Tainter suggests that societies collapse because the costs of maintaining complexity eventually outweigh the benefits. “Collapse” in this context is more like a simplification than a catastrophe. And he points out that for a lot of people, the collapse actually made life better for them, as it becomes more local and less totalitarian.

I mentioned the west because I’m a westerner with little experience of other systems, but I don’t think Tainter’s conception of a collapse would be limited to the west.

Interestingly since you edited your comment to talk about capitalism, I think under the lense of Tainter’s theory it’s the most resilient to collapse since it’s simpler, at least in theory. In practice it’s heavily regulated - in fact I’d say no country really is capitalist, at most you could say it’s “state capitalism” which is very different from free market capitalism. But you’re also not wrong in that it has issues of its own.

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sevenzero 19 hours ago | parent [-]

> Tainter suggests that societies collapse because the costs of maintaining complexity eventually outweigh the benefits. “Collapse” in this context is more like a simplification than a catastrophe. And he points out that for a lot of people, the collapse actually made life better for them, as it becomes more local and less totalitarian.

This premise sounds very intriguing. And yea I named capitalism just because I don't think we can go on like we do currently, and I'd agree that in theory it's not complex at all. In fact it makes a lot of sense (in the short term, and as long as people are willing to get exploited to be able to finance life).

Nonetheless maybe heavily regulated capitalism works, allthough, regulators are prone to corruption and act way too slow. And lobbyists preventing measurements to combat climate change as an example, I currently see as direct threat to my personal wellbeing. Hard to believe in a system that relies on exploitation, the big "if you work hard you can make it" lie and actively threatening ones or ones children's wellbeing by being ignorant to obvious and well researched topics for short term monetary enrichment...

	▲	slopinthebag 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You should definitely read the book. I'd probably differentiate between modern "capitalism" and the core idea of free trade + private property ownership since they're pretty disconnected at this point. Today we have a very complex system of private equity, leveraged buyout, and asset management, with the incentive of expansion over production. Mass financialization required the US to outsource manufacturing to cheap labour countries like China, operating two parallel economies - tangible and intangible assets. In the last 20 or so years, half the companies in the US stock market have disappeared, US farmland has shrunk by a fifth and manufacturing jobs have become redundant. The value of assets has exploded, and an ever shrinking group of transnational corporatists have turned the US economy into gambling bazaar, but the house is losing too. Stock market returns are single-handedly driven by AI speculation and the fastest growing businesses are disconnected from real goods. We have an extremely complex economy which looks entirely fake and disconnected from the real world - at least, to a layman, an economist will justify it all. Except the layman is correct. You have to keep in mind that inflating assets benefits the 1% at the detriment of everyone else, and they benefit on both sides of it. Plus politicians can use their free money to buy votes. So I wouldn't even call modern economies "capitalist", they are their own thing now. We have to wait for the historians to build new frameworks to accurately describe them.