The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Joe Tainter: "Surplus, Complexity, and Simplification"

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

On this episode we meet with archaeologist, historian, and Professor at Utah State University, Joe Tainter. What are the key differences between complicated and complex? How can we better understand energy and society through these key distinctions? Tainter explains our current predicament based on decades of research and offers pathways for our collective future. About Joe Tainter Joe Tainter has been a professor at Utah State University in the Environment and Society Department since 2007, serving as Department Head from 2007 to 2009. His study of why societies collapse led to research on sustainability, with emphasis on energy and innovation. He has also conducted research on land-use conflict and human responses to climate change. He has written several books, including The Collapse of Complex Societies and Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/27-joe-tainter

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. One reason I settled on the great simplification as a moniker is that the long trajectory of human societies that solve problems by adding more energy will reverse this century. More energy allows for more complexity. Less energy implies a simplification of processes, lifestyles, and expectations.

With me today is renowned archaeologist Joseph Tainter, who is perhaps best known for his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, where he outlines the history of human social organization and access to energy surplus. Joe and I discuss the difference between complicated and complex, the core findings of his lifelong research into this topic, and possible pathways ahead. The unspoken question is, how might human cultures solve or mitigate problems with less surplus energy? I hope you enjoy and learn from this another foundational discussion with Professor Joseph Tainter.

Hello, Joe. Good to see you. Well, good to see you. The last time I saw you on the screen was in the Jeff Bridges movie that Susan Coucher made and you and I were both in. The last time that I saw you in person, I don't know if you'll remember this. It was 2006 an energy and environmental conference I organized with Max Christian in Washington, D.C. And you were the evening speaker along with Governor Schweitzer and you were the evening speakers. And here we are 16 years later. And the world is still energy blind.

Yes, and I still don't have a solution to any of it. No simple solution. So there is a, you've been thinking about this and writing about it and teaching about it for a long time. We have a lot to cover because you're one of the many. you know, icons in this field that I've learned from. People in my circle have learned from, how did you personally become interested in complex societies, energy, the issue of collapse? You wrote your tome, the collapse of complex societies in 1988, I believe. That's over 30 years ago. How did you first get started in this?

Well, my background is that I am an archaeologist. I've always been in love with archaeologists. in history and with studying the past. So, and then my degrees are in anthropology, which is how archaeology is taught in the United States. And one of the big questions in archaeology has always been, why and how did human societies grow from simple foraging, hunters and gatherers, simple small bands who were highly mobile, to the great complex societies we have today. And why did that happen? So it's always been an interest of mine. I had made perhaps some small contributions to that question in my own archaeological research in the American Midwest and in the American Southwest.

But one of the questions that has proven elusive is why is it that complex societies seem periodically to collapse or occasionally to collapse? Think of the famous cases like the collapse of the Western Roman Empire or the collapse of the classic Maya. And it's a topic that has interested me for some time. It's a very important topic. I had written some small things about it, but felt I didn't really have enough information to write my own contributions to the topic. Then one day, it was actually in 1983 that this project started. I was at my desk reading something entirely different.

I was actually doing some reading in ecology, readings that had to do with how animals forage. And the authors were giving an economic explanation foraging, and I suddenly realized, oh, what they were describing could also apply to understanding why societies collapse. and it had to do with costs and benefits of various kinds of strategies. So the human strategy for perhaps the last 5,000 years at least, or the strategy among much of the human earth has been to grow in complexity and to solve problems, to grow in complexity, and to solve problems that way. And I realized that to understand why society's collapse, which is to say why they suddenly lose complexity, was just the flip side of understanding how and why they increase in complexity.

So the ideas that I developed have to do, or apply both to increase in complexity and also to collapse. So that, in a not short answer, is how I came to be working on the topic. Just out of curiosity, and we're going to dive deeper into everything you said. In your early archaeological days, you said you did some work in the Midwest. Did you actually do any like digging and sites sort of archaeology, or was it all scholarship in the library type of digging? No, I was in graduate school at Northwestern University, which had a field program in the Lower Illinois Valley. So at that time, there were excavations underway. I worked on a couple

of excavations. But as a student, I was not in charge of those excavations. One of the professors was in charge of them. But yes, I had done field work in the Midwest. You know, in another lifetime, I would have loved to done that type of work. Where I live here in northern Wisconsin, we're where the glaciers came down. And you can find agates, which are a billion years old. And you can also find stromatolites, which are fossilized cyanobacteriolids, which are two billion years old from the ancient oceans. I just think it's fascinating to hold something in your hand that was alive in deep time. And I've always wanted to hold like a pre-hominated ancestor skeleton or something.

