Mystical Collapse
Joseph Tainter's 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies seeks a unifying principle based on scientific analysis to explain the demise of civilizations across time and place.
Prevailing theories span the present (the British Empire) and reach back to the distant past, to the first societies that emerged in places like Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley. Eventual system failure is a given, so millennia of datasets offer plenty to draw from when searching for shared themes.
Prominent figures living through a decline (Ammianus Marcellinus and St. Augustine in the Roman case), adjacent to one, or looking back centuries after the collapse, searched for causes and developed explanations which have carried on down to the present.
More recent writers like Spengler and the Adams brothers (American scholars and direct descendants of President John Adams) entertain some rather novel theories which frankly make earlier researchers sound very reasonable. Years ago, I made it halfway through Spengler's The Decline of the West before tapping out since his assertions were too often wrapped up in the florid language of German Idealism. Pages of grand pronouncements and metaphysical pretension made it a high caloric investment with little return. Tainter and I share a dislike of Spengler for similar reasons. Unlike Tainter, however, I don't set up Spengler as the exemplar of the moral causation school of systems failure.
About three years ago, a dark joke went around on the Internet in which young men admitted to thinking a lot about ancient Rome. Girlfriends and wives would ask, "Honey, what are you thinking?" The men would admit with surprising frequency – sometimes several times a day – to thoughts of old Rome. In their ruminations, the men compared and contrasted what they knew about Rome's decline with the obvious parallels to their own present-day Western nations.
This didn't happen in 1988, when Collapse was published. The Soviet Union was breaking down, and the West was ascendant. Francis Fukuyama would write The End of History and the Last Man (1992) a few years after Tainter's Collapse, a celebratory assessment of techno-capitalism's triumph over the relentless grind of economic cycles. The seed for Fukuyama's book was a 1989 essay.
Tainter spends roughly the first half surveying various developed theories of decline, with most of his sources drawn from Western professional academics in history, economics, archaeology, and anthropology. The societies surveyed span continents, including Africa and the pre-European Americas. The Maya, Aztec, and Olmec have been of special interest to Western auditors of system failures because they are distinctly non-European, yet at certain points possessed very sophisticated social systems. This area of research was not new, but it developed actively in the 20th century with newer methodological advances.
This book examines various authors' breakdowns of the different approaches adopted, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Each has deficiencies, some more than others.
Of the eleven classifications Tainter presents, I want to look here at the ninth, what Tainter calls the "Mystical." In his assessment, this is the weakest, with no explanatory power despite being a perennial draw for systems-failure enthusiasts.
Figures like Arnold Toynbee and Albert Schweitzer are grouped with Spengler, whose dense writings are "mystical" and "value-laden." This section lumps "numerology" in with the school's other sub-genres, making a guilt-by-association argument. These numerologists are not explicitly named.
He writes:
Toynbee's emphasis on moral and spiritual values found prior expression in the work of Albert Schweitzer (1923). Schweitzer argued that if an ethical foundation is lacking, a civilization collapses. Civilizations exist in the effort to perfect humanity, and originates when a population is inspired to attain progress and to serve. Schweitzer characterized Western civilization of the early 1920s as showing signs of collapse.
In Tainter's rendering, a weakening in morals – called out by decline writers down through the ages – is a "mystical" claim and is therefore the weakest, most useless tool to apply since "value-laden" analysis is incredibly subjective, with no measurable inputs or outputs. The diversity of beliefs, practices, and customs in human communities means there is no coherent definition of good and bad actions. Worse, you can't really quantify these and plot them on a chart, so a more rigorous scientific standard is needed for a grand theory of collapse.
Material life – energy consumption, food production, population growth, etc. – is, in contrast, measurable across a society's lifecycle, although it's doubtful what the source of data for bushels of wheat are for Rome circa 50 BCE, whether it's accurate or meaningful. In contrast, Schweitzer, Toynbee, and those in their vein who point to intangibles like "character," vitality, virtue, piety, and so on rely on "mysticism" to uncover the seed of collapse. The qualia of individuals, classes, or nations are out there in woo-woo land despite witnesses of decline narrating these deviations in detail.
