Thesis #15: We have passed the point of diminishing returns.
by Jason GodeskyIn the previous thesis, we saw that complexity is subject to diminishing returns, because of each of its facets–subsistence, information processng, sociopolitical control, economics, and technology–are not only intertwined as a single system, but are themselves subject to diminishing returns. As such, any society which pursues complexity as an answer to every stress–which is to say, any civilization (see thesis #13)–must, eventually, collapse. This is only underlined by the basic fact that nothing can grow forever in a finite universe (see thesis #12). This leaves only the question of when collapse will occur, or, “is our current level of complexity before or beyond the point of diminishing returns?” To answer this question, let’s again take a look at each of the elements we’ve previously broken out separately: subsistence, information processng, sociopolitical control, economics, and technology.
- Agriculture and resource production.
- Information processing.
- Sociopolitical control and specialization.
- Overall economic productivity.
- Technological innovation.
Agriculture and resource production.
Industrialism allows the resource production of modern civilization to be reduced to a single figure: fossil fuels. Not only do fossil fuels provide energy for every segment of our economy, they even provide our food. In “The Oil We Eat,” Richard Manning discusses the nature of our “petroculture”:
The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.
The reason for the loss of caloric efficiency in agriculture, as Manning discusses in detail, is the loss of arable soil. Monoculture–planting whole fields with just one plant, as with agriculture–drains that soil very quickly. Different plants take different things from the soil, and put other things back, in much the same way as plants and animal harmonize with one another in the oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle. By planting only one type of plant in a field, those things that particular plant needs is drained, but not replenished. Meanwhile, its waste products saturate the soil.
Because of the increasing agricultural complexity of the Green Revolution, the marginal returns for agriculture have dropped to astonishingly negative values. Every calorie of agricultural product returned requires ten calories of input. This is sustainable even in the short term only because of our fossil fuel subsidies.
That subsidy may be running out soon, though. Hubbert’s Peak, more popularly known as, “Peak Oil,” is the midway point of global oil production. Energy Bulletin’s “Peak Oil Primer” explains:
For obvious reasons, people have extracted the easy-to-reach, cheap oil first. The oil pumped first was on land, near the surface, under pressure and light and ’sweet’ and easy to refine into gasoline. The remaining oil, sometimes off shore, far from markets, in smaller fields, or of lesser quality, will take ever more money and energy to extract and refine. The rate of extraction will drop. Furthermore, all oil fields eventually reach a point where they become economically, and energetically no longer viable. If it takes the energy of a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil, then further extraction is pointless.
In other words, the problem is not, strictly speaking, “running out of oil.” Rather, it is a state where the oil that remains provides the same amount of energy as ever, but continues to entail greater costs for its extraction. In other words, the “Peak Oil” problem is a problem of the diminishing marginal returns for our fossil fuel subsidy.
Thus, the question of whether we have passed the point of diminishing returns for resource extraction is the same as the question, “Have we yet passed Hubbert’s Peak?” There is increasing evidence that we may have done just that. Jeff Vail, an intelligence officer with the United States Air Force, wrote:
I gave an intelligence briefing to the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Tom Weimer, today. He’s in charge of “water and science”, which includes the US Geological Survey, the agency in charge of the official government calculations on oil reserves and depletion. Most Peak Oil nay-sayers rely on the USGS’s 2000 report that shows an excessively optimistic projection for recoverable oil reserves, but what does USGS really think? All I can say for sure is that Weimer didn’t have any objections to my assertion that Peak Oil may well be a Fall 2005 event, nor that the world is facing a serious energy supply crisis in the near future. Does the government have some master Peak Oil plan? I have no idea, but claims that they are ignorant about the problem are simply incorrect.
OPEC, which provides most of the world’s oil, may be peaking. Saudi Arabia, though very secretive about its reserves, is having difficulty selling its crude oil–it is heavy, sour crude, not light, sweet. Suggesting that the Ghawar super-field has peaked. While previous estimates for the global Hubbert’s Peak hovered around 2015 - 2025, revelations that Shell and Saudi Arabia may be lying about their reserves have revised those estimates closer to the present or recent past. The EIA released a report stating that demand would outstrip supply in 2005 Q4 (PDF). And in fact, recent oil production has been consistent with the “plateau” one expects at the top of Hubbert’s Peak.
While the case is as yet ambiguous, there is mounting evidence that Hubbert’s Peak is now upon us, and thus, that we are currently passing the point of diminishing returns for resource production in an industrial context.
Information processing.
In the previous thesis, we cited Jeff Vail’s analysis of what is perhaps the world’s most efficient information processing hierarchy: the United States military. Vail highlighted that the operational span of control for each commander is 3, since the other 2 must be dedicated to information processing due to signal degradation problems through too many levels of hierarchy.
We have recently seen a drastic increase in information processing in global telecommunications, but this has been achieved by sacrificing hierarchy, and developing the technological infrastructure to allow for rhizome information processing. Open source methods have proven themselves far more efficient at information processing. “The Blogosphere” circulated news about the 2004 United States presidential election well ahead of the hierarchical mainstream media, while the Iraqi insurgency has successfully used the internet and “open source warfare” to counter the most powerful hierarchical military the world has ever seen. This investment in simplicity has yielded significant marginal returns, but it was made possible only by investments in greater technological and social complexity. And already, there are efforts to reassert hierarchical information processing methods over the internet, showing that such methods cannot long be tolerated by a civilized society.
Education also shows a point of diminishing returns has been reached. In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter writes:
With increasing time spent in education and greater specialization, the learning that occurs yields decreased general benefits for greater costs. The greatest quantities of learning are accomplished in infancy; learning that occurs earlier in life tends to be more generalized. Later, specialized learning is dependent upon this earlier, generalized knowledge, so that the benefits of generalized learning include all derivative specialized knowledge. Axiomatically, therefore, generalized learning is of overall greater value than specialized.
Moreover, this early, generalized learning is accomplished at substantially lower cost. Malchup has compiled figures showing that, in 1957-8, education of pre-school children in the home cost the United States $4,432,000,000 (in income foregone by mothers), which yields $886,400,000 per year for ages 0 through 5. Elementary and secondary education cost $33,339,000,000, or $2,564,538,462 per year for ages 6 through 18. Higher education cost $12,757,000,000, or $2,514,000,000 per year for far fewer students, assuming an average of five years spent in higher education. In other words, the monetary cost to the nation of a year of education between pre-school, when the most generalized, highly useful education takes place, and college, when the most specialized learning is accomplished, increases by about 284 percent. And this increase would be even more dramatic if these figures took into account the fact that college enrollment is but a fraction of the available population.
Similarly … the overall production of investment in higher education for the development of specialized expertise has declined substantially since 1900. D. Price has demonstrated, in regard to the education of scientists, that educating more scientists causes those of average ability to increase in number faster than those who are most productive. Thus, increasing investments in specialized education yield declines in both marginal and average returns.
In 1924, S.G. Strumilin collected in the Soviet Union a set of educational data that reveal a corroborative pattern. He showed that the marginal return on investment in education declines with increasing education. The first two years of education, according to Strumilin, raise a Soviet worker’s production skills an average of 14.5 percent per year. Yet the third year of education yields an increase of only an additional 8 percent, while the fourth through sixth years raise skills only a further 4.5 percent per year.