But of course, those are all walled off in museums. So, okay, I didn't know that, that you came across optimal foraging theory and ecology. So could you explain other scientists and scholars use different terms, energy, EROI or energy return on investment, you use the word energy gain. Can you explain what energy gain is and why it's important? Yes, of course. It takes energy to get energy. And what matters is how much you get for what you put in. Now, this is referred to by a variety of terms. It's referred to as energy gain. It's also referred to as energy return on investment or energy return on energy invested. And that's usually given by the acronym E-R-R-O-I. It sounds

like something out of archaic Greek, but in fact it refers to a situation we're facing today. Right. And the origin of this is from animals, right? I mean, animals have a payoff. And if they can't get enough energy, you wrote about beaver colonies and complexity. So humans are animals as well, and we construct societies that gradually become complex. And so we're subject to these same natural trends and natural laws with respect to energy. That's correct, yes. So your book, Collapse of Complex Societies, written in 1988, can you define the word complex in this framework?

And how does complex differ from complicated? And I think a lot of people get confused by those two terms. So complexity as I approach it has two dimensions, what I call structure and organization, the structure of a society and the organization of a society. The structure of a society is all the parts and bits and things that go to make it up. Those can be social roles, positions, technologies, aspects of our economy, aspects of our way of life, things that we use every day. These are all what I call the structure of a society. But to make these into a functioning whole, to make these things into a society requires organization.

Organization is what makes the parts work together. So complexity consists of structure and organization. Increasing complexity means that structure and organization have grown, that the society has become more differentiated, let's say, in its social role, in bureaucratic positions, in technologies. As these things increase, that is one aspect of increasing complexity, but it also takes increasing organization to make a complex society function. So increase in organization means increasing controls over behavior,

so that behavior becomes constrained and channeled in certain directions. So this is what I mean by complexity. It consists of increases in structure and organization. So how does that differ from the term complicated? As we use the term, as I use the term and some of my colleagues use the term, complication would refer to a change in the structure of a society or an activity or a technology, say, without a change in organization. And I have used some events to illustrate.

illustrate this in a book that I did with Tad Patsk a number of years ago. So I used in this book that I did a number of years ago with Tad Patsk, I used an illustration of how the United States military forces landed in North Africa in November 1942. Now, at the time that we did this, it was something completely new to us. We had never done an overseas, massive overseas, military landing like that before. So right from the beginning, we didn't really know what we were doing very well. And one example of that is that as the material items, the military material came onto the docks on the east coast, it was simply loaded haphazardly onto ships. Now, the anthropologist Julian Stewart was attempting to describe complexity many years ago, and he pointed out, and this is a lot. And this is what got me interested in this example.

He pointed out that for the landings in North Africa, we shipped from the United States to North Africa 500,000 different types of military artifacts. Now, you look at the figure 500,000 different types of items, things, artifacts. This could be weapons, uniforms, lots of other things. Boots, helmets, all of the things that you need to conduct a major military operation today. We shipped 500,000 different kinds of things to North Africa. You might look at that and say, well, that's a complex system, but it's not. In fact, it's not a complex system. It's a complicated one because it was disorganized.

It lacked organization. As I said, items were loaded onto ships haphazardly, which is not the way you're supposed to load a ship for a military campaign. You load a ship in what's called reverse order where the items that are going to be needed last are loaded first. So the items that you're going to need first when you land are right on the top and you can find them right away. As it was in our landings in North Africa in 1942, we hadn't done a military loading. The ships had been loaded haphazardly. And what it meant was that in order to find anything, we had to unload just about everything. So, this is an example of a system that was complicated but not complex.

What would have made it complex would have been adding organization and the organization would have consisted of what's called a combat loading. So that's what I mean by a difference between complex and complicated. Okay. So the difference is that complex requires organization on top of the structure that already exists. Would that imply that a complex system? is more efficient with respect to energy?

