Lessons of history

Societies and even entire civilisations have collapsed in the past. That the same might happen to us is a scary prospect. The definition of collapse is an involuntary, uncontrolled simplification of an organisation. That organisation can be a civilisation. Perhaps you get the word ‘collapse,’ but not its definition. The definition highlights the process ‘simplification,’ whether those affected chose for it, in this case ‘involuntary,’ so not, the degree to which the process is controlled, in this case ‘uncontrolled,’ so not, and the affected component, ‘an organisation,’ which can be a civilisation, making it a helpful definition for engineers to work with. Typically, collapse brings with it a breakdown of order.

Engineers solve problems other people create. A solution begins with looking at the phenomenon in a particular way, thus in terms of processes, affected components and degree of control. We can aim for a voluntary, controlled simplification of the organisation. Voluntary is perhaps a bit too rosy a term, but at least we can try to manage the process so that it becomes somewhat more ‘controlled,’ and begins to look more like a graceful decline. That requires order to be maintained. The problem is solvable if everyone cooperates, but that requires a fairy tale we all believe in, so a new religion. And there you have the outline of the solution.

Environmental depletion or overstretching has caused most past collapses. It happened when people were using more resources than their environment could sustainably provide. That is also the case today, so we are heading towards a collapse. History can teach us what awaits us and how we can manage our problems, but today’s situation differs from the past due to technological innovation, leading to a widespread belief that technology will solve our problems. That probably is a fatal mistake. Instead of letting technology drive our destiny, it should support our goals. Theories about collapse are speculative. While the experts debate, time is running out, and it is time to act.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is the most well-known example of collapse. In the second century AD, diseases reduced the Roman population, eroding the empire’s tax base. The Western Roman Empire had a long border to defend and faced rebellions, so emperors became increasingly desperate for revenue to finance the military. Over time, taxes, currency debasement, and measures to ward off invasions became intolerable for Roman citizens, and the Western Roman Empire broke down. Most were better off with a simpler life under the rule of the Barbarians.¹

The population of Rome declined from 1,000,000 around 500 AD, many of whom lived on welfare, to less than 50,000 around 600 AD, a drop of 95%. Today, more than half the world’s population lives in cities, whereas it was about 20% in the Roman Empire. A collapse today could lead to mass relocations. Cities do not provide much that we truly need. We don’t know the future, but economics drives migration. When people can’t make a living in cities, they move out. Whether that will happen remains to be seen. It may require fewer resources and less energy to keep most city dwellers where they are now.

The Western Roman Empire was underpopulated, and taxes had become a burden. Its collapse was a relief for most. Other collapses were more disastrous because they had different causes. In fact, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was an outlier. The Mayan civilisation collapsed because the Mayans reached the limits of their environment. State planning and control had increased the efficiency of food production and distribution. It allowed the Mayans to feed more people who would otherwise have starved. Measures to increase food production had pushed their environment to the breaking point, making it increasingly difficult to keep up agricultural output.¹

As a result, the Mayan states reverted to warfare to plunder each other’s crops, making it even harder to maintain agricultural output. The Maya weakened due to malnutrition and warfare, and their states collapsed. In the short term, the peasants were better off as they didn’t pay taxes to support the state. In the long run, with irrigation works and granaries abandoned and defences neglected, agricultural output collapsed, and the population dropped by 90%.¹ Most collapses resemble those of the Mayans more than the Romans, so they are generally unfavourable to those who live through them. So, what will happen if our civilisation collapses? You can think of:

• Money becomes worthless, and many products become unavailable.
• Governments cease to function, and government services shut down.
• Businesses go bankrupt. We don’t need Netflix, nail salons, and call centres.
• There is more violence and crime, and simpler justice systems.
• Electricity from the grid becomes intermittent, and the Internet disappears.
• International trade will drop. We will use more local products.
• Manual labour will replace machines.
• We may crowd together in heated rooms when it is cold.
• There may be gang warfare, or religion takes over the role of providing order.
• And above all, billions of people might die.

