Richard Heinberg: Surviving a reduction in social complexity

The literature on societal collapse has expanded in timely fashion in the past couple of years, with the publication of Jared Diamond’s best-selling Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; Thomas Homer-Dixon’s widely praised The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; John Michael Greer’s illuminating The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age; and Dmitri Orlov’s hugely entertaining Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.

All of these stand on the shoulders of Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, published back in 1988 and still the standard work on the subject.


Tainter describes the development of societal complexity as a strategy for solving problems (too many people, not enough food, warlike neighbors, changing climate, and so on). But investments in complexity yield diminishing returns, so eventually the strategy always fails and the society must simplify again. This simplification typically manifests as political and economic crisis, abandonment of urban centers, declining population, or war.

Complexity costs energy, and so complexity emerges only in societies that have energy to spare: at a minimum, agricultural surpluses, but better yet forests to cut or fossil fuels to mine or pump. One of the reasons that returns on complexity begin to decline is that growth in exploitation of energy sources cannot be sustained: soils erode, forests disappear, or