I was an undergraduate a few years after Collapse was published and am familiar with the academy's interest at this time in exposing "value-laden" assumptions in its fields. Reading Tainter in 2026 is like opening a time capsule left by the period's intellectual class. Professors were keen to avoid statements that implied morality had anything to do with outcomes in the social sciences, owing to the widely perceived failure of the Great Society programs. Political liberalism was especially weak during this period. Colonialism, slavery, and Jim Crow were placed under a microscope, their damaging effects linked to the good/better/best self-serving reasoning of exploiters.
I remember one associate professor of political science who insisted that certain public policies – like the funding of Medicare – were morally neutral. When I asked whether these in fact reflected an ethical disposition and a moral aim, like the care and well-being of older citizens so they could end their days in dignity, he seemed confused. I was claiming that all public policy is embedded in moral reasoning about the good of individuals and societies. Whose morals, then? All human action, whether corporate or individual, assumes a set of intangible goods (e.g., dignity) which are worth having for their own sake. We can't quantify "human dignity" on a chart for the Second Temple period in Palestine, but we know Christianity placed a great emphasis on it, so much so that it is credited as a catalyst for its spread.
The Reagan era was the height of academic moral relativism, and it's arguably still regnant today: I heard a prominent physicist, Sean Carroll, say that beliefs are very subjective and religions are unreliable truth guides because they do not all agree on basic points, like whether there is one god, many gods, etc. Whenever "beliefs" are put out there by atheists, the religion's ethics are rolled into them. The baby has to be thrown out with the bath water.
In personal ethical choices for a modern secularist, there is no science governing them, just different utilitarian views requiring toleration, guaranteeing no collective recognition in return beyond adherence to paying one's taxes and obeying traffic laws. Any attempt to link the bad (but legal) actions of individuals to their own bad outcomes, like poverty, is considered akin to divination – spooky, unscientific, prejudicial.
Tainter:
Value judgments are another matter altogether. A scholar trained in anthropology learns early on that such valuations are scientifically inadmissible, detrimental to the cause of understanding, intellectually indefensible, and simply unfair. A student of other cultures acquires a deep-seated aversion to statements indicating that various cultural phenomena are good/bad, better/worse, superior/inferior. One is either an impartial social scientist or a social critic, and the latter should not masquerade as the former.
He appeals to "fairness," expresses "deep-seated aversion," and describes those who "masquerade" as social scientists in his defense of value-neutral historical assessment. While he uses value-laden tags to defend his position, he essentially denies Toynbee et al. the standing to make the same sort of assessments of their subjects. If a theorist like Lewis points to the confiscation of revenue by greedy bureaucrats in the Ottoman tax office as a morally contributive factor to decline, is he practicing mysticism? Is a society of corrupt officials who steal, especially during times of scarcity, causing the public commons to suffer, a neutral evaluation? Is praising a young republic, where laws are applied impartially and corruption is capped, an unscientific value judgment? As individuals, most of us will choose to live in a law-abiding society with low corruption. We don't want to bribe traffic cops, building inspectors, and the like in addition to the above-board taxes we already pay.
One of Tainter's criticisms of the moralists is that corruption is part of every society. He makes no fine distinctions over degrees of it, so whether the government confiscates 20% or 60% of private income is not a moral matter, although high taxation does depress material output as individuals stop working, or get very clever in how they report income. Ruling-class grasping, however, is secondary to material economic causes for the author. The latter explains the former. Prosperity increases greed among rulers, so it is the proximate catalyst for decline, not morals.
Tainter conflates two anthropological concerns here: one stated, another unstated. If good/bad is used to condemn a people in order to justify war, or to colonize them and steal their resources and enslave them, etc., then the pair is motivated by a purely ethical defect: greed. It's a veneer for theft and violence. Anthropologists being especially sensitive to this usage are lauded for their hesitancy, but it's the wrong use case.
To pass this over to the analysis of a more systemic account of the causes for collapse (during or after the fact), however, is to lose a valuable analytic.
Writers across cultures, from Nehru to St. Augustine to Ibn Khaldun to the Buddha, all used the same language of moral decline to describe a society's slide from a higher tier to a lower one, including their own home cultures. These incredibly rich sources of collapse literature are effectively vitiated because Western academic work should start from a morally neutral base. If Ibn Khaldun says elites became soft, lovers of luxury, and grasping, it cannot be reckoned as a primary cause, despite what the writer of the collapse says, since it is unquantifiable and therefore not measurable by the instruments of modern investigation.
