I recommend reading "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter [0].

Complex societies tend to address problems by adding more and more rules and regulations, simply because they have always done so and it has been successful in the past. More importantly, though, it is typically the only tool they have. Essentially these societies are increasingly overfitting their legislature to narrow special cases until it cannot handle anything unexpected anymore. Such a society is highly fragile. I witness this firsthand every day in my own country. Living here feels like lying in a Procrustean bed.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...

The two iconic texts are:

- "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...)

- "Normal Accidents" by Chuck Perrow (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Tec...)

Tainter deals directly with the Roman Empire, but the nutshell is the cost of complexity begins to outweigh its returns, requiring more and more resources just to maintain the status quo, until the entire thing becomes weak and susceptible to failures large and small.

- "Panarchy: Understanding Human and Natural Systems" (Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Panarchy-Understanding-Transformation...) is also a fantastic book drawing from ecosystem science and proposes a general model for this. It's pretty well accepted in ecological circles but has been criticised for a lack of empirical data. The general model is the same as Tainter's though.

- "The Logic of Failure" by Dietrich Dorner is also a classic! (https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...)

Well worth reading all of the above.

The classic reference, for those HN readers who are not in the post-literate society, is Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. The book explains Tainter's theory explaining collapse (increasing social complexity without commensurate improvement in quality of life) and concludes with an unconvincing representation that our society does not meet the conditions motivating collapse.

https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...

"Including total collapses of civilisations."

It seems to be an inherent thing of civilizations to collapse.

The Collapse of Complex Societies https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...

The collapse of our society seem to be inevitable. You don't have to believe is but I don't think we can beat mathematics in the long term:

"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)" http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat...

Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt...

Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...

Galactic-Scale Energy http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

Quote: "But let’s not overlook the key point: continued growth in energy use becomes physically impossible within conceivable timeframes."

Joseph Tainter has done some interesting work on the relation between societal complexity and collapse[1], here's a recent(ish) paper of his on the subject http://wtf.tw/ref/tainter_2006.pdf

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...

I thoroughly enjoyed this article... as someone who does believe in an eventual collapse I really appreciated the balanced approach while still making some fun of the fringe elements.

For the record, my belief is in a non-specific collapse based on the increasingly built-in fragility and complexity of civilization as espoused by Joseph Tainter[1] in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies"[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

[2] https://monoskop.org/images/a/ab/Tainter_Joseph_The_Collapse...

https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Ar...

The problem with the U.S system is everyone has their hand out for money. In America, Money is considered the universal yardstick for success and universally effective solution to all problems. The health care industry grew 20% last year? Fantastic!

It's a perfect example of the civilizational collapse process that Joseph Tainter, a professor of archeology, wrote about in his book "Collapse of Complex Societies"[1]. A society will get some sort of civilizational process that works to create wealth in their society. The civilization will continue to increase complexity to exploit this process and when the process starts returning negative marginal returns the collapse process begins because the whole civilization can't switch into reverse. This happened to the Romans with their conquer and receive tribute process for example. It eventually started yielding negative returns and they couldn't reverse course. The inertia was just too great.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Arc...

The "increasing unnecessary complexity leads to collapse" hypothesis was very adeptly explored in the context of the collapse of many ancient societies by archeologist Joseph A. Tainter in his book Collapse of Complex Societies[1]. Briefly, he argues that most civilizations rely on some sort of wealth producing trick. As they grow they increase societal complexity to maintain that trick. After a while, the complexity produces negative marginal returns, after which the response of the society is to further increase complexity resulting in further negative marginal returns and eventually leading to collapse.

The only civilization that was able to escape these collapse dynamics was the Eastern Roman Empire which underwent a radical simplification of administration in the latter half of the first millennia and thus greatly outlasted the Western Roman Empire, which could not adapt.

[1]. http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Arc...

The non-monotonic nature of growth has been used to justify the claim that complex societies fail because investment in complexity provides diminishing returns, however: http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Arc...

I liked Collapse, but I really liked "The Collapse of Complex Societies." Written by an archaeologist, addresses many other scholars' theories of collapse, and provides an excellent economics / complexity argument.

http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Arc...

(not an affiliate link)

Also, the idea of "diminishing marginal returns on added complexity" suggests a lot about why maintenance, extension, and management of software systems becomes harder over time.

If you enjoyed this article, you might want to look into the work of Joseph Tainter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter) and read his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Arc....