If the collapse is uncontrolled and worldwide, and there is a breakdown of order, billions of people could die. That is why we should dread collapse. Had the Mayans not waged wars but cooperated peacefully to use resources more efficiently and reduce population, their civilisation might have declined gracefully and survived. That was unthinkable given the intense competition among the Mayan states and the absence of contraceptives.

Causes of collapse

Populations grow until their environment can’t support them, or until the environment changes so it can support fewer people. Usually, it led to fewer food surpluses to save for harvest failures, and more harvest failures. Eventually, the population would succumb to disease, an invasion by neighbouring tribes, or civil war. A crucial difference with today is that in the past, there was no technological change. In recent centuries, innovations, most notably our improved ability to acquire energy, have outpaced the forces driving collapse, enabling humankind to grow far beyond previous limits. It can make the coming collapse, in terms of numbers, worse than previous ones. If only 10% of the world’s population were to die, that would be nearly a billion people. And it could be 90%. Modern technology can help us simplify in a more controlled way while allowing us to live more agreeable lives.

Jared Diamond identifies five factors that contributed to past collapses: changes in climate, hostile neighbours, the loss of trading partners, environmental problems, and society’s response to these challenges. The underlying cause is often overpopulation or environmental overstretching.² Increased efficiency in resource extraction methods, such as agriculture and mining, allowed more people to survive, worsening the eventual collapse. That applies to most collapses, including those of the Mayans, but not of the Romans. The Roman Empire suffered from underpopulation and might have survived with a larger population.

Joseph Tainter argues that in both cases, the costs of organising in a state exceeded the benefits. The Western Roman Empire was underpopulated, so the Romans couldn’t afford the taxes required to defend their long border. The Mayan states organised agricultural production and were initially successful. However, at some point, additional state interference failed to deliver more crops or better management of surpluses and deficits. Overpopulation or overstretching the environment puts a premium on organising, but it postpones the inevitable and worsens the collapse. Had the Mayans not organised themselves into states, they would have had less food, fewer people would have survived, and there would have been no collapse.

Our predicament looks more like that of the Mayans than the Romans. Competition between states and corporations for resources may intensify, making the collapse more brutal. Simpler lifestyles and having fewer children are the way out. We would be better off cooperating globally to curb consumption and population growth. That hasn’t happened so far, because it is a collective action problem. Most of us aren’t willing to contribute to the common goal when others don’t, so few people do. And governments compete to boost their economies and populations. Ending the competition between states is paramount because power, in the form of a prosperous economy, population and military, requires resources and energy. If one state pursues power or wealth in this way, others follow.

In times of decline, even the best leaders look bad as they can only make things less lamentable than they otherwise would have been. As we notice deterioration but don’t experience the alternative, anger and frustration can take over, and people will look for scapegoats and strong leaders, resulting in political instability, a breakdown of order, civil war and mob rule. Managing and turning the decline into a more graceful simplification is the best option, but that requires realism, commitment and discipline. Five centuries of economic expansion have fostered the widespread belief that growth will continue forever. We have learned to think of progress as becoming wealthier. Yet there isn’t enough to make that kind of progress, and it may require replacing humans with artificial intelligence.

Organising to solve problems

TTainter sees societal collapse as an economic calculation. Societies and civilisations collapse when the cost of their institutions exceeds the benefits they provide. If soil is depleted due to overuse, measures to improve crop yields or manage surpluses and deficits become increasingly expensive and yield lower returns. The Mayans didn’t make these calculations by keeping ledgers of incomes and expenses. At some point, their measures became ineffective, and they starved. The economic view can help us make the most of it by making a cost-benefit analysis of our activities. That can be painful because it forces us to make harsh choices. A simpler life means accepting things as they are, and helping each other rather than depending on solutions from complex organisations.

Due to pressures of competition, we optimise our systems to the current or an expected situation. If the environment changes in an unanticipated fashion, these systems become maladapted and may even suddenly collapse. And the steering parameters of our systems might prioritise profit or convenience over survival, so that we may suddenly find ourselves inept and helpless when they fail. People from simple societies, who have not specialised under optimising pressures from competition and have lived with few comforts, face better prospects in the event of a collapse of civilisation. That is also why the decline of a civilisation is accompanied by fear and anger. We fear that things will go wrong and are angry that no one fixes these issues. The problem is that we can at best turn the collapse into a managed decline. That begins with accepting that a decline is unavoidable and that we can only make the best of it.

