Plato, it appears that Joseph Tainter, whom you cited in #msg-26313080 , has been conveying this message for quite some time. In a cybertelecom.org post by Gordon yesterday, in relation to the current FCC vs. Comcast dustup and an article entitled "FCC Democrats determined to reclassify broadband", he cited a paper by Clay Shirky wherein reference is made to Painter's 1988 book entitled: "The Collapse of Complex Societies". This may also apply in some ways to Jim's message in the preceding post where he states "It's the same battles, over and over: win here, lose there. The old system, its concepts and regulations are outdated. Perhaps in time, reason will prevail." Ya think? The reticence to change, of which Tainter and Shirky speak, is certainly a phenomenon that I'm very well aware of in my daily pursuits as well:
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shirky.com
"In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed
. .. . snip
The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.
Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.
Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. "
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