A regional tax revenue officer who siphons 3% for personal enrichment: if his example spreads to other regions, society as a whole will see a decline in public works. Food scarcity will spread, workers will be more reluctant to work, and society will regress to a more primitive condition. This seems like a very intuitive argument, but unfortunately, thieves do not self-report with Excel spreadsheets. Tainter needs those in front of him, or it's just woo-woo talking.
The language of moral causation used by the mystical camp will vary, but the thrust is the same: elites betray the public trust, they confiscate more than they need, they show partiality in administration, they do not embody the virtues (courage, thrift, restraint, familial loyalty, piety, etc.) which made their societies good, and they turn away from the practice and public support of religion. Chinese dynastic records detail the moral mischief of eunuchs, the diversion of funds from public works, the buying of offices, and a host of other symptoms which are ubiquitous across human cultures in decline. Again, these accounts frequently come from introspective writers diagnosing their own cultures. The Chinese historians do not offer a rendering of moral defects that sounds any different from Ibn Khaldun or Augustine.
But while the subjectivist, neutral-value view is still with us today, it's become less persuasive because, like the young men who think a lot about Rome, bad moral actions are felt to affect us in our personal and communal lives. In the 2010s, it became okay to go to the other extreme by diagnosing Western social ills as breakdowns in historical patterns, petrified cultural mindsets, and institutional inertia. These became deeply intertwined with the culture wars. That is to say, secularized moral reasoning quickly filled the void left by the "value-less," "value-neutral" posturing of the late 1980s.
Tainter, circa 1988, holds a materialist assumption about human life. While entire societies are ordered to invisible values they hold dear, even unto death, and which they work assiduously to pass on to offspring, these are secondary and tertiary effects of prosperity, having no overarching telos. If a complex society produces high art, architecture, music and theology which speak to the deepest human need and aspiration, these, in his telling, are just epiphenomena. They are not a long-term goal of an early human society, but an emergent property of complexity.
Tainter's thesis subtly assumes the language of neo-Darwinian biology. Simple life forms evolve over time into more complex life forms; the greater the complexity, the higher the specialization. The more specialized a species is, the more vulnerable it is to sudden environmental changes.
The striking beauty of parrots is not intentional; it happens because of a complex, intricate chain of sexual selection shaped by the environment. The cost of operating as a sophisticated species – large-bodied, energetically expensive animals – means that a natural catastrophe can cause extinction, especially in fragile specialists like pandas and koalas. Simpler organisms survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event, with some beginning a new ascent to greater complexity. The elimination of dinosaurs from the ecosystem stage meant simpler life forms had a shot at making it big.
Australia's koala is adapted to eat eucalyptus leaves, which are poisonous to other species, but their specialization means it is subject to rapid die-offs whenever the trees – notoriously prone to wildfires – are destroyed. The koala is a much more specialized and complex critter than an earthworm, with higher energy needs and greater restrictions on available habitat. One doesn't need to appeal to vaguely defined vitalist arguments to show that complex societies are strikingly analogous to niche biological forms.
The emergent high art of the Renaissance period is analogous as well. Tainter, of course, would completely reject this as examples drawn from "vitalism," or Spengler's notion of birth, growth, decay, and death. But his own model strongly suggests a Darwinian material basis – ever-increasing levels of complexity over time – which become hard to sustain and maladaptive in the face of sudden changes. Moral choices of individuals – like our Ottoman tax collector – and their societies are secondary characteristics of the "creature" and are non-explanatory for objective collapse theorists.
Against Tainter's treatment of morals and character, we should distinguish between a religion's theology and its ethical content. The moral teachings of world religions are remarkably harmonious on the question of basic good/bad behavior: stealing, lying, murder, rape, and adultery are easy ones that believers and atheists agree are bad for human flourishing. Non-theistic Buddhism is actually stricter in most respects, counting the very mental disposition to unwholesome action to be a manifestation of defilement, one which fuels suffering. Like Islam, the religion also asks its practitioners to abstain completely from the use of alcohol and other intoxicants, a rarity to be sure.