No. And this is one of the challenges is that complex systems tend to have higher metabolic costs. They have higher energy costs. If you compare, well, at the opposite extremes, what did it cost to maintain a hunter-gatherer society 300,000 years ago? If you measure that in terms of calories, it's not very many. It's basically just the human metabolism of a handful or maybe even a couple of a dozen people. Compare that to the thousands of kilocalories that every individual in our society uses today to maintain complexity. Complexity always has a cost, and ultimately the cost is energy.

Now, we're largely not aware of that today. It doesn't occur to us because to us complexity seems to be free. We pay for it through fossil fuels. But in the past, increasing the complexity of a society meant that people had to work harder. So that there were always constraints against growth in complexity because people realized that complexity would cost, that growing a more complex society would be costly. As ancient societies engaged in campaigns of conquest as they grew complex themselves, they required higher and higher levels of taxes from their support population, who would have been primarily farmers. Complexity always has a metabolic cost.

And so increase in the complexity of a society means that it takes more energy to support that society. Well, in terms of the long-term evolution of human societies, this brings up a fundamental question, and that is, why did human societies ever grow more complex? If growing more complex costs more, why didn't we just stay? as simple hunting, gathering bands. Well, the answer I've proposed is that most of the time, complexity increases to solve problems. That, in other words, we might develop new technologies to solve a problem.

We might develop new kinds of social structures to solve a problem. We might increase the size of a bureaucracy to solve a problem. We might have the government initiate new kinds of programs to solve a problem. All of these things are, are increases in complexity and they're undertaken to solve problems. So the approach I took to understanding the evolution of complexity in human history and also the occasional collapses of human societies focused around the evolution of complexity to solve problems.

So let me frame this in a modern context. So the average American in the United States consumes around 2,000 calories a day. But our exosomatic or how much energy we use outside of our bodies is around 200,000 kilocalories a day. So we have almost a hundred to one exosomatic magic wand that we invisibly see as part of this complex society. But what you're implying is that because most of that is this subsidy we get from mining fossil hydrocarbons and only paying for the cost of extraction.

not the cost of creation nor pollution, that in the past, there would have been a disincentive to complexify too much because without fossil fuels as a subsidy, we would have had to work much harder and there would have been a natural cap and disincentive to complexify too fast because it would have meant we would have had to work 80-hour weeks and no leisure or music or storytelling or whatever. So without an exosomatic honeypot of energy, high energy gain fuel available to us, there was a natural cap to how complex we could get? Yes, that's correct. And it would have been not much more than that 2,000 calories per person per day. That's not quite what an agricultural society can produce, but it's pretty close to it. In the past,

90% of human populations were involved in producing energy, that is primarily through agriculture. This means that there's only 10% of the economy and the society left for such things as education, training, specialization, learning, developing new technologies, innovation. That all had to come from something like 10% of the population and also 10% of our energy budgets. So, yes, increasing complexity requires higher energy costs per capita, but this seems to come about regularly through solving problems. So which comes first? Which is the chicken or the egg in this energy gain story? Is it complexity? Is it the problems or is it the access to energy gain? There are occasions in human history when access to energy gain has allowed human societies to grow complex. And we think this is normal because we're in a period like that now with our reliance on fossil fuels. And because of that, we think this is the normal, this is normal, that this has been the normal course of human evolution.

But in fact, it's highly abnormal. It has occurred in human history only a few times, and it's never lasted very long. You can think of the famous example being perhaps focused on, when people developed a focus on intensive agriculture, that this would have given human populations a short-term energy gain per capita. But then we quickly used that up by the development of sedentary communities, by having more children, by having more children survive, because we had more calories with which to feed people. All of these things fit into our conception of why we think complexity has grown in human societies. We tend to think that it has grown because we've worked hard and been innovative.

But in fact, as I've said, those are rare occasions in human history. Most of the time in human history, complexity grows to solve problems. So there was a tweet in my feed this morning from a friend of mine, Paul Maidowski, and he wrote, empirical evidence shows that individuals can make choices, but species cannot. Ultimately, a species will mindlessly choose the path of easiest energy access. Do you agree with this or how would you caveat? That's a very simplistic suggestion. One can even question the idea that humans make choices.

