Collapsology (SOCIETAL COLLAPSE, LOL!) with Joseph Tainter

In 1988, anthropologist Joseph Tainter sat down one afternoon and sketched out a book in about twenty minutes. That book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, became the foundational text of a field that now has its own name: collapsology. Tainter, who grew up in San Francisco during the Cold War and assumed as a child that a nuclear blast would erase his home, has spent decades studying why complex societies fall apart. His answer is not about barbarians at the gate or moral decay. It is about energy, cost, and the diminishing returns of complexity itself.

What Complexity Actually Means

Tainter avoids value-laden terms like "civilization" because they smuggle in approval of whatever the speaker's own society happens to be. Instead, he defines complexity in measurable terms: the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles, the number of distinct occupations, and the ways these are organized into a functioning whole. A complex society is a problem-solving organization, class-structured, internally differentiated, and controlled. Resources that sustain life are not equally available to everyone. Tainter emphasizes that such societies are an anomaly of history. For most of human existence, people lived in small bands. Complexity is not normal, and it is not free.

The Metabolic Cost of Complexity