World religious literature covers prohibitions against these actions. Formal theologies vary significantly on certain points, but you will not find an Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or Christian society that treats lying as value-neutral behavior. With that out of the way, one can dispense with the core of his grievance against "Mysticism." Successful complex societies of the type he's interested in can never form where adultery, lying, and theft are tolerated. His own example of the Ik should suggest this. The crippling loss of altruism in this tribe has led their three-year-olds to wander around foraging for their own food.
Having classified and ranked the existing schools of collapse, Tainter turns in the second half to describing his grand unified theory.
It goes something like this:
In the early days of any area of human endeavor, from farming to education to science, initial effort yields a high return as low-hanging fruit is collected. These early easy wins set a trajectory of prosperity as the benefits of technological advancements spread through the population, creating a feedback loop of rising benefits. The standard of living rises and public projects make life more comfortable and stable; leisure classes emerge with the time and wealth to devote to cultivating higher arts and learning.
These easy pickings give way to harder wins, where the remaining problems are harder to solve. Once the low-hanging fruit has been cleared, tree climbing is required. Prosperity slows down; R&D becomes more expensive because more specialists and their support retinues are needed to push the boundaries. Elaborate, complex organizations with fragile hierarchies meant to support the upscaled structures, while pushing the frontier, begin consuming more of the input. Marginal returns decline further. Advancement slows, stalls, and society quickly reverses course in response to system shocks or environmental challenges. If effort is spent keeping many plates spinning, nothing remains when the ground wobbles from an earth tremor. Status quo maintenance of complex systems leads to a depletion of critical reserves, the kind needed to withstand a shock.
A ready example of diminishing returns is oil. In the early days, liquid gold could be pulled up readily from the ground, but as the easy-access sources were depleted, harder-to-reach oil patches required more effort, specialization, training, machinery, and maintenance. Today, we use fracking, a complex extraction process requiring copious amounts of water and specialized setups. Getting a single barrel of oil out of the ground in 1945 required X units of energy; in 2026, it takes X + Y units of energy to obtain the same. At a certain point, if it takes 1.25 barrels of oil to extract, transport, and process 1 barrel, oil extraction no longer makes sense. It's cheaper to leave it in the ground.
Tainter's contribution to the field is that diminishing returns apply not only to industrial manufacturing processes, but to every area of human activity in a complex society. He draws on findings about the growth of science and industrial bureaucracies during the 20th century.
Even more significantly, patenting relative to numbers of scientists and engineers has declined continuously since 1900. Jacob Schmookler has compiled figures showing that, excluding government-financed projects, the number of industrial research personnel increased 5.6 times from 1930 to 1954, while the numbers of corporate patents rose between 1936-1940 and 1956-60 by only 23 percent.
The number of specialists has increased in technical fields, raising training and education costs while yielding ever-falling returns on investment. Mediocre talent is passed through the system and into jobs nominally called "STEM," but which are in fact functionary positions that do little to push the frontier. The production of new bureaucracies actually impedes the work of capable practitioners.
A multi-million dollar IT project for an online auction site may appear to involve complex work requiring hundreds of engineers and developers, but how much of this is caused by overstaffing and how much by the nature of the work being performed? How much of the work is bogged down in pointless rituals meant to appease a broken hierarchy?
Tainter probably assumes that overstaffing and bureaucratic padding, like corruption, are just an unavoidable cost of doing business. Yet overstaffing with mediocre talent accounts for the largest portion of project costs – in software, labor is the budget. For this reason, so many Western companies have offshored skilled tasks to developing countries like India. If labor is cheap elsewhere, one can scale up staff much more easily while capping the highest cost factor – human labor.
I've seen this firsthand for decades in my field. Projects that should've required a fraction of personnel to complete escalated into dozens of offshore workers. Why? Because incompetent managers saw more as always better, and it looked good on one's resume to say, "I managed hundreds of people spread all over the globe on a multi-million dollar fintech SaaS project." There's no glory in saying, "I managed a successful project with twenty skilled on-shore people." Bureaucratic growth for its own sake is a luxury item, and human appetite is infinite; so long as there is a surplus of energy, it will continue. This is the real indictment of Parkinson's Law. The law is subtle, sparse, and says everything.