There's very interesting work going on in brain imaging and brain studies today. And what it is showing is that even very early socialization causes synapses to form in the human brain in certain patterns that an individual has. has for a lifetime. And the formation of these synapses conditions what the person is going to become, who the person is going to become, how the person will think, how the person will value. And this all raises the question of, well, just how much choice do humans have? You know, there's an old nature versus nurture debate. Are humans hardwired by nature? Or do we become who we are through nurture and socialization. Well, the brain imaging studies are showing that, in fact, this is a false question. It's a false dichotomy. We become essentially hardwired very early in life.

So referring to human choice as an explanation for, let's say, complexity is just simplistic. I think the larger, well, on that note, I don't so much believe in free will, but I do believe in free won't in that you can use your intelligence and neocortex to make plans that ahead of time will trump your limbic mammalian emotional response in the moment. I try to do that. I'm successful like one chance in eight. But in any case, I think my friend's point was more that aligned with the maximum power principle that organisms and ecosystems in nature self-organized to access an energy gradient.

that if there's a pool of unused energy, that some species will go towards that path, though individuals have a little bit of ability to reject that path. Are there any examples in history of human societies coming across a large energy access and they didn't access it completely and they rejected it or moved away from it or anything like that? Nate, I can't think of one. Okay. So you mentioned earlier a book you wrote with Tad Patsik called Drilling Down. And in that book, you described something called the energy complexity spiral. Can you explain what that is?

Well, yes. As complexity and energy grow, they have to grow together. On the rare occasions when humans have had little bits of surplus energy, I think on those occasions, complexity has grown because of having surplus energy, but then becoming more complex requires still more energy. So that they spiral together, energy and complexity spiral together as one increases the other increases, as energy increases complexity increases, and then as complexity increases, energy has to increase also. So this is what I mean by the energy complexity spiral. So in 2000, you wrote a paper, which I assigned to all my freshman students in Reality 101, in which you describe the Byzantine Empire as the only example of a society that planned its own soft landing through a simplification.

Can you expand on this example? And are there other examples that have come up since you wrote that paper? Well, I'll answer the second part first because it's the easiest. And the answer is no, I have not come across any other society that survived by simplifying, by systematically collapsing. The Byzantine case study is not normally recognized as a collapse, but when I began to study it, I realized that it was. But the Byzantines did not plan simplification. They were forced into it. They were forced into it because the Arabs burst out of the Arabian Peninsula and conquered half the Byzantine Empire. They conquered all of the Near East up to what's now the nation of Turkey.

They conquered North Africa. ultimately they conquered Sicily. And these things deprived the Byzantine Empire of about half of its revenue, which is to say half of its energy. And so it was forced to simplify. And the ways that it simplified are first that it reduced its full-time professional army and instead settled soldiers on the land to become essentially a peasant militia, so that the cost of the army decreased substantially. and most of the cities across the empire were abandoned. Only two cities survived, the main one being Constantinople itself. What's now Turkey, also known by the term Anatolia, had become part of the core of the Byzantine Empire after the Arab conquests.

And Anatolia had been a land of cities since the time of Alexander the Great. and just about all of those cities had to be abandoned, and populations either dispersed to the countryside to become farmers or they aggregated on fortified hilltops. If you go to the Turkish capital of Ankara today, you can see this, that at the top of the central hill in Ankara, you will see a set of 9th century Byzantine fortifications. And these are the result of the collapse of cities in the countryside that people had to go to fortified hilltops, or had to go to hilltops and then fortify them in order to be safe and to be able to survive. So the collapse in Byzantine history, beginning in the early 7th century, was not a planned simplification. It was forced on them. Their backs were to the wall.

So I'm going to jump around here, Joe, a little bit from my reading and recent refresh, the main inferences from your book, Collapse of Complex Societies, are number one, human societies are problem-solving organizations. Number two is sociopolitical systems then require energy to be maintained. Number three, this increased complexity carries with it increasing costs per capita. And investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response, as you've said, reaches a point of declining marginal returns. You wrote that over 30 years ago. Are there any things that have happened since you wrote the book that would change the nature of how you think

about that phenomenon? And is there anything that's changed about our society that would make you alter your conclusions and inferences? No. Again, I'll answer to the easy part first. I don't see any changes in our society that would require me to alter those conclusions. What I will say is that I have learned more about problem solving and complexity since then, or I have realized more about it. And one of the important things I've realized is that growing in complexity to solve problems is what I call a seductive process. It's seductive in the sense that it is natural for us to want to solve problems. And each increment in complexity seems small and affordable at the time because we don't

