In his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter examines several prior theories for the collapse of such societies as the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the Hittite Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Lowland Classic Mayan.  He finds fault with prior theories in that the various causes proposed where obstacles the societies had for a very long time successfully withstood.  He claims the cause has to be within the society.  Something had changed.  His candidate is complexity.  He argues that the complexity for each of these societies had increased to a point where it was no longer able to effectively counter some stress factor that it previously had been successful at overcoming.  His conjecture is that as a society grows in complexity the return on the benefit of complexity declines, but not before it overshoots an optimal level of complexity.  From Tainter’s point of view what we see as a collapse is nothing more than a readjustment of the complexity to a lower level.  The loss of 50% to 80% of the population is simply a side effect.  Tainter claims this is caused by the diminishing return on the investment in complexity. 

During the 1970s the term "spaghetti code" was popular in the computer culture.  The term referred to the condition of the programs in an application that had become a mess of complexity.  Everything was intertwined such that it was very difficult to predict what would happen when a change was made.  There were even complexity metrics that suggested the cost of making changes would grow until the cost to change was greater than the benefit of the change. 

I could describe the situation in governance, the legal system, education, health care, social welfare programs, and so on in similar terms.  We might say we have a “spaghetti coded society.” However, this would all be linguistic metaphor which may or may not point to anything of value.  Later I will develop a precise mathematical statement of what I label the Complexity Constraint.  Developing this will require a rather lengthy path through A Theory of Human Behavior, A Theory of Organization Dynamics, and especially the development of mimetics and memetics.  For now I will simply state the results.  I believe you will find them sensible.

Complexity can be a very real constraint on our ability to make decisions that maintain or increase our want satisfaction.  When faced with such a situation we must either decrease the complexity of the system or increase our ability to understand it.  I will state this in the more precise language of mathematics under the title of “The Complexity Constrain” in the Chapter on Forecasting .  There is a theoretical basis for Tainter's complexity conjecture, but it does not prove that is why the societies he examined collapsed.   I think the cause is better described as the complexity of special interest group conflicts which acted to restrict reaction options in the face of a changing situation.

If Tainter is right that complexity causes collapse and if our society is more complex than the Roman Empire, then it must be that we have increased our ability to manage complexity.  The term "spaghetti code" is no longer in use because a new programming paradigm was established that removed the previous barrier.  We are now creating software that, to the outside observer appears far more complex than what was created in the 70s.  We are capable of increasing our ability to manage complexity.

Fail to increase your ability to manage more complexity and sooner or later your organization will hit a complexity constraint.  Depending on the circumstances your organization will either collapse or stagnate.  For optimal achievement you must constantly increase your capacity to manage complexity.

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