In other words, Graeber's entourage formation theory produces bloated, wasteful, hard-to-maintain IT (and other) systems that frequently fail. These are micro examples of system failure, and they have to do with managerial choices driven, at least in part, by ego-inflation. I am one of the men who thinks about ancient Rome a lot because I have seen collapse up close and think back to Graeber's observation: "You cannot be magnificent without an entourage." Tainter weaves back and forth between the more micro–the number of engineers filing for patents in industry – and the macro, nation-state level.
Tainter dismisses this reasoning, arguing that the private sector also sees increased administrative overhead. However, unlike the public sector, its private interests are explicitly aimed at market efficiency, so whatever staffing is added is probably needed, and organizations tend to run lean. The market ruthlessly trims fat because it cuts into profits. In 1988, this naive assumption about capitalism was very common.
The reason why complex organizations must allocate ever larger portions of their personnel and resources to administering is because (as discussed in Chapter 2) increased complexity requires greater quantities of information processing and greater integration of disparate parts.
One can criticize my anecdotal evidence as lacking a rigorous set of confirming data sets, etc. "Ego-inflation" has no unit of measure and cannot be collated. However, this ignores that IT project cost overruns and failures constitute their own niche area of collapse studies and have for decades. In fact, the impetus for AI adoption in the enterprise is because IT is so costly, wasteful, and ultimately error-prone. LLM proponents made it clear from the beginning that software development and engineering were the core area of concern for tool adoption since these could reduce headcount, lower costs, speed time to market, and greatly improve maintainability.
Tainter silently aggregates the technical complexity of modern systems with the invisible actions of ego-actors who, per Graeber, use their positions to create bullshit jobs that justify their ascendancy in a pecking order. This isn't to say Tainter is wrong about the growth in technical demands, or that costs don't rise as a society's demands for greater "progress" (increasing standards of living) outpace what is possible. It's something he cannot quantify or measure in any meaningful way, so he pushes it into the "mystical" category. Like the Ottoman tax collector who leaves behind no paperwork detailing his theft of receipts, the director of IT doesn't reveal that his personnel budget reflects his own egoic drive to have more underlings doing bullshit tasks. Graeber's thesis that medievalism still defines modern hierarchy and work activity fills the gap.
Tainter and Graeber (d. 2020) are both anthropologists and professors of the same. Tainter circa 1988 relied on data-driven research to formulate a generalized theory of collapse, but precise data is missing for the Maya and other ancient collapse scenarios. We have to infer it from archaeological and written records, and those are not always available. This is to me a weakness papered over by charts.
Graeber's Bullshit Jobs is based on self-selected, self-reported samples submitted by afflicted workers and could be criticized as lacking Tainter's quantitative rigor. Still, the phenomenon of bullshit jobs, or jobs that involve a fair level of bullshit shoveling, is found aplenty in the private sector. Tainter's picture of market efficiency becomes very dubious because it paints from a limited palette. Since 1988, we've seen rapid growth in email jobs, and people across the Internet call them pointless. No one is eager to do any deep-dive analysis into the phenomenon, but we know it's there.
I want to firm this up using directly overlapping examples from each author found in medicine. Graeber discusses the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the legislative keystone of President Obama's tenure. Private insurance is notorious for its incredible waste. Talk to anyone who has undergone a routine procedure or test, and you'll hear stories about the chaos involved. I'll share an anecdote before looking at Obama's reasoning behind the ACA's architecture.
A few years ago, I went in for an annual checkup and did the usual panel of standard tests for cholesterol, diabetes, etc. I am in good health, with no real issues besides elevated blood pressure.
A few weeks later, I got a bill in the mail saying I owed the testing lab an additional $1.27. I thought it was a joke and ignored it. More notices followed, and I finally went to the lab's website and dutifully paid the $1.27. A few months later, I received a notice from a debt collector. My "unpaid bill" was turned over to them for collection. The letter stated I now owed $13.44 since the payer's online system apparently never processed my payment. Internet-era market efficiency in action.
It's no secret that private insurance is a churn of massive waste. I have a relative whose only job is training, re-training, re-training again on the different billing and payment systems for private payers. It's far worse than anything a government office could design.
