Book Review: "The Collapse of Complex Societies''

From Energy Bulletin 

The Collapse of Complex SocietiesJoseph Tainter
Cambridge University Press, 1990

"Near the middle of 13 Bankers, a good book about the recent financial crisis, the economist Lawrence Summers uses an analogy to suggest how to manage volatile financial markets. The emphasis is mine:

The jet airplane made air travel more comfortable, more efficient, and more safe, though the accidents were more spectacular and for a time more numerous after the jet was invented. In the same way, modern global finance markets carry with them enormous potential for benefit, even if some of the accidents are that much more spectacular. As the right public policy to the jet was longer runways, better air-traffic control, and better training for pilots, and not the discouragement of rapid travel, so the right public policy response to financial innovation is to assure a safe framework so that the benefits can be realized, not to stifle the change.

Talk to anyone with power in the modern world and this will strike them as an intelligent remark. Masquerading as sober analysis, though, Summers’s analogy is at heart a pure statement of faith. It is the modern faith, suitable for carving on all of our tombstones: a more complex system is always better than a simple one."

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