Mystical Collapse

Joseph Tainter's 1988 The Collapse of Complex Societies seeks a unifying principle based in scientific analysis to explain the demise of civilizations across time and place. The book synthesizes, refines, and discounts prevailing theories to derive a generalized explanatory model – a grand unified theory as it were – for systems failure. Specialists in collapse studies are often myopic, focusing on particularities while missing consistent signals emitted by failing societies. Tainter presents an explanation suitable for any decline based on an adaptation of the economic theory of diminishing marginal returns.

Prevailing theories span the present (the British Empire) all the way back to the distant past, to the first societies which emerged in places like Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley. Eventual systems failure is a given and so there are millennia of data sets to draw from when searching for 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, there was a dark joke going 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. The men were, in their ruminations, comparing and contrasting what they knew about the Roman decline with the obvious parallels to their own present day Western nations.

This kind of thing didn't happen in 1988 when Collapse was published. The Soviet Union was in the process of break down and the West 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 the various developed theories for decline, with most of his sources drawn from Western professional academics in the fields of history, economics, archaeology and anthropology. The societies surveyed span continents, including Africa and the pre-European Americas. The Maya, Aztec and Olmecs have been of special interest to Western auditors of system failures since these are distinctly non-European, but possessing at certain points very sophisticated social systems. This area of research was not exactly new, but it was under active work in the 20th century using newer advances in methodology.

Various authors' breakdown of the different approaches adopted are examined for their strengths and weaknesses. All have their deficiencies, some more than others.

Of the eleven classifications Tainter presents, I want to look here at the ninth, what Tainter calls the "Mystical." This in his assessment is the weakest of them, having 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 of the work lumps "numerology" in with the school's other sub-genres, so there's a guilt by association argument made in this section. 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 found in human communities mean there is no such thing as a 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 refer to intangibles like "character," vitality, virtue, piety, and so on rely on "mysticism" in uncovering the seed of collapse. The qualia of individuals, class 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 any kind of statements which implied that morality had anything to do with outcomes in the social sciences owing to the widely perceived failure of the Great Society programs. Political liberalism during this period was especially weak. 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 making the claim that all public policy was embedded in moral reasoning about the good of individuals and collectives. 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 unreliable truth guides because they do not all agree on basic points, like is there 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 judgements 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," describes those who "masquerade" as social scientists in his defense of the value-neutral assessment of history. 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 judgement? As individuals, most of us will choose to live in a law abiding society where corruption is low. 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 causes greed to increase among rulers, so it is the proximate catalyst for decline, not morals.

Tainter is conflating 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 a Western academic should work 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 his personal enrichment, if his example spreads to other regions, then the society as a whole will see a decline in public works. Food scarcity will spread, workers will be more reluctant to work and the society regresses to a more primitive condition. This seems like a very intuitive argument to make, 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 are not giving a rendering of moral defects that sound 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 have an effect on us in our personal and communal lives. It became okay to go to the other extreme in the 2010s by diagnosing Western social ills to breakdowns in historical patterns, cultural mindsets and institutional inertia. These became deeply intertwined with the culture wars. That is to say, a secularized moral reasoning quickly filled in the void of "value-less," "value-neutral" posturing of the late 1980s.

Tainter circa 1988 holds a materialist assumption for 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.
The language of neo-Darwinian biology is subtly assumed into Tainter's thesis. Simple life forms evolve over time into more complex life forms; the greater the complexity, the higher the specialization. The higher the specialization, the more vulnerable a species is to sudden changes in its environment.

The striking beauty of parrots is not intended by anyone, it just happens because of a complex, intricate chain of sexual selection shaped by 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 eco-system 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 they are 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 collapse theorists.

Against Tainter's treatment of morals and character, there's a distinction to be made 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, 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. The formal theologies vary significantly on certain points, but you will not find an Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or Christian society which 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 to their three-year olds wandering 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, the initial input of work yields a high return as low hanging fruit is collected. The early easy wins set up a trajectory of prosperity as the benefits of technological advancements spread among the population, creating a feedback loop of rising benefits. Standard of living increases and public projects make life more comfortable and stable; leisure classes emerge with the time and wealth to devote to the cultivation of higher arts and learning.

