The Collapse of Complex Societies:

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies


The answer he arrived at was that they hadn't collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they'd collapsed because of it.


a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.


Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.


Tainter’s thesis is that when society's elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some. The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.