So, there is a definite diminishing marginal returns curve for each individual’s education. This compounds to create a society’s point of diminishing returns because, as Tainter points out, a society that can satisfy its needs based on general education will return far more on its investment than those that require more specialized education. In the modern United States, intensifying complexity has led to the rise of the four year college Bachelor degree as the expected minimum of education, rather than simply the high school diploma. This is driven by the need for workers with more specialized knowledge to handle the various components of a more complex society. As such, society’s complexity is requiring heavier costs in education–passing a point of diminishing returns.
Sociopolitical control and specialization.
In the previous thesis, we mentioned the Bush administration’s creation of the Department of Homeland Security in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. At one point in time, this move may have yielded significant returns. However, in 2002, all of the departments it was unifying already had significant hierarchies and complexities of their own. Creating another level of complexity to subsume them merely exacerbated this situation.
Tainter provides still more evidence:
Between 1914 and 1967, the number of capital ships in the British Navy declined by 78.9 percent, the number of officers and enlisted men by 32.9 percent, and the number of dockyard workers by 33.7 percent. Yet during this period the number of dockyard officials and clerks increased by 247 percent, and the number of Admiralty officials by 769 percent. … Between 1935 and 1954 the number of officials in the British Colonial Office increased by 447 percent. During this same period, of course, the empire administered by these officials shrank considerably.
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Bendix has compiled for private industry, in several nations, data similar to those Parkinson has uncovered in government. He was able to show that a pattern of increasing hierarchical specialization characterizes the private sector as strongly as Parkinson has demonstrated for the public. Clearly in the private sector, where economic succeess depends on efficiency, this pattern cannot be attributed to self-serving inefficiency. The reason why complex organizations must allocate ever larger portions of their personnel and other resources to administration is because increased complexity requires greater quantities of information processing and greater integration of disparate parts.
Even in 1977, Elgin and Bushnell concluded in “The Limits to Complexity: Are Bureaucracies Becoming Unmanageable?” (PDF) that the United States government was a Stage III organization, marked by severe diseconomies of scale, and due to the “ratchet effect” (a specific case of the type of positive feedback loop discussed in thesis #12) must soon become stage IV, critical and prone to collapse.
Nor is this only a burden for the public sector. In recent years, enterprise search has become a necessary commodity for any large-scale enterprise. The information processing burden is simply too great. Even enterprise search products are now becoming insufficient for the complexity such organizations face, creating a niche that my employer, Vivísimo, has very successfully exploited, with the development of a sophisticated “clustering engine” to organize such an overwhelming amount of data. In a whitepaper distributed by Vivísimo (PDF), the annual savings for an organization with 100 employees over conventional search products is calculated to be $1,012,000. This suggests the amount of investment being made into information processing even in the “efficient” private sector for such complexity.
Overall economic productivity.
As the information processing burden increases, and as the marginal returns of sociopolitical complexity diminish, the overall economy cannot help but suffer the same curve. Tainter writes:
Complex societies with large, well-developed economies have historically been able to sustain only rather inferior rates of economic growth. Latecomers to economic growth tend to have higher growth rates than early starters. … [R]ates of economic growth are highest in middle income countries, followed by high income and low income nations. Kristensen infers from these data that, through time, rates of economic growth tend to slow down … Such a trend suggests that societies with more developed economies face a situation in which the productivity of GNP for stimulating further growth tends to decline.
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Zolotas has argued that the productivity of industrialism for producing social welfare is declining. In partial support of this assertion he points out that while U.S. per capita product increased 75 percent from 1950 to 1977, weekly work hours declined by only 9.5 percent.
Technological innovation.
The very notion that we have passed the point of diminishing returns for technology would seem to be the only one even more absurd than the very idea that technology is subject to diminishing returns at all–at least, to the techno-salvationist. In fact, the evidence is quite clear. In “Getting better value from information management,” published by Information Economics Journal in October 2003, Paul A. Strassmann notes:
The prevailing view nowadays is that IT will remain stagnant for a while. … An article by Nicholas Carr in the May 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review resulted in a lively debate about its claim that IT spending will level off permanently because IT has become strategically irrelevant.
…
Why were organisations unable to take advantage of IT capabilities? The explanation is simple. Each firm had to organise its IT department, train its managers, educate its executives, develop most of its software and integrate vendor offerings with disorderly legacy code. It was easier to junk and re-build instead of to accumulate and grow. Vendors and consultants thrived with revenues growing faster than IT budgets. Out of total 2002 worldwide IT spending of $2 trillion the vendors and consultants reaped about 30%.
Financial executives are now asking where they can find the gains from IT spending. They are not looking for a small amount of money. For US manufacturing firms IT investments accounted for over a third of all new capital expenditures. For the US financial and services sector the IT investments consumed most of the capital used for acquiring non-financial assets.
Strassman is clearly addressing concern for marginal returns–the cost of IT, versus its benefit–and finding that it does not live up to its promises. This is in information technology, the field that has seen the most strikingly successful technological development in the past 50 years. For other areas of technology, things have been even worse. Tainter writes:
Despite Malchup’s caution, a number of factors suggest that the productivity of research and development has indeed declined. … [P]atents have been declining in respect to population and number of technical workers since about 1920, well before the R&D effort of World War II and thereafter. 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 1936-40 and 1956-60 by only 23 percent.
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There are, morevoer, other data suggesting declining productivity of inventing activity in the industrial world. Hornell Hart has demonstrated consistent patterns of increasing and then declining rates of patenting (logistic curves) in many fields that are partially or wholly unrelated to military R&D. These include airplanes, automobiles, cotton machinery, electric meters, radios, sewing machines, spinning machinery, sulky plows, telegraphy, telephony, typewriters, and weaving machinery. He also noticed that the same patterns are evident in the major inventions and discoveries of the Western world, and in patents sealed in Great Britain between 1751 and 1820, and between 1821 and 1938.
Thus, it seems that military R&D cannot account for more than a small part of the decline in patents. Furthermore, the decline is so widespread in so many fields, over such a long time, that declining propensity to patent can hardly account for it either. Recent research shows that there is in fact a strong positive relationship between R&D and patenting. Thus the patent statistics appear to be a reliable indicator of inventing accomplishment.
It would appear that there has indded been a genuine drop in the inventive productivity of research and development, and that as investments in R&D have increased (from 0.1 percent of gross national product in 1920 to 2.6 percent in 1960), the marginal product of these investments has declined. Although there are some demurrals, many economists recognize this trend.
That trend has continued. Jonathan Huebner charted the same trend from 1914 to 2005 in, “A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation.” A Japanese report (PDF) from 2003 concluded that they, too, were suffering from having passed the point of diminishing returns in technology:
[W]e do not find strong evidence that Japanese innovative capacity has actually declined. However, that capacity has failed to grow at the rate of the 1980s. As a result, US and worldwide patent statistics suggest that Japanese firms in a number of sectors have fallen behind their US counterparts, even in areas where Japanese firms were formerly quite strong and rapidly converging on US levels of inventive output.
Medical technology, another field of significant investment in the past half century, has also shown signs of diminishing marginal returns. Penicillin, one of the most effective drugs ever devised, had a total production cost of approximately $20,000. According to a 2003 report by Bain & Co., the average cost of a new drug today is $1.7 billion. Writing about the study for Chemical & Engineering News, Rick Mullin writes:
According to Bain, the cost of drug development–currently 55% higher than the average cost from 1995 to 2000–is rising largely as a result of an increasing failure rate for prospective drugs in clinical trials. The rising cost of commercializing new drugs is another contributing factor–12 months of sales and marketing costs are included in Bain’s cost estimate but not in the Tufts figure.
