I’m afraid your conclusions are somewhat optimistic. I agree that total collapse is unlikely in the near term but I would argue that we are seeing increasing levels of dysfunction that do not bode well for the future.
As an example, consider this scenario. Say Trump wins the upcoming election. The results are close and Trump’s win depends on the vagaries of the Electoral College system. The Blue nomenklatura goes apoplectic and announces The End of Democracy. Some technicalities are found, or invented, to argue Trump’s win invalid. The Deep State (The NY Times, CNN, the FBI, the Federal judiciary, etc.) rally to Biden’s cause and he is installed as president. Trump goes to prison. Half the country is outraged but powerless.
Is this scenario impossible? I would have said so a few year’s ago, but now? And if not now how about in a few more years?
I would argue higher and higher complexity requires a static or growing cohort of people who are actually intellectually competent. If that cohort of competence starts declining, complexity must go in the other direction and once that starts it can't easily be reversed or stopped- a new level of equilibrium may not be reached without a big overshoot on the downside.
I look around me today in the U.S. and Europe, and I am not confident about the competence of our society.
You can call me old and crotchety if you’d like, but I say if you can’t do something as simple as set a VCR clock, then you have no business bossing other people around with them fancy regulations and rules. I call it the “Regulator’s VCR Dilemma” or RVD for short, but not to be confused with Right Ventricular Dysfunction. Studies consistently show that 78% of the population has a VCR with a blinking “12:00”. How am I supposed to record this Sunday’s episode of “Murder She Wrote,” if the clock is doing the blinky thing? You’re fired dumb regulator!
"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."
It's not really a good example. The history* is complicated so you'll have to excuse me if I leave out a lot of the background.
But it's best to see the political disorder of the Weimar period as part of a pattern and an instance of a broader phenomenon of fragility, destabilization, and crisis that was occurring simultaneously in many European countries in the aftermath of World War I and the October Revolution, and with the collapse of the European empires. What was happening in Germany was also happening in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Turkey, and other places.
To paint in very broad strokes, what one saw was the attempt to instantly replace the systems and powers of the old order with an attempt to mimic and immediately copy the 'liberal' political systems and ideological frameworks of the victorious Western Democracies. Certain analogies can be drawn to later difficult efforts to "nation-build" and suddenly impose these new structures on societies which lacked experience with the system and the time to evolve and adapt the toolkits necessary to handle various challenges inherent in the new frameworks.
It doesn't have to be mimicry of the outside, there are examples of indigenous movement to invent new ideological foundations for social order and governance, and (roughly) the American and French revolutions are ok examples. Things start going south right away, sometimes leading to reactions of major swings in the opposite direction or pulling backs of certain excesses, which was why the more radical decentralization of The Articles of Confederation was replaced by the more conservative centralization of The US Constitution.
But getting back to the post-WWI period, these "shock therapy" transitions were something the elite intellectual liberal-nationalists in those countries were very eager and enthusiastic to accomplish, having dreamed about it for decades, especially since they were briefly propelled all the way upward into power, status, and influence. Some major social transitions have to be accomplished gradually while allowing the body to gradually become accustomed to handling novel stressors before administering more medicine. If in trying to treat a cancer you give a year's worth of chemotherapy to the patient all at once, he just dies.
The implementation was running mostly on optimistic wishful thinking and naivete rather than on any wisdom or experience with the realities of rule and necessities of statecraft in the new system.
Part of the problem was that culturally confident intellectual elites in the liberal democracies themselves often did not really understand the de facto, informal, and illegible aspects of their own society's workings that were an indispensable foundation that enabled the legible, formal, de jure system to actually work for them in practice, that certain inherent dangers of liberalism were being kept in check in equilibrium with a set of co-evolving mitigations. One doesn't understand the potential problem posed by the starling and how they are kept in check in their native habitat until one starts trying to breed them in Central Park and watch them quickly crush the populations of less competitive birds in a sizable chunk of the continent.
So, in those European countries, the elite liberals, in addition to not being competent at the job of governance in the new system, introduced two novel features to the local approach to social governance which proved immediately unworkable. In general they swung too far to the opposite extremes of state authority. In order to avoid dictatorship, they created a system that depended on so much consensus that it became impossible to get anything done or to hold coalitions together for long. In order to avoid central control over opinion and expression and political exclusion of certain viewpoints, and to permit open criticism, they opened the door to subversive, seditious, and effectively treasonous Socialist agitations and conspiracies which had zero commitment to the present order and sought to undermine, overthrow, and replace it as soon as feasible and by whatever means necessary. And with lots of foreign help! The Soviets reasonably saw the bulk of these parts of Europe as ripe for plucking, and plenty of American elites were wholly sympathetic to that project.
