Trego's Mountain Ear

The ending years of the 20th century saw three theorists developing hypotheses related to societal collapse of states.  George Cowgill (1988:263) saw internal economic reasons – societies that depend on taxation develop increasing numbers of people and organizations that are legally exempt from taxes . . . and increasing numbers of taxpayers find ways to avoid taxes illegally.  Bureaucracies – expensive bureaucracies – grow, with “increasing corruption, rigidity, incompetence, extravagance and inefficiency.”  Simultaneously, citizen expectations of state services increase.

Jared Diamond looked at growing populations mandating agricultural intensification – and that intensification carries with it unanticipated consequences – soil erosion, problems with water management, deforestation, etc.

Joseph Tainter looked at complexity – challenges in production are met with increasing complexity (1988:88-90) and listed 8 causes for the collapse of complex societies.

1. Resource Depletion
2. New Resources
3. Catastrophes
4. Insufficient response to circumstances
5. Other complex societies
6. Intruders
7. Mismanagement
8. Economics

Economic factors and mismanagement kind of go together.  If we look at the bureaucracies that keep our nation state functioning, we find ( https://www.federalpay.org/employees ) 

2,807,126

EMPLOYEES

732

AGENCIES

$76,667.77

AVERAGE SALARY

$215.22B

TOTAL SALARY

Now if these numbers seem large, the Census provides us with numbers for state and local governments: 19,768,685 employees, with $89,265,296,554 in total salary.  Frankly, I don’t trust my data – it comes from two sources, and the proportions look a little strange.  But questionable data isn’t the problem – we’re talking over 22 million government employees to manage.  Tainter’s 7th cause of collapse is mismanagement.  

The total number of jobs listed for the US in February 2022 was 150,399,000 – and a little bit of rounding tells us that about 2/15, or 13% of US jobs are for one form of government or another.  On one hand, 13% of the nation’s jobs are to make government work – which is a large expense.  On the other hand, there is a tremendous opportunity for Murphy to get into a system this large and complex and arrange for things to go wrong.

Under the heading of Mismanagement, Tainter’s explanation is “The elite in a civilization may so abuse their power and direct so much of the surplus wealth and labor of their society to their own benefit that not enough is left for the maintenance of the economic and political system, leading to collapse.”

If you’re politically on the left, you can readily see where the fat cat right wing elite can do this.  If you’re politically on the right, the stories of Joe Biden and son that are available support Tainter’s explanation.  If you’re somewhere in between, Tainter makes even better sense.

Simply enough, the more moving parts there are in a system, the more opportunities Murphy has for things to go wrong.  The less competent management is, the more opportunity there is for systemic failure.  It kind of goes back to Malthusian demographics – for a bit over 225 years, our society has developed increasingly complex systems that made Thomas Malthus wrong.  The thing is, Malthus only has to be right once.