From National affairs, number 68 • Summer 2026:
In these pessimistic times, dark assessments of American or even civilizational decline are not hard to find. Given the fact that our riches and powers continue to increase, albeit at a reduced clip, such assessments seem premature. But the study of civilizational decline holds important lessons for us today.
Consider the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter, whose 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies still stands as a leading text in the field. Tainter's work contrasts sharply with the 20th century's most famous efforts to solve the riddle of why civilizations rise and fall, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and Arnold Toynbee's mammoth A Study of History, both of which were grandiose mashups of erudition, personal prejudice, and metaphysical speculation that won their authors celebrity and widespread acclaim as seers and prophets. The Collapse of Complex Societies, meanwhile, is unassuming and no-nonsense, and remains all but unknown outside scholarly circles.
But the framework Tainter offers for understanding the life cycles of civilizations could be just what we need to make sense of our perplexing time, and to think constructively about our future.
RISE AND FALL
Tainter's theory can be summed up concisely. Human societies are best understood as organizations constructed to solve problems, with the problems being some combination of serving the narrow interests of elites and attending to the broader interests of society. More complex forms of social organization — including greater specialization, higher volumes of exchange, and increased levels of hierarchy — arise to solve problems that can't be managed otherwise. Investment in sociopolitical complexity pays off, creating larger and richer polities, but it also comes with costs that tend to mount over time. Eventually, as the costs of maintaining the status quo creep upward, further investment in additional complexity starts to yield diminishing returns. Push things further, and returns turn negative.
In Tainter's analysis, declining marginal returns to investments in complexity create societal vulnerability. The polity becomes top-heavy, saddled with increasingly onerous overhead costs. The resulting decline need not be precipitous, though. An unusually favorable turn in the climate, a better-than-average ruler, internal problems for a hostile neighbor, and similar turns of fate could make for a temporary revival. On the other hand, a nasty negative shock could send things into a sudden tailspin. Sooner or later, the combination of heightened vulnerability and a potent challenge leads to one of two outcomes: loss of territory to a rival civilization, or, in the absence of any adversary in a position to fill the vacuum, collapse and reversion to a simpler, more decentralized social order.
Tainter's model of the changing marginal returns of social complexity offers a convincing picture of many civilizations' life cycles — their rise and expansion as well as their decline and fall. As civilizations grow and expand, their social orders become more complex — a more extensive division of labor over a larger territory, a growing administrative and military apparatus, an enlarged and enriched elite class. During the expansion phase, rising complexity is self-reinforcing: New conquests bring new sources of plundered wealth and tax revenues, which fund a larger army, which enables more conquests.
Eventually, though, expansion has to cease, whether because it bumps up against powerful rival powers or because the distance from the governing center is just too great. Once expansion ceases, returns to complexity eventually reverse their course and start heading downward. After the one-off gains from plunder have been exhausted, it's necessary to raise taxes on the provinces to maintain revenues and pay for a now-much-larger elite. But squeezing the provinces hurts production, which necessitates further tax hikes, which provoke dissent that requires the dispatching of additional occupying troops to quell, which necessitates further tax hikes, and so on. If the empire is in a crowded neighborhood, it may find itself shrinking as more vital neighbors nibble away at its edges. If there is no competitor in a position to fill the vacuum, decline may accelerate to collapse: a return to a much less complex social order to shed the now-unbearable costs of complexity.
In the dynamic sketched out above, a lot of the work is being done by pre-modern conditions. The extent of territorial expansion was constrained by communications and transportation technologies, and the means of acquiring new wealth to stay ahead of the rising costs of complexity were largely limited to conquest and plunder. So the question naturally arises: Is Tainter's model of rise and fall applicable to the contemporary world?
Tainter describes human societies as "problem-solving organizations" whose "sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance." When those systems start to yield diminishing returns, the clock can be reset if a new "energy subsidy" can be found. In the pre-modern world, the main sources of energy were human and animal power, and thus the new subsidy could only be procured by territorial expansion (you could also luck into a new subsidy if an extended period of peace, good weather, and no major disease outbreaks produce sustained domestic population growth).
In the industrial era, new forms of energy subsidy became available: steam power and fossil fuels in the narrow sense, and modern technological and economic growth more broadly. These new literal and figurative power sources boosted human welfare dramatically, and they did so by enabling a dramatic complexification of the social order: rapid population growth, a huge increase in specialization and occupational variety, and the steady growth of a mass managerial and professional elite. This transformation has expanded managers' and professionals' share of the workforce from under 10% in 1900 to over 40% today. Meanwhile, the percentage of total social resources devoted to governance, as opposed to production, has climbed to a substantial fraction of total output in all the advanced economies. Our social order is thus growing increasingly top-heavy.
Has that top-heaviness reached the point that it's problematic? Have we entered Tainter's danger zone of declining marginal returns? Tainter devotes extensive discussion to the widespread presence of diminishing returns in modern life, paying particular attention to falling returns to research and development (R&D) and both growth and sclerosis within government and bureaucracy more generally. But of course, as Tainter realizes, diminishing returns with respect to specific inputs are a ubiquitous fact of economic life. Ongoing innovation, however, continually forestalls the arrival of zero or negative overall returns, thus keeping stagnation or economic decline at bay....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
Tribes and States: Human Self-Organization
And:
...And as noted in the introduction to 2020's "Tribalism":
The title of this piece was "Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?" but that seems an incorrect characterization.
It's all about trust, which is one of the reasons globalists have a problem convincing ordinary people to share their grand dreams and visions. Many of the things globalists have promised turned out not to be true so people go to the population size they feel they can trust.
Can't trust the U.N. after the Oil-for-Food frauds and the Rwandan genocides? Let's try nation-state.
Can't trust nation-states because one part of the populace cheats or shows themselves to be hypocrites?(And it is this very point, Orwell's “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” where globalists lose the masses)Let's try states.
And then city-states and if you can't trust your fellow metropolitans we'll go with blood relations, first tribes and if there are schisms there, to immediate family. Consanguinity and all that.
Tribalism isn't a "mal" anything, it's a survival mechanism for when you really, really have to increase the odds that you will be able to trust another person....
Intro now outro! Here at Climateer Investing, We Recycle.
