Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

I'm obsessed with a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies by the Anthropologist

Joseph Tainter.

Writing in 1988, Tainter investigated societal collapses across history, the Olmex, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Romans, and so on. And what he found

is that there are diminishing marginal returns on societal complexity as a tool for problem solving. As a society grows,

administrative bodies tend to proliferate to the point where they stop adding value and start being a drag.

Meanwhile, expenses such as welfare programs, legitimizing costs and compensation for elites pile up. They are

rarely scaled back. Eventually, the society grows sclerotic, loses the ability to cope with

accumulating problems and collapses. The notion that our society could collapse because of a dynamic along these lines is not

some fringe, whack-a-doodle idea. There are very smart people who take the possibility very seriously.

In his book Scale, for instance, the theoretical physicist Jeffrey West says that to avoid collapse, we must keep

graduating to ever faster treadmills of material progress. The cycle of innovation, he writes,

will be continually repeated, thereby pushing potential collapse as far into the future as the

creativity, inventiveness, and resourcefulness of

human beings allow. When you put it like that, the need for progress suddenly looks pretty

serious. Fortunately, unlike the Romans or any of those other collapsed societies, we have

somewhat routinized the process of scientific

discovery and technological advance. If anything is going to save us, it's probably going to be that.

But we need to figure out what drives progress and how we can get more of it.

Who better to discuss this topic than Alex Stapp, a guy who has literally just founded a think

tank called the Institute for Progress.

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