Social circumstances in all those places worsened quickly with governments unable to get anything done and too weak (and full of Reds) to deal with the Red Menace, which was constantly escalating the level of violent conflict in the hopes of kicking off Civil Wars which they expected to win (and nearly did). Public intellectual commentary in those places at that time was obsessed with talking about this common problem, complaining about the failures of liberalism, identifying the root causes, wringing hands about how to save a liberal order without compromising liberal principles, and ... coming up with alternatives to liberalism. Like Fascism.
Both actual Fascism in its original intellectual conception as with the Italians, and the hazy modern folk concept of ordinary people feeling a pressing need for stable leadership in governance, with sufficient authority to make things happen and get things done in reasonable time, and strong enough to maintain internal security keep the crazy revolutionaries (Reds, Islamists, whatevers) down. But those people weren't just "authoritarian personalities" or whatever. There was actually a pressing need for that kind of government if there was to be any hope of returning to normal life, stability, safety, order, and (most) freedoms, anytime soon.
And the liberals just couldn't deliver that anywhere, they didn't have what it took to make themselves strong enough to thwart the active efforts of rising rivals to intentionally make things worse and make it impossible for them to deliver anything, in order to erode the system's legitimacy and the population's commitment to it as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
The collapse of liberalism in all those countries was not due to "complexity" but to an ideological invasive species taking out their political immune systems, and then Civil Wars of varying levels of intensity breaking out between the most ruthlessly determined factions for control over the weakened host. They mowed down the Queen's garden and were surprised to see the territory not become a pleasant park but immediately contested by two rival species of noxious weeds, and then covered over in just one of those weeds which makes the ground inhospitable for any other kind of plant.
*As a personal note of observation, I happen to work in an environment where there is a regular turnover of recent and fairly smart college graduates, which provides me with some anecdotal insight into what kind of commonly taught knowledge gets in the heads of a supposedly "educated person", such that one could assume even a cursory familiarity with it in the course of carrying out a conversation. Compared to 25 years ago, my impression is that historical knowledge has taken the biggest hit by far, with all kind of details for entire periods replaced with a kind of hazy moralistic certainty that those were just the "bad old days".
I just came upon Adam Tooze's "The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931" (2015). I'll see how close it comes :)
That's an interesting take on interwar Europe. Is there a good written history organized like that? The impression I've always gotten is, "The liberals were right and should have been listened to. But WW I and it's aftermath had so screwed things up that
Speaking of North, his use of the more neutral expression “discontinuous institutional change” rather than something as emotionally charged as the polarizing use of “collapse” seems more helpful and more widely relevant for a lengthy list of reasons I won’t go into. But, it might be of interest to consider North’s thoughts on discontinuous institutional change as expressed in subchapter III and IV in Chapter 10 of Part III of his book Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. In particular, because his observations seem to provide some predictive hypothesis:
“Wars, revolutions, conquest, and natural disasters are sources of discontinuous institutional change [… …] By discontinuous change I mean a radical change in the formal rules, usually as a result of conquest or revolution [… …]
1. Incremental change means that the parties to exchange recontract to capture some of the potential gains from trade (at least for one of the exchanging parties). Such recontracting can range from a very simple kind to what Skocpol call political revolutions, in which a restructuring of political institutions resolves a gridlock crisis. The key to continuous incremental changes is institutional contexts that make possible new bargains and compromises between the players. Political institutions (both formal and informal) can provide a hospitable framework for evolutionary change. If such an institutional framework has not evolved, the parties to an exchange my not have a framework to settle disputes, the potential gains from exchange cannot be realized, and entrepreneurs … may attempt to form a coalition of groups to break out of the deadlock by strikes, violence, and other means.
2. The inability to achieve compromise solutions may reflect not only a lack of mediating institutions, but also limited degrees of freedom of the entrepreneurs to bargain and still maintain the loyalty of their constituent groups. Thus, the real choice sets of the conflicting parties may have no intersection, so that even though there are potentially large gains from resolving the disagreements, the combination of limited bargaining freedom on the entrepreneurs and a lack of facilitating institutions makes it impossible to do so.
3. Because and make deals with other interest groups. However, as a result the final outcomes of successful revolutions become very uncertain, because conflict within the coalition over the restructuring of the rules, and hence the distribution of rewards, leads to further conflict.
4. Broad based support for violent action requires ideological commitment to overcome the free-rider problem. The stronger the ideological convictions of the participants, the greater the price they will be willing to pay and hence the more likely the revolution will be successful.”
