Complexity, energy, people and inequality
Reading Richard Wilkinson and Joseph Tainter
Is an increasing complexity a result of inevitable processes, and has it reached its peak?
In my latest essay, I discussed the book Poverty and Progress – en ecological model of economic development by Richard Wilkinson. Even if I don't fully agree with Wilkinson's thesis that development is driven by need, I think he demonstrates quite well that in a long term perspective we actually spend more and more efforts to maintain human societies. We certainly get amenities along the way but most of the economic growth is allocated to keeping the Machine running. In a way, there is a parallel in the energy system where a lot of energy is used just to keep the energy flowing.
Societies are constantly increasing their complexity to solve problems
I realized a new edition of the book had recently been released, and I asked Richard Wilkinson if he could send me the foreword to the new edition, which he graciously did. In the foreword Wilkinson writes:
“In the modern world it is clear that a main thrust of innovation is to solve the environmental problems we have run into”. In this process we are forced to go from easily accessible resources to resources requiring more efforts and innovations. He believes that:
“The scale at which we now have to build windfarms, install solar panels, change domestic heating systems, replace diesel and petrol transport with electric vehicles, replace textile fibres and building materials with sustainable ones, and develop a new science of food production, will necessitate an expansion of the productive system. Whether we like it or not, a 'green revolution' will amount to economic expansion as we are forced to intervene more deeply in natural processes.“
Having read Wilkinson's foreword, I turned to re-reading a few articles of Joseph Tainter. Tainter is the father of complexity collapse theory (that is my terminology), i.e. the notion that societies are constantly increasing their complexity to solve problems (very much the same as Wilkinson) but that the increasing complexity sooner or later leads to some kind of collapse. In The collapse of complex societies (1988) Tainter writes:
“More complex societies are more costly to maintain than simpler ones… As societies increase in complexity, more networks are created among individuals, more hierarchical controls are created to regulate these networks, more information is processed, there is more centralisation of information flow, there is increasing need to support specialists not directly involved in resource production, and the like… The result is that as a society evolves toward greater complexity, the support costs levied on each individual will also rise, so that the population as a whole must allocate increasing portions of its energy budget to maintaining organisational institutions.” .
Notably, “collapse” will not necessarily be a very dramatic event but rather a series of downscaling, downshifting processes, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow. The British empire collapsed some time after WW II, on paper that is (today Britain can hardly keep its core of England, Wales and Scotland together). In reality, the decline took a long time and the American Empire was already ahead of Britain a long time earlier. Giovanni Arrighi dates the end of the British imperial cycle to 1918 and the birth of the American empire to 1870 in The Long Twentieth Century, Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. The American Empire peaked some time towards the end of the 20th century, but already the defeat in Vietnam was a sign of a turn of the tide and the USA will continue its descent. In some way, Trumpism is perhaps some kind of adaptation to this reality, a retrenchment of the Empire?
In the chapter Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (in Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics (1996 Island Press.), Tainter states that any voluntary change towards a soft landing of the current system and degrowth is unlikely and that a “future of greater investments in problem solving, increasing overall complexity, and greater use of energy” is most likely, driven by the “material comforts it provides, by vested interest, by lack of alternatives, and by our conviction that it is good”.
In the article Energy, complexity and sustainability: A historical perspective (2011), Tainter takes an even harsher attitude towards de-growth and simplicity: “Contrary to what is typically advocated as a route to sustainability, it is usually not possible for a society to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long term.”, and that long-term sustainability requires “increasing complexity and energy production“. He states that securing high-quality energy should be the first priority.
Both Tainter and Wilkinson thus project ̶ or recommend ̶ continued increasing complexity and energy use as the main road ahead. I don't think this is neither possible nor desirable, and I am not convinced that social, economic and technical complexity are primarily results of efforts to solve real problems, something I discussed at length in my previous essay, but let us follow their train of thought.
There are complications, some noted by them and some not.
Tainter notes (1996) that in modern society, science is “humanity's greatest exercise in problem solving” but that increasing investments in research yield declining marginal returns. So in some sense, his own analysis points towards exactly the kind of diminishing returns which precedes collapse. Innovation, an off-shoot of research, also shows signs of slowing down, despite enormous resources spent. In many critical areas Eroom's law seems to beat the more known Moore's law.
In many critical areas Eroom's law seems to beat the more known Moore's law.
In the end of the foreword, Wilkinson links to his later work on equality:
“The only period when we avoided growth and lived in what we now - following Herman Daly - call a 'steady state economy’, was during our prehistory as hunter gatherers. That was only possible because those societies practised effective methods of population control and lived mostly in highly egalitarian societies, so avoiding the competitive and insatiable status consumption which intensifies the current environmental crisis.”
I do think that human civilizations did avoid growth in many other periods. As a matter of fact, I think Wilkinson's book demonstrate quite well that many societies were able to live in a steady state. This should not be understood as a totally static society, but rather a society were there are cycles of (technical, cultural and economic) “progress” and “decline”.
It seems to me that neither Tainter nor Wilkinson have considered population in their reasoning about today. In half of the countries in the world, the average women give birth to less than 2.1 child, the rate considered to give a stable population. The populations of Italy, Japan and South Korea risk being halved up to 2100. This points to that the world will reach ”peak population” earlier than previously assumed.
The combination of falling population and a squeeze on energy as well as a social, cultural, and economic, backlash of globalization* actually follows the trajectory for collapse of Tainter very well:
”A complex society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated. Specialization decreases and there is less centralized control. The flow of information drops, people trade and interact less, and there is overall lower coordination among individuals and groups. Economic activity drops to a commensurate level, while the arts and literature experience such a quantitative decline that a dark age often ensues. Population levels tend to drop, and for those who are left the known world shrinks.”