These give way to harder wins, where remaining problems are more difficult 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, begins consuming more of the input. Marginal returns decline further. Advancement slows, stalls and the society quickly reverses course in a downward direction in response to system shocks or environmental challenges. If effort is expended in keeping many plates spinning, there is nothing left 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, more specialization, more training, more machinery and maintenance. Today, we use fracking, a complex extraction process requiring copious amounts of water and specialized set ups. 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 applies not only to industrial manufacturing processes, but to every area of human activity in a complex society. He appeals to the findings related to the growth of the 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, causing an increase in training and education costs while yielding ever falling returns on the investment. Mediocre talent is passed through the system and into jobs which are nominally called "STEM," but are in fact functionary positions which do little to push the frontier. The production of 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 aimed at appeasing 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. It's this reason that 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 discussed seeing this firsthand and up close for decades in my field. Projects that should've required a fraction of personnel to complete escalated into dozens of offshore workers. Why? Because the view of incompetent managers was that more was 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 being 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 systems 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 – number of engineers filing for patents in industry – and the macro, nation-state level.

Tainter dismisses this type of reasoning on the grounds that the private sector also undergoes an increase in 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 eliminates 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 of 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 head count, lower costs, speed time to market and greatly improve maintainability.

Tainter silently aggregates the fact of technical complexity in modern systems with the invisible action of ego-actors who, per Graeber, use their positions to create bullshit jobs which justify their ascendancy in a pecking order. This isn't to say that Tainter is wrong on the growth in technical demands, or that costs do not rise as a society's demands for greater "progress" (increasing standards of living) outpace what is possible. It's just something he cannot quantify or measure in any meaningful way, so it gets pushed 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. It has to be inferred from archaeological and written records and these 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, are 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 a rapid growth in email jobs and these are discussed as pointless all over the Internet. 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 during his tenure. Private insurance is notorious for its incredible waste. Talk to anyone who has undergone a routine procedure or test, you'll hear stories about the chaos involved. I'll share one anecdote before looking at Obama's reasoning for the architecture of the ACA.

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 received a bill in the mail stating that 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 to private payers. It's far worse than anything a government office could design.

In the past year, I switched to a different payer and was told by my doctor that 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 produces bad outcomes (as I learned after the fact) for patients 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 were given a boon by 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 life-style 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 super computers, 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 release. 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. Missing in the recent turnaround is that the U.S. outcomes in healthcare "require" double the inputs. This isn't emergent complexity, but the ruling class's commitment to profits and broken, ineffective hierarchies.

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 Window Fallacy. The economy can keep sinking money in non-productive work because, in the short term, it appears to keep the consumer-based economy running. 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.

Medicine however is the tip of the iceberg for our "complex society." Look at the military industrial complex, its F-35 super jets 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, 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 question of ethics 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 function of bias that results in a net loss in innovation and growth. A social scientist saw Tainter was not presenting a complete picture of the causes for 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 manufacture, 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 scuttled a few years before.

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 heavily dependent on Iranian oil still 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 the manufacture of semi-conductors and with Iran cut off from world trade, the thought among American imperialists was that China's advances in prosperity could be curtailed with the installation of a pro-Western faction in Tehran. In fact as we've seen, six months into the war and 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 in the face of 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 oligarchical 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 handled its own ascent through progressive technical innovation and a crackdown on public and private corruption and these, in tandem, have made it the likely candidate for world hegemon once the United States finally implodes.

One of the noticeable disparities 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 make it a significant concern to 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 only appeared in the context of post-Soviet Russia prior to say 2000, but has now entered the lexicon of Westerners of whatever alignment. The word is a recognition of 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 the question of why nothing is being done to curtail petroleum usage given the state of the environment: greed and profit motive. A STEM practitioner with decades of research and publishing on the topic of environmental disaster, he understands intricate systems. Unlike the value-neutral anthropologists, his scientific grounding doesn't lead him to self-censor about the root of climate change by retreating into material complexity.