Considering these observations, we might ask ourselves some questions:
To the extent that the regulatory agencies and the courts impede political recontracting, are they contributing to a greater likelihood of thwarted recontracting and thus discontinuous institutional change?
To the extent that political deal-making facilitated by using future generations to fund current benefits grows less feasible, will the frequency of gridlock crises increase?
If the frequency of reductions in real wages increases (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/realer.pdf ), which ideologies might gain stronger and broader commitment? At what point might free-rider problems be overcome?
And so on.
Can incremental innovation in institutions as described by North keep the boat afloat? The establishment’s resort fear and intimidation tactics, censorship and suppression of dissent suggest not. Yet, for a majority, the alternatives appear worse: keep your head down and it will likely all blow over.
Are the economic consequences of the impending tax and new regulatory burdens that are about to be heaped upon us enough to sink the boat? Incrementally, there doesn’t seem to be a breaking point: Derek Parfitt rules. (https://zworld.substack.com/p/could-i-make-you-eat-shit ) And yet, survivalism, at present, is about a $2.5 billion a year industry. The moment a carrier gets sunk in the Red Sea, that figure will increase by a lot. And one remembers when backyard fallout shelters were all the rage. Might there be returns to post-discontinuous institutional change preparation in terms of private ordering of institutional arrangements? If so, we may never know as discretion and secrecy would appear to be of utmost value to such arrangements.
I notice that the Dourado-Tainter story rather defines the result of collapse to be the same as the cause of collapse: society gets too complex, then it stops being complex. That is... not terribly compelling. It is a bit like explaining why people become poor by saying they acquired too much money.
I think the third thing (or second thing in this case) driving the collapse as society gets more complex is that complexity leaves many opportunities for inefficiencies through corruption. Parasitism is easier to execute and harder to detect and excise in larger, more complex organizations.
That is another interesting point: increased centralized control complexity makes wealth creating more difficult and rent seeking more easy. Not necessarily linearly or in a mirrored way, but even if not intentional the tendency of centralization seems to be making wealth production more difficult while rent seeking gets easier.
I share Arnold’s doubt about whether a society can collapse merely from complexity. However, we do live in a society that depends upon a lot of complicated systems that require a high level of competence to operate and maintain. What happens when those in charge are selected by identity rather than for competence?
1) The Soviet Union is probably an example of a collapse that doesn't require a violence.
It also illustrates how you can be very stagnant but not collapse.
2) If we include third world democracies that record gets a lot sketchier. Given the likely demographics of the west in a generation or two, this might be illustrative.
I also feel like universal suffrage democracy with a modern welfare state is a different animal the kind of small government limited suffrage democracies of a century ago.
3) One could describe Singapore as a semi-closed access system. It's not as if the PAP has lost a single election since its founding. I could list some other close examples and they aren't all city states.
Elections give feedback, usually along the lines of "status quo acceptable/not acceptable".
That doesn't necessarily tell you what to do. As noted, the electoral feedback "Weimar bad" didn't give a path to knowing what's good.
The best leaders seem to find a way to integrate the good feedback and reject the bad, which requires a tough mix of accepting when one is wrong and sticking to ones guns as well as copious amounts of discernment.
Ultimately though, elections are a lot less information dense than markets. I'd probably take a closed access political order that respected markets (Singapore) over an open access order that didn't.
I just finished Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. It's a little frustrating because, though he gives lots of ways that a society can be more complex, he never comes up with a way to put them all together: to say this society is more complex than that one, or this society is more complex in this year than it was twenty years previously.
Perhaps that is how it should be. There are lots of different ways a society can be complex. But through most of the book, he talks of complexity as if it is a single variable. And he has simple little graphs of "complexity" as a function of time (pp. 93, 113) or "benefits" as a function of complexity (pp. 119, 125). Which is another problem. He doesn't define "benefits". Benefits to who? How do you net out positive and negative benefits, e.g., enserfment. I came away feeling "benefits" was somewhat circular. It was a benefit if it helped the society survive, but the theory is that a society is vulnerable to collapse when the costs of additional complexity exceed the benefits.
In other parts of the book, he basically says that this all depends on context, which is no doubt true. Some times, what used to work no longer does. In the later Roman Empire, more taxes doesn't mean a stronger central government. It means more tax evasion, lower "legitimacy", and less resistance to invasion by the peasants--even some times inviting the barbarians in. There is good additional complexity and bad additional complexity, which partly depends on how much complexity there already is but also, maybe mostly, depends on other things.
The great irony of the book is that he begins by criticizing other explanations of collapse. One school says that invasions did the society in, but invasions were successfully resisted several times in the past. So it can't be just invasions. Another school says it was epidemic disease, but previous epidemics didn't bring the society to collapse. You have to know the details.