In the past year, I switched payers, and my doctor told me I would need to pay out of pocket. The payer is a household name, the largest in America, but my doctor told me that he didn't work with them. The new payer is notorious for being difficult to work with and producing bad outcomes (as I learned after the fact) in the name of cost savings. Routine diagnostics that would be cost-effective in the long term are buried in reporting and processing to such an extent that doctors find it easier to not deal with them. In January, I'll go back to the old payer.
Obama, when asked why he bucked the electorate's preference for a single-payer public healthcare system, responded:
"I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have," Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. "Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs filled by people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"
Shitty private insurers got a boon from the ACA. They wrote the legislation and lobbied for its passage because of greed. There is no other word for it. It isn't market efficiency; it isn't an organic complexity emerging because medicine has become so much more advanced. Medical progress has been unimpressive given the incredible increases in costs and the explosion in diseases like diabetes because many of these are rooted in poor lifestyle choices. Humans take the path of least resistance, favoring the satiety of appetite. Laying all blame at the feet of doctors is misguided, but to blame "complexity" when behavior – individual and collective moral choice – is treated as sacrosanct guarantees further wealth destruction.
Cancer is still treated with the same primitive tools of cut, burn, and poison as it was in 1960, with some notable improvements for certain types. People now use drugs like Ozempic to treat obesity, which is a behavioral problem caused by stress, lack of activity, and overeating. Life expectancies were declining in the age of supercomputers, rich data sets, and decades of studies and research amounting to trillions.
The CDC happily reported a reversal of this trend in its January 2026 health report card. A society that chooses the satiation of appetites will lose the ability to build the material reserves required to survive system shocks. This is a decidedly value-based judgment because it accords with common sense and shared universal reflections on human nature. What's missing in the recent turnaround is that U.S. healthcare outcomes "require" double the inputs. This isn't emergent complexity, but the ruling class's commitment to profits and broken, ineffective hierarchies. Obama and his ACA reflect elite aims.
If cancer were cured tomorrow, it would mean an instant recession as thousands of "cancer research" and "cancer treatment" jobs vanished. Something like 200 billion USD is spent annually on cancer, with some improvements since 1991. Today, cancer is accelerating among the young at unheard-of rates. A PA told me recently that they are seeing mysterious masses show up on routine X-rays in younger patients. They refer these patients to oncologists for follow-up.
Obama's quote shows a ready acceptance of the Broken Windows Fallacy. The economy can keep sinking money into non-productive work because, in the short term, it appears to keep the consumer-based economy running. In the long term, however, the sunk money destroys reserves and wastes valuable R&D capital, which could be better used to buttress a civilization against unexpected calamities. Call it saving up for rainy days.
Medicine, however, is the tip of the iceberg for our "complex society." Look at the military-industrial complex, its F-35 superjets and other gross wastes of money, and you see the same psychology of pointless complexity which produces nothing but debt. This debt is wasted on systems that have much more to do with staffing, empire building, and rentier economics than complexity simply. Again, the invisible pull of libido dominandi and greed more generally are not quantifiable.
Or are they?
Just a few years after Collapse was published, international bodies and scholars began reporting on corruption since it was rightly perceived as a significant arresting factor for economic growth and human well-being. Almost as if social scientists were reacting to Tainter's materialist rejection of "mysticism," the 1990s saw the introduction of corruption-measuring indices. Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators, and the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) (a legally binding framework finally formalized in the early aughts) were all either established or started in the 1990s. While Tainter talks about "mysticism," international bodies only a few years later were busy developing metrics to assess avarice's cost in driving down economic growth.
Social scientist Paolo Mauro looked at the same ethical question in his 1995 paper "Corruption and Growth" (Quarterly Journal of Economics). I've not read this in full, but the opening lines give the flavor:
Many economists argue that malfunctioning government institutions constitute a severe obstacle to investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation. North (1990) emphasizes the importance of an efficient judicial system to enforce contracts as a crucial determinant of economic performance. Low security of property rights over physical capital, profits, and patents may reduce incentives and opportunities to invest, innovate, and obtain foreign technology. Cumbersome and dishonest bureaucracies may delay the distribution of permits and licenses, thereby slowing down the process by which technological advances become embodied in new equipment or new productive processes.