We organise ourselves into organisations, such as states and corporations, to solve problems. We have the police to solve a security problem. There are streaming services that can help with boredom. And we have hospitals to deal with medical problems. Complex organisations, such as states or corporations, entail costs and benefits. When you solve a problem, you often get a bigger one in return, thus one that is more costly to handle. If you prevent famine by building granaries, more people survive, but you end up with even more hungry people. When societies are simple, expenses are low, while the benefits of solutions can be substantial. A simple doctor’s post in the jungle might lengthen the life of local tribespeople by as much as twenty years. As the level of organisation increases, the costs of additional complexity rise while the benefits decline.

As we cure easy-to-treat diseases, people grow older and get harder-to-treat diseases. If our medical knowledge increases, we can cure some of these diseases with expensive treatments, and people will die of even harder-to-treat diseases. Medical costs explode with only marginal gains in life expectancy. Replacing the doctor’s post in the jungle with a hospital might cost five times as much and add only three years to the tribespeople’s lives. Perhaps five tribes together could afford the hospital. In complex societies, tasks require occupational specialisation, information processing and management. There are benefits to complex organisations, but they usually come with scale and technological complexity. Specialised physicians can do better jobs with more advanced equipment.

Since the Industrial Revolution, our technological prowess and energy consumption have expanded dramatically. Abundant fossil fuels, innovations and increases in scale reduced the cost of organisation. The benefits outweigh the expenses more than before, allowing us to specialise further. In the past, over 90% of the people worked in agriculture, tilling the land. Now machines do that work, freeing up labour for other, less essential, purposes. The same happened in the production of goods and services. Technological development further increased these benefits. Computers use far less energy than they did forty years ago for the same amount of computing power and memory. That made more uses feasible, so we use far more energy for information technology than we did forty years ago.

It is the curse of innovation and efficiency improvements. As technology becomes more efficient and cheaper, we use it for more purposes, which, in turn, leads us to consume more resources and energy rather than less. And so, efficiency improvements and innovation increase resource and energy consumption as long as resources and energy are abundant. Once resources and energy supplies dwindle, much of what we do now loses its purpose. When that happens, efficiency improvements and innovation can help us do more with the same resources and energy, so we can have better lives than most people have had for most of history. And you can be happy if you have enough.

Diminishing returns: an example

Life expectancy in the UK rose from forty to eighty years between 1860 and 2020. As life expectancy rises, the costs of new complex treatments increase while their effect on life expectancy decreases. These costs become a burden, and the British healthcare system is in trouble. British healthcare is relatively efficient. Comparing the United States with one of the poorest Latin American countries, Cuba, demonstrates the law of diminishing returns even better. The facts are truly shocking. Cuba is a miserable place. Essentials are hard to come by. Homes are crumbling. The electricity fails. The country can barely feed its people. Today, Cuba is on the verge of collapse caused by economic mismanagement.

Cuba only has bare-bones healthcare, while the United States spends more on healthcare than any other nation. Yet life expectancy in the United States and Cuba had been roughly the same for decades.³ Only in recent years has the United States carved out a slight lead. How can it be? Cuban healthcare is simple but more evenly distributed, while Cubans don’t have unhealthy lifestyles marked by stress and fast food. U.S. healthcare is burdened with litigation and vampire capital. Pharmaceutical corporations sell expensive and unnecessary treatments, insurers don’t give coverage to increase shareholder profits, and medical professionals enjoy privileges they don’t have in other countries. Finally, and most importantly, healthcare is not available to everyone.

Wealthy people in the US live fifteen years longer than poor people. That is not only due to access to healthcare. Lifestyle affects life expectancy as well. Obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, gang violence, stress, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths come into the picture. But infant mortality among black children in the US is twice as high as that of white children. Poor Americans have much shorter lifespans than Cubans. Some believe American healthcare fails because it is not a free market. And that belief stands at the cradle of the failure. Other advanced economies spend 30 to 50% as much as the US on healthcare while achieving an additional 4 years of life expectancy. In those countries, healthcare is mostly public, like in Cuba.