But in his theory, he just adds this diffuse idea of complexity. Previously, the society had been on the rising part of the marginal benefit v. complexity curve. Now it is on the falling part.
But (another but), in the detailed case studies, he does go into details. He doesn't use complexity as a simple variable but as a framework that has to be filled in. And when he fills it in, he brings in those other theories: invasions, diseases, resource depletion, etc.
Re the idea that "modern" democracies don't collapse: many did in the 1920s & the 1930s, not just Weimar's: Italy, Spain, Portugal, just to name a few. Poland, Austria, Romania, etc, had liberal regimes that large majorities very quickly got sick of. Then again, not sure why we need to keep the count limited to "modern" democracies. All ancient democracies collapsed in the most colorful ways, from Athens to Corinth to Syracuse. The Roman Republic, which in many ways was closer to a Greek democracy than many believe, famously ended with a bang. We need to be ready to see democracies collapse, regardless of one's opinion on their effectiveness, because history teaches us that nothing lasts forever, if for no other reason.
Tainter has a much stronger definition of collapse than just reverting from democracy. In fact, his definition of collapse might not even apply to Weimar Germany. That definition is a much lower level of social complexity. By that definition, modern collapses are rare or perhaps nonexistent, although the ancient examples probably hold up.
Strictly going by Tainter's description, I can only think of a state that overcomplicated itself to destruction, and that is post-Diocletian Rome, which was (to use modern parlance) an executive monarchy with a parliament. One often sees economic explanations of the fall of the Roman Empire that stress hyperinflation, when in reality it was overtaxation and overregulation (which did combine to destroy hyperinflation) that did most to weaken the state. China's early Han Dynasty is another possibility. None of those states have modern counterparts, really, outside of (as you cited earlier) contemporary China.
I just looked that up, thanks. I don't know enough about the Chacoans to have an opinion, but the parts about the Romans and the Maya definitely make sense to me.
Does he mention the Justinian Plague (and the concurrent volcanic eruption with worldwide disastrous climate effects)?
Or the severe shift in climate (prolonged ENSO drought, ironically overlapping with Europe's Medieval Warm Period) that stressed the climax Maya culture?
Climate shifts likely a part of the Chacoan collapse too, although I need to catch up on the details.
The base case is the ever-growing regulatory state having the US on the road to Euro-style stagnation. Continued deficit spending will lead to IMF intervention, as it did for the UK in the 1970s, with mandatory cuts to entitlements, government headcount, and government pension plans. The birth dearth will likely require the Ponzi scheme to be restructured before the end of the century anyway. Collapse may come from kleptocracy, where people simply refuse to pay taxes due to no real representation, or nuclear war.
ps. In 4.5 years, Trump and Biden will be gone, the self-serving bureaucracy will still be strangling the golden goose, and the globalists will be continuing to add another layer of bureaucracy.
Hitler, Maduro, and maybe Trump all seem examples where the public was looking for simple answers to complexity. In the first two cases they got something not far from what Dourado and Tainter suggest. Maybe this is the most likely path to that end.
Then again, US politicians are constantly offering supposedly simple answers to complex issues. I'm not sure if that weakens or strengthens my point.
From the start I was thinking of the regulatory state and as I read I wondered why it wasn't mentioned. The last paragraph dismisses it rather quickly. Maybe it's not a threat but I was thinking of how the timelines for completing infrastructure projects have gotten far longer in the last 100 years. Will there come a time when new initiatives become too complex to complete? Ironically, given comments on China in the piece, that country seems to complete many large infrastructure projects with lightning speed.
Part of the problem with analyzing the US is too many allegedly smart people pay too much attention to howling nobodies. No, this person doesn't have that much power, they lack basic organizational competence.... but they can frighten people who want drama in their lives.
"Digging a hole with a shovel is simple. Digging a hole with a backhoe requires a lot more economic infrastructure..."
I think it's instructive to point out that this description might be inaccurate, and inaccurate in some of the same ways that open-access orders might collapse.
If we're being precise, there's a pretty big disconnect between using a backhoe and building and maintaining backhoes. The latter are what requires a lot of infrastructure. The former no so much. You can ship off a backhoe to even most third world countries and expect it to get years of use, even though the society using it might not be able to build backhoes themselves.
I think this has some obvious parallels to various forms of political and human capital. What a society can make use of is a very different question from what it can make.
I’m afraid your conclusions are somewhat optimistic. I agree that total collapse is unlikely in the near term but I would argue that we are seeing increasing levels of dysfunction that do not bode well for the future.