As so often, the question of what is the chicken and the egg comes to mind. Is a drop in population growth and the plateau of per capita energy production symptoms of the end of growth or are they drivers of the end of growth? Human societies are emergent organizations where it is not possible to identify one factor as being the driver. Nevertheless, clearly energy and population are two very important factors.
Equality is a precondition for a steady state economy
Another important factor is equality, or the lack of it. In the very last sentence of the foreword of Poverty and Progress, Wilkinson writes: ”My subsequent work on the effects of income inequality suggests that much greater equality is a precondition for a steady state economy enabling us to live in equilibrium with the environment.”
I agree. But it seems to me that it is not possible to reconcile this with a society of ever increasing complexity and energy use as recommended by both Wilkinson and Tainter. It seems to me that complexity, high energy use and division of labour are recipes for inequality. Whether the complex system is ”managed” by markets or a bureaucratic and authoritarian state is in this context secondary, both produce economic and political inequality. A recent article by Gary M Feinman in Resilience gives an interesting historical perspective on this:
”What we see is that when our governing institutions are financed by monopolized resources that are not drawn from the labour and fields of the local population, but rather through external resources, power in governance will likely become concentrated in the hands of a few.” **
It seems to me that most of the political establishment and analysts have not understood this link and that they believe that it is just a matter of policy to fix inequality. But as the system constantly (re)produces inequality it is very hard to correct it with policies. In the continued growth scenario of the past, people would still largely accept the inequality in exchange for constant increasing income and more stuff. But when growth stops, discontentment spreads; the inequality and the associated powerlessness are major components of the political backlash against globalization and its complexity.
Summing up, I believe there are many indications that the ever increasing complexity clearly show diminishing returns and that people turn their back on global capitalism and modernity (whatever that is).
* It is an interesting question if there is a backlash against globalization or a backlash of globalization itself, i.e. Is the problem that there are negative side effects of globalization or rather that globalization doesn't work as well as before? That is a huge topic which I hope to cover more soon. My spontaneous opinion is, however, that it is both.
** That doesn't mean that less complex societies miraculously and automatically becomes egalitarian. This is discussed in depth by David Graeber and David Wengrow in their work The Dawn of Everything. But that is yet another discussion.
I am glad you are tackling the complexity question Gunnar. This was something forced on me many years ago. As an antiwar activist from 1968-1975, I started asking questions and then researching the answers. The first one was, "How did the US get involved in this insane war in Vietnam?" This led to the second question, "What in the hell is wrong with the US?" And then of course there was the third question, "What are we going to do about it?" Since I had been doing archaeology in the field in 1968 and 1969, I quite naturally gravitated to an anthropological and social science orientation. This led to collapse and complexity studies. It is no accident that Joseph Tainter is an archaeologist. Another archaeologist who looked at these kinds of questions and who I highly recommend is Ian Morris, especially his 2010 book, Why the West Rules - For Now.
I looked at the 2011 Tainter article you mentioned and it is behind a paywall, but the abstract and blurb I could read gives the gist of his position. He says, "The common view of history assumes that complexity and resource consumption have emerged through innovation facilitated by surplus energy. This view leads to the supposition that complexity and consumption are voluntary, and that we can therefore achieve a sustainable future through conservation. Such an assumption is substantially incorrect. History suggests that complexity most commonly increases to solve problems, and compels increase in resource use."
I disagree based on Tainter's predisposition for integrative theory. In The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), Tainter mentions conflict theory vs. integrative theory. Conflict theory argues that societies become more complex because the elites strive for more control and more power. Integrative theory argues that societies become more complex because they solve problems. Think capitalists exploiting workers vs. an administrative state that regulates irrigation so that everyone benefits from increased food production. Tainter acknowledges that conflict theory has some good points but comes down on the side of integrative theory. This is the origin of his "problem solving" paradigm, as noted in the article abstract quoted above. I default to conflict theory, based on my experience in over fifty years of research, as well as a political education in the streets trying to stop an insane war. The anti-insane war activities also led to alternative efforts in food co-ops, food growing, starting farmers markets, teaching sustainable methods, etc. The bottom line is that the administrative state is not there to provide benefits for all. It was not so in ancient Sumer, nor in Rome, nor in the 21st century. One could make an argument that I am looking at this issue from a perspective that has already witnessed an inflection point in marginal returns, but that objection really doesn't fly. Ancient Sumer saw collapse BECAUSE of the elite control of the administrative state, as did Bronze Age Mycenae, ancient Rome, the Maya, etc. This argues for control of the administrative state by the elites for their own ends right from the beginning.
Like many anthropologists, Joseph Tainter has a vested interest in his career, which depends on a state-level society with surplus for professors. My particular work doesn't. One should look long and hard at how people make a living and whether that colors their research and conclusions. That said, I still regard Tainter's 1988 book as very important. It provides a sound basis in conflict vs. integrative theory, adds in marginal returns and uses case studies to illustrate his points. He also - which I think is most important - mentions that when a society collapses, it declines into regional polities. This is Tainter's most important point, in my opinion.
Excellent post .. many great points.
If possible, please set up a BlueSky account so I can refer your post to others I correspond with others on sustainability
Finally, my great great grandfather is from Skurup, Skaine, Sweden .. where his son Olaf migrated to US early 1900s ending up w a 20 acre parcel in Iowa
Regards