Mayans, Romans and Peak Oil

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Clay Shirky introduces us to Joseph Tainter and his book The Collapse of Complex Societies.  Shirky wastes Tainter's brilliant work to explain why the old media is unable to adapt to the realities of the new media world.  A more important application relates to our society's inability to adapt to the realities of peak oil.  Very few now deny peak oil but very few are willing to do what is necessary to make a smooth transition away from oil and avoid a peak oil spawned depression.  Why is this? Tainter may have the answer.  Shirky gives as a good summary of Tainter's thesis:

Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level
of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the
Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those
groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced
technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed,
impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but
future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter
asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden
dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn�t collapsed despite their
cultural sophistication, they�d collapsed because of it. Subject to
violent compression, Tainter�s story goes like this: a group of people,
through a combination of social organization and environmental luck,
finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes
society more complex�agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries
require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive�each
additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved
output�but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the
marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any
additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter�s thesis is that when society�s elite members add one layer
of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting
all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then
some.

The �and them some� is what causes the trouble. Complex societies
collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become
too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why
didn�t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer
Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to
reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn�t because they
don�t want to, it�s because they can�t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler �
the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily
amenable to change. Tainter doesn�t regard the sudden decoherence of
these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake��[U]nder a situation of
declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate
response�, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate
adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any
simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an
inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment
where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say
right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last
remaining method of simplification.

The complexity of our society is almost entirely the result of not just oil but cheap oil. Even if we haven't reached peak oil we reached  peak cheap oil.  We have known this day was coming for a very long time.

In the beginning there was Shell geologist M. King Hubbert who in 1956 predicted that oil production in the U.S. would peak and start to decline in the early 1970�s. Of course he was labeled an alarmist nut case; know one wanted to hear such nonsense. In 1970 the production in the lower 48 states was the highest it had ever been and dropped sharply after that. Dr. Colin Campbell and others used Hubbert�s methodolgy to calculate when world oil production will peak and begin to decline. Forcasting Global Oil Supplies(Note: a very technical pdf). Their conclusions predict the peak will occur in 2005 or 2006 and decline from that point on.

We could have started making moderate changes 40 years ago but we didn't because "even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites". As Chris Nelder points out it's probably too late now.  So according to Tainter this is what we have to look forward to:

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an
inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment
where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say
right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last
remaining method of simplification.