As an example, consider this scenario. Say Trump wins the upcoming election. The results are close and Trump’s win depends on the vagaries of the Electoral College system. The Blue nomenklatura goes apoplectic and announces The End of Democracy. Some technicalities are found, or invented, to argue Trump’s win invalid. The Deep State (The NY Times, CNN, the FBI, the Federal judiciary, etc.) rally to Biden’s cause and he is installed as president. Trump goes to prison. Half the country is outraged but powerless.
Is this scenario impossible? I would have said so a few year’s ago, but now? And if not now how about in a few more years?
That is not social collapse though. The US had a Civil War but the society kept functioning, even when fractured in two warring sides.
That's a really interesting thought. Thanks, Lorenzo.
I would argue higher and higher complexity requires a static or growing cohort of people who are actually intellectually competent. If that cohort of competence starts declining, complexity must go in the other direction and once that starts it can't easily be reversed or stopped- a new level of equilibrium may not be reached without a big overshoot on the downside.
I look around me today in the U.S. and Europe, and I am not confident about the competence of our society.
You can call me old and crotchety if you’d like, but I say if you can’t do something as simple as set a VCR clock, then you have no business bossing other people around with them fancy regulations and rules. I call it the “Regulator’s VCR Dilemma” or RVD for short, but not to be confused with Right Ventricular Dysfunction. Studies consistently show that 78% of the population has a VCR with a blinking “12:00”. How am I supposed to record this Sunday’s episode of “Murder She Wrote,” if the clock is doing the blinky thing? You’re fired dumb regulator!
be kind, rewind.
"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."
It's not really a good example. The history* is complicated so you'll have to excuse me if I leave out a lot of the background.
But it's best to see the political disorder of the Weimar period as part of a pattern and an instance of a broader phenomenon of fragility, destabilization, and crisis that was occurring simultaneously in many European countries in the aftermath of World War I and the October Revolution, and with the collapse of the European empires. What was happening in Germany was also happening in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Turkey, and other places.
To paint in very broad strokes, what one saw was the attempt to instantly replace the systems and powers of the old order with an attempt to mimic and immediately copy the 'liberal' political systems and ideological frameworks of the victorious Western Democracies. Certain analogies can be drawn to later difficult efforts to "nation-build" and suddenly impose these new structures on societies which lacked experience with the system and the time to evolve and adapt the toolkits necessary to handle various challenges inherent in the new frameworks.
It doesn't have to be mimicry of the outside, there are examples of indigenous movement to invent new ideological foundations for social order and governance, and (roughly) the American and French revolutions are ok examples. Things start going south right away, sometimes leading to reactions of major swings in the opposite direction or pulling backs of certain excesses, which was why the more radical decentralization of The Articles of Confederation was replaced by the more conservative centralization of The US Constitution.
But getting back to the post-WWI period, these "shock therapy" transitions were something the elite intellectual liberal-nationalists in those countries were very eager and enthusiastic to accomplish, having dreamed about it for decades, especially since they were briefly propelled all the way upward into power, status, and influence. Some major social transitions have to be accomplished gradually while allowing the body to gradually become accustomed to handling novel stressors before administering more medicine. If in trying to treat a cancer you give a year's worth of chemotherapy to the patient all at once, he just dies.
The implementation was running mostly on optimistic wishful thinking and naivete rather than on any wisdom or experience with the realities of rule and necessities of statecraft in the new system.
Part of the problem was that culturally confident intellectual elites in the liberal democracies themselves often did not really understand the de facto, informal, and illegible aspects of their own society's workings that were an indispensable foundation that enabled the legible, formal, de jure system to actually work for them in practice, that certain inherent dangers of liberalism were being kept in check in equilibrium with a set of co-evolving mitigations. One doesn't understand the potential problem posed by the starling and how they are kept in check in their native habitat until one starts trying to breed them in Central Park and watch them quickly crush the populations of less competitive birds in a sizable chunk of the continent.
So, in those European countries, the elite liberals, in addition to not being competent at the job of governance in the new system, introduced two novel features to the local approach to social governance which proved immediately unworkable. In general they swung too far to the opposite extremes of state authority. In order to avoid dictatorship, they created a system that depended on so much consensus that it became impossible to get anything done or to hold coalitions together for long. In order to avoid central control over opinion and expression and political exclusion of certain viewpoints, and to permit open criticism, they opened the door to subversive, seditious, and effectively treasonous Socialist agitations and conspiracies which had zero commitment to the present order and sought to undermine, overthrow, and replace it as soon as feasible and by whatever means necessary. And with lots of foreign help! The Soviets reasonably saw the bulk of these parts of Europe as ripe for plucking, and plenty of American elites were wholly sympathetic to that project.