If this is true, then the cost of developing new drugs is increasing exponentially, and largely due to the fact that most prospective drugs fail in clinical trials. Medical technology is incuring greater costs for less benefit–in the case of medical technology, that would be more “misses,” or work that never produce a viable drug.
* * *
Tainter provides another example of how we have surpassed the point of diminishing returns for complexity that does not fit easily under any of the above headings, as it applies to medical research and longevity:
Medical research and application provide a good example of a declining marginal return for increased investment in a scientific field. While it is less easy to measure the benefits of medicine than its costs, one sure indicator is life expectancy. Unfortunately, ever larger investments in health care do not yield proportionate increases in longevity. In 1930 the United States expended 3.3 percent of its gross national product (GNP) to produce an average life expectancy of 59.7 years. By 1982, 10.5 percent of GNP was producing a life expectancy of 74.5 years. … [F]rom 1930 to 1982 the productivity of the U.S. national health care system (measured thus) declined by 57 percent. (In fact, it is likely that the decline in the productivity of medicine has been even greater, for the effects of improved nutrition and sanitation on increasing life expectancy have not been included.)
From this data, Tainter concluded in 1988 that collapse was neither an option, nor an immediate threat. The reason, he said, was that the United States existed in a peer polity system, and that no single polity can collapse in such a system without being immediately reabsorbed by the whole.
For such brilliant insight, Tainter shows a disappointing inability to grasp the implications of his own theory at the end. The difference he draws between the collapse of isolated civilizations (such as Rome) and peer polity systems (such as the Maya) is arbitrary. We are dealing with “global” systems, whether we are dealing with literal islands, “islands” isolated by distance, geography, or culture, or the entire globe itself. The global system of complexity must collapse as a system. No single part can collapse in isolation, this is true. This is a direct result of the fact that civilization must always pursue complexity (thesis #13), and must always grow (thesis #12). Thus, when New Orleans collapsed, the United States government eventually moved in to restore its former level of complexity. This is one, arbitrary level we could look at; or, we could look at the arbitrary level of nation-states, and cite the collapse of the USSR and its immediate reabsorption into a similar level of complexity.
However, it would be obviously untrue to conclude from this that collapse is impossible. The only caveat is that the entire system must collapse as a system, not as individual, constituent parts. Thus, the Roman Empire collapsed as a system; the Mayan city-states collapsed not as individual city-states, but as a single system. We do not face the collapse of the United States or any one nation-state; we face the collapse of industrialized society itself. The scale of the nation-state has become arbitrary as well. As globalization proceeds, multinational corporations have risen to an unprecedented level of power, bisecting nations and undercutting their influence (see Jeff Vail, “The New Map: Terrorism in a Post-Cartesian World“). If nation-states are vertical powers, then multinational corporations create horizontal powers across them. This trend raises the question of whether we still truly live in a peer polity system at all, or if we are seeing the rise of some new level of complexity in such organizations as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank–the inevitable conclusion to intensifying complexity, with the emergence of a single, global civilization? Ultimately, the distinction is still a semantic one, however; peer polity systems often behave as though they were a single civilization, because the political alliances and economic relationships between them fuse them into a single system of social complexity.
As we have seen, the crisis of the diminishing returns on complexity is not only present, it is global. The same problems can be seen in every country; we have highlighted the United States here only for its greater wealth of available data, and, as the “capital” of the globalized civilization/peer polity system, it provides perhaps the most striking example. We have passed the point of diminishing returns for agriculture, information processing, bureaucracy, technology and the economy itself. All of these are intertwined, as we saw in the previous thesis. Having passed the point of diminishing returns, the collapse of such a system is inevitable.
WHEW!
And that’s the half-way point, boys and girls. Snuck it in under the wire for “being published in October” by a full 16 minutes! Reminds me of some of those operating systems programming projects I turned in back in my college days….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 12:52 AM
You write that we live in a peer polity, and if any single or small number of polities collapse, they’ll be immediately re-absorbed. There is a lot of evidence that this is true.
You also hypothesise that if the global system collapses, every single polity collapses with it.
However, you do not consider what happens when most but not all peer polities collapse, and the ones left standing have no capability and diminished incentive to re-absorb the collapsed ones immediately.
Let us look at the island of Cuba as an example. When Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba also collapsed to a reduced level of complexity. However, the surrounding peer polities had not been fully successful integrating Cuba back into a complex global system.
As of today, Cuba is largely self-sufficient, and will suffer little from the global collapse.
Let us assume that there are several places such as Cuba, that will survive global collapse while retaining some complexity above Neolitic.
These remaining “Cubas” will all be small and likely unable to engage in conquest of collapsed areas, at least immediately. However, because some level of civilization will be preserved in these spots, eventually expand they must. Thus, the global collapse will likely be repeated perhaps on a smaller scale, and it will be repeated multiple times.
Comment by Mikey_G — 1 November 2005 @ 11:14 AM
Because, as Tainter discusses, that never happens, because it’s impossible.
Cuba is not sustainble (it’s depending on materials from the 1950s that are already disintegrating), nor is it as isolated as we like to think. I believe Cuba’s ability to survive has been vastly exaggerated.
Yes, and on an extinction curve. Following this collapse, though, we will achieve a significant new state of affairs: forevermore, the majority of the earth will belong to less complex cultures. Over time, complexity will follow an undulating extinction curve, going up and down like a sine wave, but with each crest lower than the last.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 11:19 AM
Oh, and if “Mikey G” is supposed to be imitating my brother–not cool. Mike would never call himself “Mikey.” He hates when people call him that. Don’t call him that. You’ll make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 11:20 AM
I don’t understand. If a collapse of one or small number of polities provides a relief of stress to the remaining polities, wouldn’t collapse of a large number of polities relieve even more stress on the remaining ones allowing them to survive longer?
Comment by _Gi — 1 November 2005 @ 11:47 AM
Hey –
Its a question of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
State A could sit back and watch a neighboring territory(state C) collapse and do nothing… but they also know that State B would then have the opportunity to move in and take control of those resource — which then makes them (State A) susceptible to being overwhelmed by State B.
So do you take a chance that you lose your position, or do you do everything possible to position yourself to the fore?
Typically civilizations always chose the strategy that focuses on the near term rather than the long term — which means expending the resources now, moving into the niche, protecting (expanding) thier assets, whatever. If they do otherwise, they will quickly be overwhelmed by thier more aggressive neighbor.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 1 November 2005 @ 12:03 PM
This works quite nicely, if State A and State B are close and in direct competition with each other over a scarce area of expansion C.
But if majority of states collapse, State A and State B which remain are likely to be isolated from each other, thus their incentive to compete will be reduced. Additionally, there will be so many collapsed areas into which state A and state B can now expand, that they will not be able to quickly reabsorb a majority of collapsed areas. Thus, the competitive pressures on A and B are relieved until they meet again at some future date which may be quite far in the future.
Comment by _Gi — 1 November 2005 @ 12:47 PM
Hmmm … finished the first half of my Thirty Theses on the traditional date 488th anniversary of the day Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. Cool!
