sudden societal de-complexification may occur more quickly than governments are planning for. A systems-collapse scenario may occur in the case of critical resource losses. Modern civilization requires a vast supply of injected critical resources to function: Petroleum, iron, lithium, nitrogen fertilizer, etc. A rapid-unplanned-de-complexification could become favorable if too many critical resources are lost at once, the acquisition of some is often tied to the availability of others.

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A Note on Global Industrial Society as a Civilization

In this review I have describe “global industrial society” as a single civilization. From a spiritual or cultural ethos, that’s entirely untrue. At the same time 2000 years ago, an Iberian had less in common with a Greek than a modern Shenghai businessman has in common with a British banker.

Wastern Faustian civilization is not only economic system, it’s a cultural ideal that gave birth to the global industrial society. That global industrial society, however, has to be taken as an economic unit for the purposes of understanding the reasoning of Joseph Tainter and making reasonable predictions about future societal changes. Tainter spends a lot of time discussing what defines “a civilization” and mostly settles on an economic model.

Social, economic and military de-complexification is how Tainter defines collapse. While Tainter does not make specific reference to Global Industrial Society (his book was published in 1988), it is clear that what he constitutes as a “civilization” could easily be defined as a single global entity at this time.

We live in a world where every industrialized nation has similar cross-reliant economic systems. So much so radical disruptions to trade can occur even between military enemies should economic decoupling be forced. The architectural style of a modern strip-mall in the United States differs little from an equivalent in China, Russia, India, Argentina or Poland. A future-historian looking back through archeological records may well presume that a single empire conquered the entire world due to clear cultural amalgamation.

While I would still argue that Faustian civilization holds a unique place in critiques of human societies, it is reasonable that we define the global industrial society as something else. A capital-driven state of delusional eternal economic growth.

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Disagreements with the work

Joseph Tainter ignores “mystical explanations” for societal collapse. Still, it appears that there is more to societal collapse than mere decreases in marginal-return-on-investment. It could be that Joseph Tainter is right, but it seems likely that there is a larger cultural spirit that does age. A state of cultural exhaustion is reached that is coterminous with unsustainable societal complexity. A people of a single mind can far more invest in critical resources than a disparate people. In creating a global industrial society, it seems that the Elites have done their best to slay cultural spirits.

What appears to be a global backlash against a high-complexity system is also a reaction to a spiritually destructive mono-state. The soviet union saw something similar over a similarly short timeline. A massive state at high complexity containing thousands of disparate groups that collapsed within a few generations. When the spiritual unity of a people is decoupled from the complexity of a society, the legitimacy of the state suffers. The global industrial society is predicated on the idea that if every one is rich, every one is happy. Too few people are rich, too many are listless, few are happy. An identity is not something that can be commodified.

The societies of the modern industrial global civilization have been placed in the furnace to fuel growth, but now there’s only spiritual cinders remaining; little drive to maintain the extreme complexity required. Spiritual backlash is a real occurrence in a subsumed people and is one reason that this high level of complexity is intolerable.

Thus, I believe Tainter is in error when dismissing mystical attributes to social decay. Reliance on purely materialistic (e.g. scientific) definitions leaves significant blind-spots. That said, this text is extraordinarily well written and well researched. I would highly recommend it as an introduction to many of these concepts, but it should be paired with a spiritual consideration of social systems.

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