Social circumstances in all those places worsened quickly with governments unable to get anything done and too weak (and full of Reds) to deal with the Red Menace, which was constantly escalating the level of violent conflict in the hopes of kicking off Civil Wars which they expected to win (and nearly did). Public intellectual commentary in those places at that time was obsessed with talking about this common problem, complaining about the failures of liberalism, identifying the root causes, wringing hands about how to save a liberal order without compromising liberal principles, and ... coming up with alternatives to liberalism. Like Fascism.
Both actual Fascism in its original intellectual conception as with the Italians, and the hazy modern folk concept of ordinary people feeling a pressing need for stable leadership in governance, with sufficient authority to make things happen and get things done in reasonable time, and strong enough to maintain internal security keep the crazy revolutionaries (Reds, Islamists, whatevers) down. But those people weren't just "authoritarian personalities" or whatever. There was actually a pressing need for that kind of government if there was to be any hope of returning to normal life, stability, safety, order, and (most) freedoms, anytime soon.
And the liberals just couldn't deliver that anywhere, they didn't have what it took to make themselves strong enough to thwart the active efforts of rising rivals to intentionally make things worse and make it impossible for them to deliver anything, in order to erode the system's legitimacy and the population's commitment to it as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
The collapse of liberalism in all those countries was not due to "complexity" but to an ideological invasive species taking out their political immune systems, and then Civil Wars of varying levels of intensity breaking out between the most ruthlessly determined factions for control over the weakened host. They mowed down the Queen's garden and were surprised to see the territory not become a pleasant park but immediately contested by two rival species of noxious weeds, and then covered over in just one of those weeds which makes the ground inhospitable for any other kind of plant.
*As a personal note of observation, I happen to work in an environment where there is a regular turnover of recent and fairly smart college graduates, which provides me with some anecdotal insight into what kind of commonly taught knowledge gets in the heads of a supposedly "educated person", such that one could assume even a cursory familiarity with it in the course of carrying out a conversation. Compared to 25 years ago, my impression is that historical knowledge has taken the biggest hit by far, with all kind of details for entire periods replaced with a kind of hazy moralistic certainty that those were just the "bad old days".
I just came upon Adam Tooze's "The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931" (2015). I'll see how close it comes :)
That's an interesting take on interwar Europe. Is there a good written history organized like that? The impression I've always gotten is, "The liberals were right and should have been listened to. But WW I and it's aftermath had so screwed things up that
" Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.""
Speaking of North, his use of the more neutral expression “discontinuous institutional change” rather than something as emotionally charged as the polarizing use of “collapse” seems more helpful and more widely relevant for a lengthy list of reasons I won’t go into. But, it might be of interest to consider North’s thoughts on discontinuous institutional change as expressed in subchapter III and IV in Chapter 10 of Part III of his book Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. In particular, because his observations seem to provide some predictive hypothesis:
“Wars, revolutions, conquest, and natural disasters are sources of discontinuous institutional change [… …] By discontinuous change I mean a radical change in the formal rules, usually as a result of conquest or revolution [… …]
1. Incremental change means that the parties to exchange recontract to capture some of the potential gains from trade (at least for one of the exchanging parties). Such recontracting can range from a very simple kind to what Skocpol call political revolutions, in which a restructuring of political institutions resolves a gridlock crisis. The key to continuous incremental changes is institutional contexts that make possible new bargains and compromises between the players. Political institutions (both formal and informal) can provide a hospitable framework for evolutionary change. If such an institutional framework has not evolved, the parties to an exchange my not have a framework to settle disputes, the potential gains from exchange cannot be realized, and entrepreneurs … may attempt to form a coalition of groups to break out of the deadlock by strikes, violence, and other means.
2. The inability to achieve compromise solutions may reflect not only a lack of mediating institutions, but also limited degrees of freedom of the entrepreneurs to bargain and still maintain the loyalty of their constituent groups. Thus, the real choice sets of the conflicting parties may have no intersection, so that even though there are potentially large gains from resolving the disagreements, the combination of limited bargaining freedom on the entrepreneurs and a lack of facilitating institutions makes it impossible to do so.
3. Because and make deals with other interest groups. However, as a result the final outcomes of successful revolutions become very uncertain, because conflict within the coalition over the restructuring of the rules, and hence the distribution of rewards, leads to further conflict.
4. Broad based support for violent action requires ideological commitment to overcome the free-rider problem. The stronger the ideological convictions of the participants, the greater the price they will be willing to pay and hence the more likely the revolution will be successful.”
Considering these observations, we might ask ourselves some questions:
To the extent that the regulatory agencies and the courts impede political recontracting, are they contributing to a greater likelihood of thwarted recontracting and thus discontinuous institutional change?