Of course, the whole story with the nailing and the church door is all made up, but still….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 12:49 PM
Complex societies are under intense pressure both internally, and externally, to constantly intensify their investments in complexity. The game of Prisoner’s Dilemna that Janene mentioned adequately explains the external pressure, as discussed in thesis #12. The internal pressure to intensify investments in complexity is discussed in thesis #13.
Many civilizations have existed without any complex societies impinging on them; they have still been compelled to pursue ever greater complexity, even beyond the point of diminishing returns, simply because of these internal pressures, such as Quinn’s “Food Race.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 1:57 PM
Hey –
But how do you get from a bunch of states literally pushed immediately up against one another, to a bunch of dis-associated states?
When we take about states collapsing, this is over a period of time (a year or two being FAST) both within a given state and between states. So you can never get to the point where these polities will be isolated without first presuming that they did nothing in response to thier immediate neighbor’s collapse.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 1 November 2005 @ 2:01 PM
The dynamics of collapse is determined by reduced energy input which will be insufficient to support complexity of most states. So they all collapse very quickly.
Since the energy distribution and complexity is not uniform, a small portion of states will not collapse as quickly. But while these holdouts might have enough energy to maintain their complexity and even enough energy reserves to increase their own complexity as needed, they will not be able to expand nearly as fast as their collapsing neighbors will collapse. If this is how collapse proceeds, you end up with a small bunch of isolated complex states surrounded by huge swaths of collapsed territories.
Yet, any arbitrary collapsed territory will not be safe from the survivers’ attempts to expand, although most will be spared for a long time.
Comment by _Gi — 1 November 2005 @ 2:47 PM
Each survivng “pocket” of complexity will have immensely diminished energy supplies, without access to a global system of complexity, trade –supplies which wll be growing smaller. Venezuela might even be able to assert control over a significant portion of Latin America, but ultimately, it will collapse as well before it even reaches the Rio Grande.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 3:06 PM
In other words, what we see in a graph of complexity over time is the up and down of a sine wave, only each successive crest is smaller than the last, and eventually extinguishes. We’re at the very tip-top of the tallest crest–it’s all downhill from here.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 3:07 PM
Going back to practical considerations for you as a primitivist.
Let us suppose that US state collapsed, you picked up with your tribe and you are now safely in the environment of your choosing living the life the way you want.
You manage to escape the convulsions of dying state, avoid the cannibal gangs, maybe establish contact with other tribes. Do you feel safe at this point?
How far in the future is this point? Will you feel like Moses dying before reaching the promised land if this strugle and convulsions and escapes take too long? Will you be able to distinguish forager tribes like yours from clever cannibal tribes who didn’t learn to eat the right plants and want you for dinner?
Comment by _Gi — 1 November 2005 @ 3:30 PM
Do I feel safe at that point? Absolutely. When will it be? I intend to be living that life even before civilization collapses. I expect to not even know the collapse is going on until it’s over. Our “deadline” is 2010, and we have plans in place and on schedule to see that it happens.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 3:32 PM
Intriguing
How will you avoid the knowledge of collapse in progress?
Will you have no civilized means of communication when you go in the wild? Will you not at least make stocks of useful civilization debries like guns and ammo? Will you try to avoid all communication with any other tribes who are in posession of civilized communication devices?
What if you move too soon? What if your location will be prized by a better armed group and you’ll have to retreat? Are you willing to do it blind, without any information about ongoing collapse to guide your actions?
Comment by _Gi — 1 November 2005 @ 4:26 PM
That was a slight exaggeration, of course. We’ll be sufficiently far removed that it will take a conscious effort to keep our fingers on the pulse. I will likely still be posting here until the last internet satellite uplink crashes, but I doubt Giuli will want to know a thing about what’s going on in the civilized world. And she won’t have to.
We’re going to be in those wilds so useless to agriculture that even at peak population, peak energy, peak power, and peak need, they weren’t worth trying to tame. Collapse always involves a contraction of cultivated land, not an expansion, so the “land grab” scenario is at major odds with reality. Currently cultivated land is going to be abandoned; there will never be another new farm plowed. They’ll be lucky to keep farming the land they already have. And we’re trained to head into the cities in times of emergency–just see any zombie movie.
So, what armed groups should I worry about? There won’t be much in the way of competition from other foragers, since there likely won’t be any other foragers for hundreds of miles, because the vast majority of people in every culture will remain true to that culture and starve for it. Far less than 1% will ever look to the wilderness–that permanently demonized “Other”–for safety and sustenance. After all, if it’s this bad in the cities, just imagine what it must be like in the woods!
Meaning, it’s unlikely anyone will want to bother us. In the unlikely event that someone is that stupid, foragers enjoy the benefits of a human body that lives a life to which it is adapted. The result is a suite of capabilities that most civilized folk would consider “superhuman.” The human body is really an incredible instrument. So, anyone attempting such a foolhardy move will face an army of Batmen, with a knowledge of their terrain so intimate it’s spiritual, practicing guerrilla warfare–a uniquely tribal mode of warfare.
To say nothing of the rhizome army of the Appalachian Confederation.
That’s a setup that could go toe-to-toe with the United States Marine Corps. Why would I be afraid of some starving, sickly, desperate farmers with shotguns who are suicidal enough to try to plow forests they couldn’t even plow when they had gasoline-powered tractors, when they can’t even plow their own fields? Or should I be afraid of other primitivists, all, what, 1,000 of us or so, most of them heading to the other end of the continent–and even so, would still be stumbling through a territory they didn’t know?
What is it I’m supposed to fear?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 4:53 PM
If you are not a Batman now, you will not be one in five years, by your “deadline”.
The government of the United States managed to reserve plenty of perfectly good fertile land as National Parks.
Whatever happens right now in Amazon rainforest, may happen to these National Parks, as the farmers realize that their land is worth as much as a handful of sand without fertilizer. Land grab is unavoidable when Federal Government breaks down.
These forests will be slashed and burned by sickly desperate farmers who also know how to hunt.
Your location may be exempt, your land might be worthless for cultivation, and then you will have nothing to fear.
Comment by _Gi — 1 November 2005 @ 5:20 PM
So, your contention is that after five years of eating a healthy, adaptive human diet, getting a healthy amount of physical activity, and actually using my senses will yield the very same physical specimen as spending the next five years staring at a computer screen, in a carefully climate-controlled building in a city that dulls every single sense, eating the Neolitihic crap that the human body simply doesn’t know how to properly digest? That’s a pretty radical view of human health you have there, but I’m sure the, “Sitting on your ass is just as good as a healthy diet and exercise” plan will be a major seller if you can stretch it out to book length and throw around enough buzzwords to sound “scientific.” Seems to work for everyone else…
They’re national parks because they’re not useful for anything else. When they do become useful, the government hands them over fairly quickly, witihin a decade.
That won’t last very long, as they’ll soon realize how idiotic they were. Those lands were reserved as national parks because they were useless for farming. If they can’t farm the primo land they’re already on, how are they going to farm the stuff that was too infertile even with petrochemical ferilizers?
Anyway, the “land grab” scenario would be a much stronger hypothesis if, out of all the known cases of collapse, you could find just one where it happened. Instead, they all saw significant contraction of cultivated land–not expansion.
