Toward a General Theory of Societal Collapse. A Biophysical Examination of Tainter s Model of the Diminishing Returns of Complexity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biophysical model linking societal collapse to diminishing returns of complexity, showing how resource depletion and increasing complexity can lead to rapid societal decline.

Contribution

It presents a simple, energy-based model that supports Tainter's hypothesis of complexity's diminishing returns causing societal collapse.

Findings

Societies exhibit various decline trajectories, including rapid collapses.

Resource exploitation is nonlinearly related to societal complexity.

The model supports the idea that increasing complexity can lead to resource depletion and collapse.

Abstract

The collapse of large social systems, often referred to as civilizations or empires, is a well known historical phenomenon, but its origins are the object of an unresolved debate. In this paper, we present a simple biophysical model which we link to the concept that societies collapse because of the diminishing returns of complexity proposed by Joseph Tainter. Our model is based on the description of a socioeconomic system as a trophic chain of energy stocks which dissipate the energy potential of the available resources. The model produces various trajectories of decline, in some cases rapid enough that they can be defined as collapses. At the same time, we observe that the exploitation of the resource stock (production) has a strongly nonlinear relationship with the complexity of the system, assumed to be proportional to the size of the stock termed bureaucracy. These results provide support for Tainter s hypothesis.