To the extent that political deal-making facilitated by using future generations to fund current benefits grows less feasible, will the frequency of gridlock crises increase?
If the frequency of reductions in real wages increases (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/realer.pdf ), which ideologies might gain stronger and broader commitment? At what point might free-rider problems be overcome?
And so on.
Can incremental innovation in institutions as described by North keep the boat afloat? The establishment’s resort fear and intimidation tactics, censorship and suppression of dissent suggest not. Yet, for a majority, the alternatives appear worse: keep your head down and it will likely all blow over.
Are the economic consequences of the impending tax and new regulatory burdens that are about to be heaped upon us enough to sink the boat? Incrementally, there doesn’t seem to be a breaking point: Derek Parfitt rules. (https://zworld.substack.com/p/could-i-make-you-eat-shit ) And yet, survivalism, at present, is about a $2.5 billion a year industry. The moment a carrier gets sunk in the Red Sea, that figure will increase by a lot. And one remembers when backyard fallout shelters were all the rage. Might there be returns to post-discontinuous institutional change preparation in terms of private ordering of institutional arrangements? If so, we may never know as discretion and secrecy would appear to be of utmost value to such arrangements.
I notice that the Dourado-Tainter story rather defines the result of collapse to be the same as the cause of collapse: society gets too complex, then it stops being complex. That is... not terribly compelling. It is a bit like explaining why people become poor by saying they acquired too much money.
I think the third thing (or second thing in this case) driving the collapse as society gets more complex is that complexity leaves many opportunities for inefficiencies through corruption. Parasitism is easier to execute and harder to detect and excise in larger, more complex organizations.
The opportunities for and returns to rent seeking begin to exceed those of wealth creating activity.
That might be the correct answer.
That is another interesting point: increased centralized control complexity makes wealth creating more difficult and rent seeking more easy. Not necessarily linearly or in a mirrored way, but even if not intentional the tendency of centralization seems to be making wealth production more difficult while rent seeking gets easier.
I share Arnold’s doubt about whether a society can collapse merely from complexity. However, we do live in a society that depends upon a lot of complicated systems that require a high level of competence to operate and maintain. What happens when those in charge are selected by identity rather than for competence?
1) The Soviet Union is probably an example of a collapse that doesn't require a violence.
It also illustrates how you can be very stagnant but not collapse.
2) If we include third world democracies that record gets a lot sketchier. Given the likely demographics of the west in a generation or two, this might be illustrative.
I also feel like universal suffrage democracy with a modern welfare state is a different animal the kind of small government limited suffrage democracies of a century ago.
3) One could describe Singapore as a semi-closed access system. It's not as if the PAP has lost a single election since its founding. I could list some other close examples and they aren't all city states.
Elections give feedback, usually along the lines of "status quo acceptable/not acceptable".
That doesn't necessarily tell you what to do. As noted, the electoral feedback "Weimar bad" didn't give a path to knowing what's good.
The best leaders seem to find a way to integrate the good feedback and reject the bad, which requires a tough mix of accepting when one is wrong and sticking to ones guns as well as copious amounts of discernment.
Ultimately though, elections are a lot less information dense than markets. I'd probably take a closed access political order that respected markets (Singapore) over an open access order that didn't.
I just finished Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. It's a little frustrating because, though he gives lots of ways that a society can be more complex, he never comes up with a way to put them all together: to say this society is more complex than that one, or this society is more complex in this year than it was twenty years previously.
Perhaps that is how it should be. There are lots of different ways a society can be complex. But through most of the book, he talks of complexity as if it is a single variable. And he has simple little graphs of "complexity" as a function of time (pp. 93, 113) or "benefits" as a function of complexity (pp. 119, 125). Which is another problem. He doesn't define "benefits". Benefits to who? How do you net out positive and negative benefits, e.g., enserfment. I came away feeling "benefits" was somewhat circular. It was a benefit if it helped the society survive, but the theory is that a society is vulnerable to collapse when the costs of additional complexity exceed the benefits.
In other parts of the book, he basically says that this all depends on context, which is no doubt true. Some times, what used to work no longer does. In the later Roman Empire, more taxes doesn't mean a stronger central government. It means more tax evasion, lower "legitimacy", and less resistance to invasion by the peasants--even some times inviting the barbarians in. There is good additional complexity and bad additional complexity, which partly depends on how much complexity there already is but also, maybe mostly, depends on other things.
The great irony of the book is that he begins by criticizing other explanations of collapse. One school says that invasions did the society in, but invasions were successfully resisted several times in the past. So it can't be just invasions. Another school says it was epidemic disease, but previous epidemics didn't bring the society to collapse. You have to know the details.