BTW, your implication of a parallel in the Amazon couldn’t be more off. The Amazon’s soil has all the fertility of a block of cement. All the nutrients are locked in the trees. So, swidden agriculture, or “slash-and-burn” is the only viable method. Indigenous people used this method sustanably for thousands of years, but it was always a difficult, precarious balance. Western influences have thrown it completely out of whack. But this is not a new practice in response to lack of otherwise fertile land; this is an ancient, otherwise sustainable practice that has become completely maladapted to the new context.
They won’t get very far–they’ll die of starvation first. I mean, you’re basically saying that if a farmer can’t get his crops to grow, the logical next step is to try plowing pavement and cultivate the desert. Who would choose to try something more difficult, when they can’t even successfully get their first option going? You’re expectng people to pass up the lowest-hanging fruit and to go right for a tiny sour little berry twenty feet straight up, surrounded by thorns. It just doesn’t happen.
Well, what primitivist in his right mind wouldn’t do precisely that?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 5:33 PM
I don’t understand.
The nutrients are locked in the trees.
You burn the trees and release the nutrients back into the soil. What is the difference if the trees are in the Amazon basin or in Yellowstone?
The current “primo” soil is depleted of all the nutrients and it will not produce any yield without synthetic fertilizer.
So, you move to the forest burn the trees, and use ashes for fertilizer. Now you have fertile soil for a while. Eventually, it depletes, so you move to the next part of the forest, burn it and repeat the process.
Ofcourse the cultivated land will contract, because most of the dust bowl will have to be abandoned because it is not “primo” land, it is the same desert only without a chance to use ashes from the trees as fertilizer.
As far as your health, it will most likely improve. I have serious doubts that you will gain any superpowers though. You’ve been poisoned by the civilization’s toxic byproducts and its Neolithic crap for many years. You’ll be lucky to detox.
Comment by _Gi — 1 November 2005 @ 5:47 PM
Without a doubt the Homo Sapiens as a species has passed its peak and what remains is a dreadful and inevitable descent to extinction. The Earth simply cannot sustain a population of nine billion humans even with the assistance of the fossil fuels, once the fossil fuels become exhausted the Earth will not sustain a human population of a hundred million. During periods of scarcity and decline the worst traits of human nature become predominant (see Germany circa the 1930’s).
Though I reject the doctrine of the Apocalypse from a religious perspective it does appear likely that humankind will enter of period of tribulation based upon the imbalance between excessive human population and the diminishing finite resources of the Earth. Christians who look forward to the Rapture ought to pray for God to remove them from the Earth soon because life is going to become very difficult over the next several decades.
Those who doubt that tribution is coming ought to pay more attention the world. Tribulation has already come to the continent of Africa via genocide, disease and starvation. Tribulation has come to the Middle East via a desparate American military action in Iraq and the prospects of more elsewhere. Eventually tribution will reach the United States of America. When it comes it will make both the Great Depression and the Civil War seem insignificant.
Whatever happens will happen. It’s best to enjoy the life of peace and prosperity which exist now rather than worry about the problems of tomorrow. The good memories that you preserve of today might serve as solace through the dark days which are certainly coming.
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1
Comment by David Mathews — 1 November 2005 @ 5:56 PM
Because in Yellowstone, the nutrients aren’t all locked in the trees. Not every nutrient in the soil is useful to every plant, in just the same way that of all the gases n the air, you only use oxygen, and breathe out methane. Crops need a narrow range of salinity and pH balance in the soil–a precise balance that not all plants need. In the same soils that some plants wither, others thrive. Agriculture relies exclusively on a small number of closely-related crops, and thus, needs a very specific type of soil, in a very specific type of climate. Our national parks all lack one, the other, or both. While they’re great for wildlfire, they’re useless for farming.
Different species between Yellowstone and the Amazon rainforest. A lot more nutrients in Amazonian trees than ours. The resulting fertilizer is very good; ours, not so much. Also, even in the Amazon, you’re talking about significantly smaller fields, significantly smaller yields, and permaculture techniques that are anathema to contemporary monoculture.
Foragers live perfectly well in a prairie, of course.
When I had sufficient funds to follow the paleo diet, it took me two weeks to see significant improvements in weight, vision, mental acuity, speed, strength and agility. That was without any exercise. After consciously training my senses, I’ve seen benefits in a matter of a few months that most of my fellows refuse to believe–seems too “comic book” to be credible, after all.
Granted, there’s likely a point of diminishing returns, but the body heals VERY quickly once you stop abusing it and treat it right. The !Kung may always laugh at me, but at this rate, civilized folk will be in awe after a single year.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 5:57 PM
David–
Civilization is frail. Humanity, though, is anything but. What makes you think we won’t survive our civilization? You’ve made the error B warned about: “We are not humanity.” Humanity hasn’t passed its peak at all; civilization has. Those are two very different things. Humanity is as strong as ever, if we can just rid ourselves of this mistake a few of us made.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2005 @ 5:59 PM
Whatever happens will happen. It’s best to enjoy the life of peace and prosperity which exist now rather than worry about the problems of tomorrow. The good memories that you preserve of today might serve as solace through the dark days which are certainly coming.
What peace? What prosperity? I will have very few good memories of a time when I must live locked inside my house in constant fear, when I am surrounded by strangers, when I am forced to work long hours for the privilege of barely getting by, where I am a constant witness to the daily abuse of everything and everyone around me. All of my good memories will most definitely be of times when I managed to leave this misery, if only for a few days.
Roxy
Comment by Raku — 1 November 2005 @ 6:12 PM
I’ve been on Paleo since late December. I rarely excercise and meditate less frequently then I’d want to.
I’m now stronger, leaner, faster, more sensitive, have more endurence, am faster mentally and reflexively than ever before. And that’s less than a year with just a scaled down version of the diet without the lifestyle. I fully plan on leaping tall buildings, Batman was a wuss. All he had was money and technology, no superpowers at all.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 1 November 2005 @ 8:19 PM
Re:
This is true, but the opposite may also be true, if civilisation manages to find itself a richer energy source than fossil fuels. In this case, we really are in trouble – even we will continue to separate further and further from nature. Meanwhile, nature will continue to die off – eventually reaching a point where it will not be viable to leave civilisation in the way that is being discussed here – our environment of evolutionary adaptedness will be no more. It will be too depleted of diversity to be a functioning food-producing environment for humans. For those of us who thrive on city living and and reconstituted algae, this will be fine. For those of us who are more primitively inclined however, the door back to nature will eventually close. We just have to hope that the hydrocarbon peaks occur as soon as possible – otherwise, R&D could well find the wonder-fuel that really does finish us all off.
Jason (and anyone else for that matter): What are the potential energy sources that you most fear might keep the juggernaut rolling? And how big is this danger?
And also, I’m not yet as familiar with the paleo diet as I should be, but if you’re exhaling methane, perhaps it would be worth taking another look at your grass consumption?
_Gi: Assuming that Primitivists are just mad fuckers (which, for the record, I believe is most definitely not the case) what alternatives do you suggest for people who are sick of living the way we do now? Are you thinking Permaculture or what?
Comment by Clive — 2 November 2005 @ 10:41 AM
I believe Jason meant carbon dioxide. And I forgive him for his error. Now may we all continue to tease him mercilessly for it.
The only possible source of energy we could find that might cut it, and I stress might, would be if we found the body of Jeasus Christ. Then all we’d have to do is attach a magnet on either side and play tapes of Bush’s speaches. The rotation of the magnets would supply us with ample electricity.