Americans use drugs, eat fast food and drink sodas unavailable in Cuba. Cubans are poor, so it isn’t profitable for drug cartels to sell them opioids, cigarette manufacturers to sell them cigarettes, and fast food chains to sell them burgers. The death toll from drugs, fast food and sodas in the United States exceeds that of famines in Cuba. Overconsumption can be as deadly as underconsumption. Americans experience more stress than Cubans because they need to be competitive in a market economy that is constantly innovating and improving efficiency. Many Americans have two or three jobs. Cubans don’t work so hard, and Cuba is falling apart while Americans die of heart disease and drug abuse.

As a result of all that, Americans are equally fit as Cubans. And Cubans on the brink of starvation are healthier than poor Americans living off fast food. And so, life expectancy isn’t a good measure of overall well-being. Over a million Cubans have fled their country. Still, US private healthcare is extraordinarily inefficient and ineffective compared to Cuban state healthcare. Americans sense something is wrong with their healthcare system. It is a total disgrace. Only public healthcare generates no profit for the interest groups and billionaires that pay US politicians and think tanks, so that solution remains out of sight.

Managing excess

Excessive production and consumption create problems we think we must manage. That requires specialisms, laws, controls, and the like, and it becomes increasingly costly. We blame governments for taking away our freedoms when they impose limits. Still, most regulations address valid concerns. Complexity and specialisation, and that includes regulations, suffer from diminishing marginal returns. They all seem to make sense, but if you add more, the costs increase while the benefits decline. Consider the issues of food production and pollution control. Tainter used the figures of the Limits to Growth. Growing world food production by 34% between 1951 and 1966 required increasing tractor expenditures by 63%, fertiliser expenditures by 146%, and pesticide expenditures by 300%. We now deal with soil degradation, which can endanger our future food supply.¹

Pollution reduction shows a similar pattern. Removing all organic waste from a sugar processing plant costs 100 times as much as removing 30% of it. Reducing sulphur dioxide in the air of a US city by 48% instead of 5% or particulates by 69% instead of 22% raises the cost of pollution reduction by 520 times. These figures from the 1960s are outdated, but the nature of the problem hasn’t changed. Allocating more resources to R&D can provide temporary respite from diminishing returns, but R&D also has diminishing returns.¹ We invent increasingly useless products, and economic growth comes from successfully marketing them. We might increase output while containing pollution, but it can become prohibitively expensive. Terminating the production can be cheaper.

Like the Mayans, we have stretched our environment to its limits. When we simplify our lives, we depend more on our family and community and less on markets and states. We can do without automobiles, set up reliable public transport at a fraction of the cost, and save millions of lives. Without traffic congestion, public transport can be faster. We use local products where possible. And we need fewer specialists, thus elites, to run our lives. When we do it well, we can be better off than we would have been otherwise. The 80/20 rule states that 20% of the causes have 80% of the effects. So, 20% of our resources and energy consumption could cause 80% of our well-being.

People in wealthy countries, on average, live at 30 to 50 times the subsistence level. In other words, they could survive on 2-3% of what they consume now. They could live agreeable lives with 25%, which is ten times as much as nearly everyone had before the twentieth century. Giving up 75% seems extreme, but if everyone lived like people in wealthy countries, we would need four Earths, which is impossible, so 75% of the people would have to die. It is only reasonable. Those who use more steal from poor people or future generations, and even murder them by doing so. The same goes for those who have many children. Switching to a circular economy powered by renewable energy reduces the need for austerity.

Latest revision: 19 May 2026

Featured image: Diocletian’s Aqueduct in Split, Croatia, built around 300 AD. User: SchiDD. Wikimedia Commons.

1. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Joseph Tainter (1988). Cambridge University Press.
2. Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive. Jared Diamond (2005). Viking Press.
3. Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans. Rob Minto. Newsweek (2022).