But in his theory, he just adds this diffuse idea of complexity. Previously, the society had been on the rising part of the marginal benefit v. complexity curve. Now it is on the falling part.
But (another but), in the detailed case studies, he does go into details. He doesn't use complexity as a simple variable but as a framework that has to be filled in. And when he fills it in, he brings in those other theories: invasions, diseases, resource depletion, etc.
Re the idea that "modern" democracies don't collapse: many did in the 1920s & the 1930s, not just Weimar's: Italy, Spain, Portugal, just to name a few. Poland, Austria, Romania, etc, had liberal regimes that large majorities very quickly got sick of. Then again, not sure why we need to keep the count limited to "modern" democracies. All ancient democracies collapsed in the most colorful ways, from Athens to Corinth to Syracuse. The Roman Republic, which in many ways was closer to a Greek democracy than many believe, famously ended with a bang. We need to be ready to see democracies collapse, regardless of one's opinion on their effectiveness, because history teaches us that nothing lasts forever, if for no other reason.
Tainter has a much stronger definition of collapse than just reverting from democracy. In fact, his definition of collapse might not even apply to Weimar Germany. That definition is a much lower level of social complexity. By that definition, modern collapses are rare or perhaps nonexistent, although the ancient examples probably hold up.
Strictly going by Tainter's description, I can only think of a state that overcomplicated itself to destruction, and that is post-Diocletian Rome, which was (to use modern parlance) an executive monarchy with a parliament. One often sees economic explanations of the fall of the Roman Empire that stress hyperinflation, when in reality it was overtaxation and overregulation (which did combine to destroy hyperinflation) that did most to weaken the state. China's early Han Dynasty is another possibility. None of those states have modern counterparts, really, outside of (as you cited earlier) contemporary China.
Tainter's three case studies are the western Roman Empire, the Maya, and the Chacoans (San Juan basin, in what is now the southwestern U.S.).
I just looked that up, thanks. I don't know enough about the Chacoans to have an opinion, but the parts about the Romans and the Maya definitely make sense to me.
Does he mention the Justinian Plague (and the concurrent volcanic eruption with worldwide disastrous climate effects)?
Or the severe shift in climate (prolonged ENSO drought, ironically overlapping with Europe's Medieval Warm Period) that stressed the climax Maya culture?
Climate shifts likely a part of the Chacoan collapse too, although I need to catch up on the details.
The base case is the ever-growing regulatory state having the US on the road to Euro-style stagnation. Continued deficit spending will lead to IMF intervention, as it did for the UK in the 1970s, with mandatory cuts to entitlements, government headcount, and government pension plans. The birth dearth will likely require the Ponzi scheme to be restructured before the end of the century anyway. Collapse may come from kleptocracy, where people simply refuse to pay taxes due to no real representation, or nuclear war.
ps. In 4.5 years, Trump and Biden will be gone, the self-serving bureaucracy will still be strangling the golden goose, and the globalists will be continuing to add another layer of bureaucracy.
Hitler, Maduro, and maybe Trump all seem examples where the public was looking for simple answers to complexity. In the first two cases they got something not far from what Dourado and Tainter suggest. Maybe this is the most likely path to that end.
Then again, US politicians are constantly offering supposedly simple answers to complex issues. I'm not sure if that weakens or strengthens my point.
From the start I was thinking of the regulatory state and as I read I wondered why it wasn't mentioned. The last paragraph dismisses it rather quickly. Maybe it's not a threat but I was thinking of how the timelines for completing infrastructure projects have gotten far longer in the last 100 years. Will there come a time when new initiatives become too complex to complete? Ironically, given comments on China in the piece, that country seems to complete many large infrastructure projects with lightning speed.
Replace "collapse" with "decay" and start over.
Calling “woo woo” needs to happen more often.
Part of the problem with analyzing the US is too many allegedly smart people pay too much attention to howling nobodies. No, this person doesn't have that much power, they lack basic organizational competence.... but they can frighten people who want drama in their lives.
"Digging a hole with a shovel is simple. Digging a hole with a backhoe requires a lot more economic infrastructure..."
I think it's instructive to point out that this description might be inaccurate, and inaccurate in some of the same ways that open-access orders might collapse.
If we're being precise, there's a pretty big disconnect between using a backhoe and building and maintaining backhoes. The latter are what requires a lot of infrastructure. The former no so much. You can ship off a backhoe to even most third world countries and expect it to get years of use, even though the society using it might not be able to build backhoes themselves.
I think this has some obvious parallels to various forms of political and human capital. What a society can make use of is a very different question from what it can make.