But seriously, nothing we have comes close to cutting it, nothing on the drawing board is close enough to ready, and it’s too late for something wholely new. The fun thing about approaching maximum complexity is that it makes invention more difficult. So our need is increasing while our ability to act on that need is near zero. Fun, huh?
Paleo diet is quite googlable. Essentially you eat what our paleolithic ancesters ate. So nuts, fruits, and vegetables galore. Enjoy as much meat as you want. Avoid all grains, legumes, and strachy vegtebles. Rule of thumb: if you could eat it raw, feel free to throw it on the grill. Google for details. Humans are not meant to eat grass. Humans are meant to eat the things that eat grass.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 2 November 2005 @ 11:52 AM
Clive,
I am all out of fresh ideas. This site and the people who populate it are apparently on to something.
I come here to learn because many things I do not understand.
Assuming Primitivists are irrelevant to civilization, which seems more to the point than your original assumption, I am trying to understand what exactly will happen to this civilization and how will real people (including the cast of cannibalistic urban gangs, permaculture and horticulture villagers, agricultural land-grabbers, bunker-hiding elites with 30 years worth of canned foods stored, Donner parties starving in the forest, tough ex-special force commandos trained to survive indefinitely in the wilderness), and the rest of us will survive the coming shortages. This civilization managed to produce a very large store of knowledge. Some people in our society probably know more about various forager tribes than they know about themselves and each other. Not to mention the things we know about materials, biology, ecology, thermodynamics, and collapse of complex societies. Which knowledge will be useful? Who will use it and how? What can be preserved? What would be the media? If I survive to have grandchildren, will they care about germs? Will they understand this civilization? If only primitivists survive, will they have enough genetic diversity to create a robust population?
Will there be a big global war? That would reduce the complexity and cause devastation of surviving ecologies.
Will people turn to hunting en-masse when food runs out? There are more than 100 million guns and a billion rounds of ammo in US, hundreds of thousands of experienced hunters and ex-soldiers accustomed to killing the toughest game. Not to mention all the former boy and girl scouts who did not entirely forget their skills. Imagine what happens, if paleo diet becomes as popular as Atkins. Imagine what happens, when there are few viable alternatives.
At this point, I have too many questions and not a lot of answers.
Comment by _Gi — 2 November 2005 @ 12:15 PM
“Vail highlighted that the operational span of control for each commander is 3, since the other 2 must be dedicated to information processing due to signal degradation problems through too many levels of hierarchy.”
I have no idea what this means. Maybe if I had been in the military….
Comment by Peter — 2 November 2005 @ 5:31 PM
The preceding sentence was:
Click on that link, and you might find:
And at that link, you’ll find:
These are really meant to be read in order.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 November 2005 @ 5:39 PM
I was reading a hard copy at the cafe so I couldn’t click the link.
Comment by Peter — 2 November 2005 @ 5:52 PM
That’s fine; I’m basically writing a book here. Previous chapters are assumed.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 November 2005 @ 6:10 PM
Here’s a book on my Amazon Wishlist: The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy by the late Christopher Lasch. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393313719/qid=1131033156/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-3713505-2486432?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
From what I understand of the book, Lasch argues that sometime in the 1980s the elites began seperating themselves and their interests from the rest of us. In effect, they started climbing into the escape pods accessible only to the first class passengers.
Although I doubt that he saw Collapse in our future, he did see a disengagement by the elites due perhaps to diminishing returns.
Comment by Peter — 3 November 2005 @ 12:02 PM
But he makes it sound like a bad thing….
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 November 2005 @ 12:32 PM
Totally True! but it is a fallacy to continue;-
Just because Oil has reached Oil’s point of diminish returns, has little or no bearing on the timing when any other resource may (eventually) reach their own points of diminishing returns. Thus to say that Oil’s point of diminishing equates to “the point of diminishing returns for resource production in an industrial context” is at best quite sloppy, at worst a devious miss-representation.
Jason then a lot of the other examples you give, or stuff you cite from Joseph Tainter in support of the diminishing returns thesis, upon closer investigations are misconceptions or miss-interpretation of the facts. Especially what is said about Education and Technological Innovation, where the examples are more evidence of / for Academic Inflation or Knowledge Domain Saturation, than being any skerrick of evidence for diminishing returns from rising complexity.
So despite your noble aim for this Thesis #15 your evidence here-in todate does not support your statement;-
Sorry mate, the whole issue is more complex than that.
Shawn.
Comment by W.Shawn Gray (AuzGnosis) — 29 December 2005 @ 11:17 PM
The fact that we’ve passed the point of diminishing returns has not a whit to do with where our energy comes from: it has to do with our returns on complexity, and whether they’re declining. Which … they are. That’s what all of those examples show.
Oil’s a good indicator of overall energy thanks to Liebzig’s Law of the Minimum. If it takes one doodad and one thingy to make a widget, and you have 10 doodads and 100 thingies, you’re only going to get 10 widgets–and it really doesn’t matter how many thingies you have left over.
I have no idea what you’re talking about with the “Academic Inflation or Knowledge Domain Saturation” schtick, though, but if you’ve found a flaw in Tainter’s basic argument there, then your Nobel Prize should be in the mail, ’cause you’ve gone ahead and made a major paradigm shift of your own. Which will reset the curve for diminishing returns on research, until collapse studies becomes too specialized again and it takes years of research to learn something we didn’t already know.
It’s really not any more complex than that … complexity itself is actually pretty simple.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 December 2005 @ 11:24 PM
G’day Jason,
There is no flaw in Taiter’s basic argument, I’m just saying some of the examples given stink. You could just as easily collect a bunch of examples from the mid-18th or early 19th centuries and make the same argument you have above.
In the USA maybe. A collapse of the USA soon, likely. But the world beyond following your arguments will just in-time fill-in that hole. For an thought exercise look at the USSR in the late 1970’s.
C’ya Shawn
Comment by W.Shawn Gray (AuzGnosis) — 29 December 2005 @ 11:58 PM
G’day Jason,
Filling-out yesterdays quick answer, you had also written;-
Taking the last one first, any definable discrete ‘body of knowledge’ or ‘area of study’ can be regarded as a ‘knowledge domain’. Be that as large as the ‘everything to do with and/or known about medicine’ or as small as something like ‘a detailed knowledge of double glazing of windows for insulation properties in cold climates’. Likewise the ‘practice of innovation’ is also another knowledge domain. Thence to talk about “innovation saturation” as is done many times in the article you cited;-
Review of “A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation,” Jonathan Huebner, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, September 2005 (forthcoming) © 2005 by John Smart. [Permalink: http://accelerating.org/articles/huebnerinnovation.html
is strictly the same thing as the more verbose description of talking about the “Saturation of Knowledge Domain for practice of Innovation” As an aside it is interesting to note that while this article make numerous references to various supply, demand and capacity saturation, ‘complexity’ gets only one mention, then that is as part of a cited title! In many ways it is saying the samething I have been saying about this subject.
“Academic Inflation” is the market place devaluation of relevance of an academic qualification as the supply of applicants with that qualification rises. Their exist a tendance among employers to often demand (and be willing to pay for) the most qualified person for given position. While once accepting a Certificate in an area of study for a given job, when diploma was the highest degree commonly held in an occupation, as higher degrees are introduced by academia the minium qualifications required for a jobs tend to creep up so is to maintain (over time) similar small (historical) numbers of applicants for certain position. So that while the duties of a position may still only obligate say a Certificate level qualification, the employer now requires applicants to have a Degree in that area. Nursing & teaching are two classic examples in Australia & England. The worst case I am aware of is that competition is so fierce for job positions in the Philippines for as a Taxi drivers that a Bachelors Degrees (in any subject) tends to-be the yardstick that must be passed to secure a Taxi drivers job!
