Time to pack the station wagon

In a recently published newspaper essay, Thomas Homer-Dixon predicts that the total collapse of society is fairly likely to occur fairly soon. He threads together three ologies to explain that too much complexity driven by too few sources of cheap energy will lead to too little resilience in the event of "simultaneous high levels of distress and conflict at several levels of society." He uses the cheerful expression "massive state breakdown" to describe massive state breakdown, but he certainly doesn't do so cheerfully. Here are the rudiments.

Sociology

"[America sociologist Jack] Goldstone has shown that societies are far more likely to break down when they're overloaded by converging stresses - say, rapid population growth, scarcity of key resources and a financial crisis."

Anthropology

"After studying ancient and modern societies, [American anthropologist Joseph] Tainter has concluded that they generally respond to stress by making their institutions and technologies more complex. A society dealing with a prolonged drought, for example, might build elaborate irrigation systems so it uses water more efficiently on its farms and it might create another layer of bureaucracy to make sure everyone follows water-sharing rules. In the short and medium terms, this greater complexity often produces big benefits - such as more food - and most people are better off."

"But Tainter has also found that greater complexity doesn't produce benefits forever, because it's costly. The cost is paid in the currency of energy ... "

"[He] argues that investments in complexity eventually produce what economists call 'diminishing marginal returns'."

"In time, the benefits of greater complexity fall to zero and can even become negative. As an expanding portion of society's wealth is sucked into further boosting complexity, its reserves to deal with unexpected contingencies fall, making it more susceptible to sudden, sever shocks from the outside."

Ecology

"[Canadian ecologist Buzz] Holling [contends] that any living system - from forest ecologies to modern economies - naturally tends to become more complex, internally connected and efficient over time, regardless of whether it needs complexity to solve its problems. Eventually it becomes so well adapted to a specific range of circumstances - and so well organised as an efficient and productive system - that when a shock pushes it outside that range, it can't cope. And the system's high connectedness helps any shock travel farther and faster across the system as a whole. Overall, then, the system becomes more rigid and brittle - in a word, less resilient."

Now, here's the nub of the problem (the "contradiction" in Homer-Dixon's terms). Modern societies are responding to increasingly intense "internal pressures" - such as the rich-poor divide, global warming, disease outbreaks and the "diffusion of technologies for mass violence away from governments to small groups of people (including terrorists)" - by developing "steadily more complex institutions and technologies" which require "higher inputs of high-quality energy." But this is occurring at a time when supplies of "abundant, cheap, high-quality energy" are drying up.

Soon it will be time to pack the station wagon.