Joseph Tainter

And that's true of a small business, large business, or an entire society.

The great book by Joseph Tainter, the American historian, called The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Complexity grows until what happens is that all of your resources are being utilized just managing the complexity.

And then you become fragile as an institution because you can't deal with whatever the next disruption is.

Every single major society has gone through a similar developmental process of starting simple, of becoming more and more complex.

You know, Joseph Tainter has a whole book called The Collapse of Complex Societies, based on the notion that human beings are problem-solving entities, but with each problem solved, the society becomes more complex.

So you run out of food because you're hunting and gathering skills and tools have become so competent.

Well, we invent agriculture.

And so in the United States, it's obvious with the emergence of the proletariat underground, the people have been ignored by the enormous acquisition of wealth.

40% of the U.S. people haven't experienced any income growth, significant income growth in the last several decades.

So all the manifestations and symptoms that Joseph Tainter describes for the complex of previous cultures is now occurring on a global scale in our culture.

And the point will be reached where it begins to slide.

Taxes could only be raised so much without whipping up the sands of revolt.

And so, as Joseph Tainter explains, when extraordinary expenses arose, the supply of coinage was frequently insufficient.

To counter this problem, Nero began in 64 AD a policy that subsequent emperors found increasingly irresistible.

This policy involved debasing the value of the standard Roman silver coin, the denarius, by infusing it with cheap metals such as copper, and clipping both gold and silver coins, or in other words, reducing the size of them.

Just as when you start to use certain drugs, you don't know when to stop nor how to stop, it is the same with inflation.

The governments don't know when nor how to stop, warned Ludwig von Mises.

Due to the state's prolonged policy of inflation, in the first half of the 4th century, hyperinflation kicked in, Joseph Tainter writes.

In the second century a maudius of wheat, approximately 9 liters, during normal times, had sold for half denarius.

But actually since Jeff's first two episodes aired, we have made a revolutions episode, literally the field is called revolutionology, with world expert historian Dr. Jack Goldstone.

Uh, we've also made an episode on the collapse of societies with author and scholar Dr. Joseph Tainter.

But anyway, after the Russian Revolution-

We have these East Europeans that are both working, you know, in factories and building skyscrapers and things like that, but also these educated people, wealthy people who are from the Dark East, and they're still scary, and they still practice religions that, that we don't know, and we, we put a lot of our fears into these, you know, possibly powerful people who are wealthy and educated and come from this area of the world and practice those, those religions.

So there's this kind of complexity that happens, and eventually they reach this threshold where all the fat of the society goes into keeping the complexity going.

Then what happens is that there's generally a trigger, and this is actually the work of, um, Joseph Tainter, who's on the cover of the book.

He's sort of the OG voice in this area.

Uh, I think he's in his sort of 80s now.

So if we're facing a contraction towards smaller, more localized and communal societies, how do we preserve those gains without preserving the system that produced them? Is it possible to have contraction without a complete breakdown of society? Are there any examples in history of a society contracting without total disorder?

I found a paper by Joseph Tainter, this historian.

Uh, it was written in 2000.

This is prior to the transition town movement and local, all this localization stuff that's gone on.

And people just can't remember as well when it's, everything is do- being done on a screen.

Do you watch all of this unfolding and think this is like Joseph Tainter's, uh, diminishing returns of complexity? Like, we're living through it.

Ev- everything's-

Yeah

For that, you need an anthropologist who spent the 1980s digging through the wreckage of dead societies, looking for the one thing they had in common.

Joseph Tainter published The Collapse of Complex Societies in 1988, and his answer was so cold it barely sounds like history.

Civilizations don't die from decadence, he argued.

They don't die from barbarians.