Best of luck Shawn
Comment by W.Shawn Gray (AuzGnosis) — 31 December 2005 @ 1:58 AM
You say that the same argument could be made of the 18th century, but I’m not sure how. All the indicators I cite above are the obvious metrics one would turn to, to answer a question of complexity’s diminishing returns, and all agree that we have passed that point. Most of these same indicators were up during the 18th century, so how could you make the same argument? You’d have to turn to other metrics, which would require much more of a stretch. I didn’t cherry-pick these indicators because they supported my thesis; I used them because they are the clearest indicators of complexity that we have. That they’re all showing diminishing returns indicates where we are on the curve of complexity’s marginal returns. So, to make the same argument for the 18th century would require quite a stretch–and I notice that while you indicate that it could be done “easily,” you make no attempt at actually doing so. I suspect it would not be nearly so easy as you imagine.
The USSR in the late 1970’s was barely staying afloat. The perception in the U.S. of USSR competitiveness was largely the mythological concoction of vested U.S. political interests, including the neoconservatives.
In the meantime, most of the world has already collapsed–as much as is possible in a peer polity system. The former USSR, most of Africa, New Orleans, Montana, central Asia, the Middle East, and South America have all suffered some form of collapse over the past 50 years, and are currently stitched together as “failed states,” i.e., regions that would have collapsed were they not knit into a peer polity system that continues to (just barely) prop them up. In fact, the only regions that are unambiguously still on their complexity “feet” are the United States, Canada, Western Europe, China and Japan.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 2 January 2006 @ 11:00 AM
“18th century” whoops! What a horror of single digit typo, that eight was meant to be a zero. That is to say it should have read “mid-10th or early 19th centuries”. It was around the mid 900s that most Western / European chroniclers (Christian Monks for the most part ) started feverishly documenting the signs of the day, that they believed herald the commencement of the ‘Tribulations of the Apocalypse’, in fulfilment of the Millennium Prophecy from the ‘Book of Revelation’.
Ah, no. Just as your cited article by John Smart reviewing Jonathan Huebner’s writing notes;-
Your cited observations could be interrupted as “complexity’s diminishing returns“, but as Smart shows there are many other equally valid (and I argue, more accurate) explanations. For your observations to be accepted as supporting facts you must first prove how & why they are better fits of Occam’s Razor than any alternative explanation for the observations.
Two old books which demonstrate a total different explanation for most of these observations;-
Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” & Alvin Toffler’s “The Third Wave”
Yes the world is in a growing mess. But before one can solve a problem (which is what I’m concerned about working towards), you have to have the correct diagnosis of the problem. I just don’t think this Complexity to Collapse theory cuts it as a predictive tool, especially as it provides no time-based mechanism to validate your postulation’s against.
Best of luck, Shawn
Comment by W.Shawn Gray (AuzGnosis) — 3 January 2006 @ 6:08 AM
I’ve discussed the millennialism of the past in “The Eschatology of the Left,” but suffice to say, the millennialism around the collapse of the Roman Empire, and then again for “Y1K” (both of which were intense interests of mine in former years, and consumed quite a bit of my time once), heartily fit into the rubric I discussed there of, “predicated on the interpretation of Bronze Age literature.” As I argued there, yes, we share a trope, a basic mode of thought. There are only so many such archetypes into which we can fit our understandings, so that’s hardly surprising. What differs is the quality of our arguments, and the nature of our evidence. As I wrote there:
Yes, of course I read Huebner’s article before I linked to it. Obviously, he does not agree with me. Neither does Tainter. But neither of them can point to any contradictory evidence; they merely reject it on the grounds that they’re uncomfortable with such an idea, and it would be difficult to entirely prove.
As far as my interpretation as better fitting Okham’s Razor, I believe I already did that in the article. How does one track “inventiveness,” if not by number of patents? Patents rose for a time, peaked, and now are in decline. We see the same phenomenon in the cost per research project in medicine; we see the same in political spending and taxation; we see the same in agricultural production, in information processing, in our GNP. We’re spending more to get less–the very definition of diminishing returns.
This thesis set out to prove that we have passed complexity’s point of diminishing returns, and I think I’ve done that. I don’t see where any of your criticisms are relevant to that thesis. I agree, that’s not terribly predictive, but if that thesis is true, and the preceding thesis–that complexty’s diminishing returns leads to collapse–is true, then that means that we are facing collapse in the near future. When is, of course, much more difficult to predict, which is why the theses after this begin to look at some of the probabilistic, proximate causes which may or may not be the final trigger. Given the “perfect storm” that’s gathering, I would be deeply surprised if we were not in full-fledged, easily-recognizable collapse by 2025. 2010 is the “deadline” the Tribe of Anthropik has for self-reliance, and we’re expecting the really terrible things to begin sometime in the 2012-2015 timeframe–it just make ten years for people to realize the full implications of what’s about to happen.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 January 2006 @ 12:06 PM
Excellent essay, a lotta brain food and resources to follow up on. Saved this one to disk cuz I’ll be coming back to it.
Comment by Wombaticus Rex — 28 February 2006 @ 6:03 PM
[quote]
Mikey_G says:
November 1st, 2005 at 11:14 am
You write that we live in a peer polity, and if any single or small number of polities collapse, they’ll be immediately re-absorbed. There is a lot of evidence that this is true.
You also hypothesise that if the global system collapses, every single polity collapses with it.
However, you do not consider what happens when most but not all peer polities collapse, and the ones left standing have no capability and diminished incentive to re-absorb the collapsed ones immediately.
Let us look at the island of Cuba as an example.
[/quote]
[quote]
Jason Godesky says:
November 1st, 2005 at 11:19 am
However, you do not consider what happens when most but not all peer polities collapse, and the ones left standing have no capability and diminished incentive to re-absorb the collapsed ones immediately.
Because, as Tainter discusses, that never happens, because it’s impossible.
As of today, Cuba is largely self-sufficient, and will suffer little from the global collapse.
Cuba is not sustainble (it’s depending on materials from the 1950s that are already disintegrating), nor is it as isolated as we like to think.
[/quote]
Minor point: I agree, Cuba isn’t isolated, British tourists go there all the time.
Well, I think Jason might be making the right claim, but I am not yet convinced by his proof. Maybe his proof is inadequate, or maybe it’s adequate but I don’t understand.
I seem to recall Tainter said that Western Rome collapsed and Byzantine Rome survived for a few centuries. So if I’m understanding Tainter, collapse is not always universal. I think Tainter would agree with Mikey that the planetary corporate apparatus could collapse but leave a few pockets which are roughly civilized. Specifically, a planetary peer polity could collapse in some areas of the planet and not get re-established. Those areas would be more efficient and more survivable. Perhaps they would still be on an extinction curve, but it seems to me that some areas are better prepared for collapse than others.
In the Rome/Byzantium case, Byzantium was not the center of ideology. Rome had the mystique. Rome was the focus of the myths. Byzantium was just a nice city.
When Rome fell, one could say the peer polity changed beyond recognition or collapsed altogether. And yet Byzantium was still there, and Byzantium did not try to re-absorb Rome.