Mauro uses clinical language to refer to greed ("dishonesty") and entourage formation ("cumbersome"), linking their presence to measurable losses in investment and technical advancement. Tainter's concern about a decline in patents is not simply his metaphysical "complexity" rearing its head as midwits flood technical fields, but also a biased view that results in a net loss of innovation and growth. A social scientist saw that Tainter was not presenting a complete picture of the causes of social regress. The earlier Ottoman revenuer was now being measured as a detrimental moral actor harming others.
I close this review of Collapse by considering the 2026 U.S.-Iran war.
There are at least two ways to analyze it. The first is, per Tainter, a case of a stretched empire attempting to secure cheap energy sources – petroleum in this case – through warfare. Having deposed Venezuela's Maduro and restored American involvement in oil production in Venezuela, the Trump administration pivoted to toppling the sayyids of Iran on humanitarian grounds. The usual nostrums about "liberating" the oppressed people and ending the regime's non-existent nuclear weapons program were pulled from the earlier Iraq war playbook.
We've all seen this movie before, and the cross-spectrum consensus is that this war is all about propping up a failed imperial system run by plutocrats who lack the moral and intellectual capacity to handle decades of self-inflicted wounds. Western elites chose to deindustrialize, making their nations wholly dependent on China for manufacturing, and then redirected the savings into their own back accounts. Thirty years after NAFTA and the offshoring of factories, we have nations which produce very little apart from finance-based bubbles. During Covid, then Senator Marco Rubio expressed incredulity when told that the U.S. could no longer even produce a vitamin C tablet domestically. The last factory had been shut down a few years earlier.
Most observers understood that the real goal was using Pax Americana's war engine to gain access to Iran's oil fields. The American empire's chief rival for hegemony is now China, which has emerged as an existential threat to the dollar-trade system after decades of advanced industrialization and scientific advancement. China is, by some accounts, still heavily dependent on Iranian oil despite its conversion to a nuclear-powered energy grid and electric transit system.
From e-cars to high-speed rail, China's pursuit of cheap, highly available nuclear energy and integrated systems has reduced its reliance on petroleum imports, but it remains vulnerable nonetheless since fertilizers and other petroleum by-products are essential to a modern economy. LNG is vital to semiconductor manufacturing, and with Iran cut off from world trade, American imperialists thought they could curtail China's advances in prosperity by installing a pro-Western faction in Tehran. In fact, as we've seen, six months into the war, Iran remains solidly anti-American, its population completely uninterested in toppling its own leadership.
For Tainter and most collapse theorists, the ill-advised war is a textbook case of an empire in decline seeking to secure reserves to maintain its complexity amid diminishing returns.
Analyzed in another light, the war has been a humanitarian disaster that has elicited moral outrage among both American voters and the wider international community. Outside of oligarchic bubbles, the war is seen as unprovoked aggression caused by corruption within the Trump administration.
To lean too heavily either on complexity or corruption as the causes is, in my opinion, a mistake, but to discount the ethical dimension altogether as woo-woo is to cripple the analysis of systemic collapse. China has driven its ascent through progressive technical innovation and a crackdown on public and private corruption, and together they have made it the likely candidate for world hegemon once the United States finally implodes.
One noticeable disparity that emerged after the release of Collapse was wealth inequality. Between 1988 and 2026, the gap between workers and the wealthy grew to proportions that have become a significant concern for the left, right, and center factions in American politics. Trump purported to represent the forgotten American worker, but has only exacerbated the gap by redirecting public money into the pockets of oligarchs, first with Covid and later, with his various wars against oil-rich nations.
Consider for a moment that we now openly discuss oligarchs and their designs on our future in the West. The word itself appeared only in the context of post-Soviet Russia before, say, 2000, but has now entered the lexicon of Westerners of whatever alignment. The word recognizes a moral state in society, not its complexity. Oligarchs steal from the public commons in broad daylight, and complexity has little to do with it. The Chinese government anticipated, researched, planned, and built; the Western ruling class steals and kills.
Climate scientist Bill McGuire, in this interview, answers why nothing is being done to curtail petroleum use given the state of the environment: greed and profit motive. Educated in STEM, a practitioner thereof for decades, and a teacher/scholar, his background didn't lead him to self-censor about the proximate cause of the environmental catastrophe facing the globe.
