Contra the Dourado-Tainter story

I have problems with this particular theory of social collapse.

Eli Dourado writes,

A number of times in human history, a society has gone from a relatively high level of sociopolitical complexity to a much lower one—rapidly, within the span of a few decades. This is what we will call collapse. Collapse manifests as a lower degree of social differentiation and economic specialization, less centralized control, less behavioral control, less investment in art and monuments, a lower flow of information within society, less sharing and trading of resources, a lower degree of social coordination and organization, and territorially smaller political units. And a lot of people probably starve, if they don’t meet more violent ends.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Dourado describes a theory of collapse due to Joseph Tainter.

This added complexity accumulates. As it does so, it requires resources—Tainter emphasizes energy and fiscal resources⁶—to maintain. Often, the resource demands of one piece of complexity necessitate more complexity, as when a higher tax rate necessitates new resources to be put into legitimization and coercion. The complexity accumulates as a system. At first, the cost-benefit ratio of this added complexity is very favorable, and the marginal benefits are high. As more complexity is added, the marginal benefits diminish, then go to zero, before turning negative.

And then a society becomes too complex, and it collapses. Dourado has much more explanation, and I’m sure that Tainter has more still, but it strikes me as woo-woo.

I start with a concept of complexity based on Austrian capital theory. Economy A is more complex than Economy B if production is more roundabout. Digging a hole with a shovel is simple. Digging a hole with a backhoe requires a lot more economic infrastructure: to create all of the parts for the backhoe, to supply fuel for the backhoe; to supply financing for backhoe services, and so on.

Can an economy become too complex? The Austrian says yes, in the short run, if interest rates are too low an economy can become too capital-intensive, and that leads to business cycle fluctuations. But I have never been fond of Austrian business cycle theory, and even if it were true I think that in the long run having production be more and more roundabout is the way to go.

Of course, there are other definitions of social complexity that one could use. And with any definition, you can say that “Too much complexity is bad.” What else could you mean by too much?

What would be my theory of social collapse? I would say that most societies throughout history have been fragile. Societies depend on people agreeing to obey social norms, especially the rules put in place by the government. In what North, Weingast, and Wallis call the Natural State, most people resent the government and its rules. They obey because the government coalition is the only group capable of undertaking organized violence. The coalition’s main job is to make sure that no other powerful organization can form. In fact, another term that NWW use for the Natural State is “limited-access order,” because people outside of the coalition typically have no ability to form significant political or economic organizations of any kind.

A Natural State would collapse if the coalition failed to hold together. Then you get war. It can be an internal civil war. Or it can be an external invasion by a conqueror that exploits factional divisions within the invaded territory (my understanding is that a lot of societies of indigenous people of the Western hemisphere had this happen to them). If the war lasts long enough and is destructive enough, the society falls so far that it meets the definition of collapse.

China is a limited-access order. I believe that this makes China’s regime fragile.

Iran is a limited-access order. I believe that Iran’s regime is really fragile.

But we do not live in a Natural State. The United States is what NWW call an open-access order. Anyone has the legal right to form an economic or political organization—subject to certain rules, of course. This gives nearly everyone a stake in the political order. It gives the government what political theorists call “legitimacy.”

How does an open-access order collapse? We do not know the answer to that question, because just about every society that historians describe as having collapsed was a limited-access order.

If you ask me to give an example of a modern democracy that collapsed, the best I could come up with would be the Weimar Republic. There, the regime had little legitimacy to begin. It put its people through hyperinflation and a Depression. It was subject to Communist subversion. And many of it citizens fell under the spell of a ruthless demagogue named Adolf Hitler.

Suppose that you do include Weimar in your historical sample of collapsed societies. If you were trying to come up with all of the possible causes for its collapse, “too much complexity” probably wouldn’t make the list.

Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that the United States might collapse. But I think that before you can get collapse, you need violent warfare. I cannot speak to the risk of being attacked by another country. But internally, the level of political violence here is close to as low as it has ever been.

Eli Dourado is against the way that the regulatory state impinges on our lives. That is what he means by too much complexity. His frustration with the regulatory state is understandable. But I cannot buy into the Dourado-Tainter thesis that the regulatory state is putting the United States on the road to collapse.

substacks referenced above: @

A beginner’s guide to sociopolitical collapse