So it looks to me as if Tainter does not agree with Jason. I apologize if I’m misreading either writer.
Comment by Rick — 30 March 2006 @ 11:52 PM
Byzantium had plenty of mystique. Where do you think Russian Empire got many of its symbols and ideology?
Byzantium to Russian Empire as Greece is to Roman Empire.
Byzantium did not try to re-absorb Rome because there was no profit in it. By the time Western Roman Empire collapsed, it was bankrupt, poor in exploitable resources and overrun by ferocious barbarians. There were more profitable directions for the Byzantine Empire to expand its influence.
Comment by _Gi — 31 March 2006 @ 1:20 PM
All right, my choice of “mystique” didn’t communicate my meaning very well.
Overall it seems to me that Jason (should I call him Godelsky to indicate that he is an academic, or should I call him Jason to differentiate him from his brother?) is stating his case as a proven certainty.
While I would assign a high probability to his claims turning out correct, I don’t think it’s entirely certain.
Comment by Rick — 31 March 2006 @ 8:18 PM
Poor Justinian. When he was crowned Emperor of the East in 527, Rome had been in Gothic hands for 45 years. In the immediate aftermath of Odoacer’s sack of Rome, the East had its hands full with other matters; besides, Odoacer may have styled himself Rex Italiae, but he still recognized Julius Nepos as his superior and even issued coins with Nepos’ image. Still, at the first opportunity, the Eastern Emperor Zeno invaded Rome by proxy–sending the Ostrogoths under Theodoric the Great to take back the Eternal City from Odoacer. In theory only a viceroy of Zeno, Theodoric wielded the real power in Rome until his death in 526–one year before Justinian’s ascension. Theodoric allowed Roman citizens to continue living under Roman law, while providing Gothic law for his own people. Theodoric fancied himself a Roman, and aspired to the same ideal of Romanitas as the Eastern emperor himself, making the situation of whether or not Rome had really “fallen” a very murky one.
But with Theodoric’s death and Justinian’s ascension, the new emperor decided to dedicate his reign to the reconquest and restroation of the empire, fancying himself a new Constantine. His military campaign to reconquer the West was incredibly ambitious, and succeeded in recapturing a good deal of the Western Empire. In a different time, it would have been remembered as one of the great military campaigns of Western history. Yet, those gains were quickly lost after Justinian’s own death, and even at their zenith, the Eastern Empire ultimately simply lacked the energy and complexity to recapture the West.
It’s been mentioned several times that th East “let” the West fall, and made no move to retake it, but that simply is not true. The decline of complexity in the Western Empire was quite gradual, with far more continuity than is generally considered. I think it was a “collapse” only in the imaginations of contemporary Roman snobs and modern Classicists. The East tried at several points to increase the level of the complexity in the West, but ultimately failed. It did, however, precisely as I would predict it to: it spread the hghest level of complexity its energy level was capable of sustaining.
Well, you definitely shouldn’t call me “Godelsky,” because that’s not my name–it’s “Godesky,” no “L.” This blog is not peer reviewed, so that level of formalism is probably not necessary. Most people just call me “Jason.” Call me anything but late for dinner.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 April 2006 @ 2:33 PM
“This blog is not peer reviewed, so that level of formalism is probably not necessary. ” Well, I guess it depends on how you define peers, eh. You get plenty of responses from other primitivists, some even as academically rigorous as yourself in these replies. Whilst not a formal format, there is definitely a high level of review and critique here.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 29 August 2006 @ 11:28 PM
I suppose there’s that, isn’t there? Not quite a formal peer review process, but it certainly accomplishes many of the same aims.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 30 August 2006 @ 9:36 AM
I have not read other people’s comments. I have only read the thesis article. The two arguments I would like to make starts with technology and ends with education. Every time a breakthrough technology comes out, the point of diminishing return moves further into the future, and with technology always increasing, that point of dimishing return is still far away. And who knows when the next breakthrough occurs to push it that much further away. The second point I want to make is more money may go into specialized education. These cost figures are about the money that goes to the schools and not to the students themselves. Elementary and middle school definately does not cost as much as high school and college. High school cost the most per student because most of the money still goes toward the students education, but things change when you reach college. most of the money that goes to colleges end up in some type of research. The students may be doing the research but the actual education, most of the time, is paid out by the student through tuition and fees. Some students may receive scholarships but most pay through loans, credit cards and cash. The amount of money that the student makes after graduation is usually more than what was put in. And without the funding for research at colleges a lot of technologies would not exist. Colleges in the early 1900’s focused more on education, but now college’s and universities serve a dual purpose. To say that higher education is past the point of dimishing return is ignorant and unresponsible.
Comment by terry medeiros — 28 September 2006 @ 11:38 AM
Are you sure you read the article, Terry? Because your comments were already refuted there. I’ll merely reiterate here more directly.
Neither point is true, because invention itself is subject to diminishing returns. In fact, as I argue in this thesis, we have already passed the point of diminishing returns. Each new invention is merely an increase in our complexity, and thus brings us closer to the point of diminishing returns (or now, further past it). Because of the irrational faith in technological invention, I singled that facet of complexity out for individual consideration in the next thesis, thesis #16.
That’s actually very illustrative of the point here. This no mere unnecessary overhead; this is the bureaucratic complexity that has developed as our society, and our educational systems, have become more complex. That is the cost of complexity; that is complexity beyond the point of diminishing returns.
Well yes, that’s why people still do it. But the cost is still rising faster than the return, so the marginal return is decreasing. Understand?
Frankly, your argument otherwise betrays a certain lack of understanding for what diminishing marginal returns means. Both in research and education, universities are spending more and more for the same results. That’s the very definiton of diminishing marginal returns. It doesn’t mean it’s a losing proposition yet; it means that it’s trending towards that, and will one day reach that point. The point of diminishing returns is when you start trending towards a losing proposition, but any system will be abandoned well before it actually reaches the point of becoming a losing proposition. You’ll never see the day when an education costs more than you’ll ever be able to pay back, for instance, because people will stop pursuing an education before that happens.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 September 2006 @ 11:51 AM
Theres too many comments and I’m not reading them all. In fact, theres so many that I’m not reading ANY of’em, howszat for diminishing returns? Anyways, I think youre a smart dude and I agree with your views. F-ing rotten culture… By the way, somehow I feel that the primary function of top-heavy civilizations is to be evolutionary choke-points. can you feel it?
Comment by Konstantin — 18 February 2007 @ 1:00 PM
okay so I did read some of the comments and it seems we are discussing the aftermath and I just want to say, remember the end of the Roman Empire and what effect it had on its underdevelopped provinces? I dont think the Visigoths, for instance were too affected, or the Franks or the Egyptians, or any o’those folks. They just all kind of went back to their own standards. It wasnt that catastrophic, s what I’m trying to say. Global economy my ass. If US files for bancruptcy tomorrow, Romania and Tibet are not gonna explode into space. The Chinese would have a joygasm.
Comment by Konstantin — 18 February 2007 @ 1:26 PM
China’s on the brink of collapse as it is. Their complexity is propped up by our own; without 300 million rich Americans to sell cheap crap to, China has nothing.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 February 2007 @ 10:44 AM
need to see a diminishing return curve when there is a negative number
Comment by Sherrian — 10 October 2007 @ 5:25 AM