The Collapse of Complex Societies

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.

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.