look at the long-term cumulative costs, and ultimately it's the cumulative costs that seem to do the damage that make a society susceptible to collapse. By a cumulative cost, I mean the cost of solving the last problem before and the last problem before that and the last problem before that, all of which may have required increases in complexity and increases in a society's energy budget. Again, I want to emphasize that people today are largely unaware of this because Complexity to us appears to be free. We pay for it through fossil fuels. Well, and underpinning that, I think people look at the world using a technology and a monetary

lens, and then other people like us look at the world from an ecology and energy lens. And if you understand that we're using these monetary markers, either linen, money in our pocket or digits in the bank to buy things that require energy and materials, that energy underpins the entire thing. So I think it's energy blindness, and I don't know if this is willful ignorance, that we would rather not know how much our lives and future expectations and institutions are dependent on the capital that we're treating as interest, pulling it out of the ground, or if it's truly because of a lack of education in our systems that we don't teach ecology to young people. Certainly the lack of education is important, and I think we'll

probably get back to that during this interview. But the work I did in collapse brought me into working increasingly and seriously in the topic of the future complexity of our way of life, the future survival of our way of life, the sustainability of our way of life. And coming from my background in anthropology, I realized that the human species is not suited. to develop long-term sustainability. And that's because we did not evolve to be broad-scale thinkers. That is to say, we didn't evolve to think broadly in space or in time. Our ancestors, going back again 300,000 years ago, down to maybe about 10,000 years ago,

lived lives that were short. They had no knowledge of the landscape beyond their immediate territory and their immediate neighbors. they had no concept of a distant future because they didn't need to have that concept. Life for them was lived by the seasons. They lived by hunting and gathering or later by planting, and life was determined by the seasons. These things were fundamental to the human way of life, and because of them, there was never natural selection in the human species for the ability to think broadly in time and space. So we don't.

we never evolved the capacity to do so. Now, I don't want to suggest that no human ever thought broadly in terms of time, because, of course, clearly many did. The classic example would have been the ancient Maya who had a remarkable calendrical and astronomical knowledge. It has been showcased just recently in one of the most recent issues of science. It's sitting next to my easy chair right now. I'm reading through that article. But this was a very small part of the society. And ultimately, their calendrical observations would have been almost certainly tied to the agricultural cycle and also the need to integrate their complex societies.

So there was an energy cost to supporting a small number of specialists in astronomy and developing calendars. And the society seemed to need these things. But this was just a small part of the society. The small part of the society had a high energy cost, but it was just a limited number of people. I emphasize, again, that humans did not evolve to be broad-scale thinkers. But in terms of the sustainability of our way of life, that's precisely what's required today. So it's pointed out, it's been pointed out very often that we are not equipped to deal with long-term problems that are in the distant future. whose effects we don't feel today.

And so, for example, this is, it's been well noted that this is one of our problems who are addressing the climate, the problem of climate change, because we just tend to think, oh, yeah, well, that'll be, you know, we can deal with that in the next generation or or some such. We don't need to deal with it today. Of course, the climate does seem to be changing today. And at least some people are becoming aware that the climate change is real and it's beginning to affect us. But the bulk of the population as a whole will not follow suit until they really

see it affecting their lives. At which point it will be too late to mitigate. That may well be. So is there a way that we can, as including modern society, but just human societies generally, is there a way to solve problems without using more energy? Well, I suppose you could stop doing certain things. You could curtail some activities in favor of others. And, you know, It can be pointed out that governmental appropriating bodies do this all the time. The United States Congress or parliaments and other parts of the world, state legislatures. They do this all the time. They either decide not to solve certain problems because they don't want to come up with the money

or they will solve the problem, but they're going to reduce the budget somewhere else. So maybe we can solve problems without an increase in energy cost on a net basis. But it seems to involve simply reducing the energy costs somewhere else. Well, it's a little bit of a tautology because the problem we need to solve right now is we're using too much energy. Yes. Yeah. So is there any chance that we could via yours and others' research, kind of have this Harry Selden from Asimov's foundation map where we become aware that we need

energy to solve problems. And instead of continuing to kick the can in a biophysical sense, when Thomas Malthus existed, we didn't know, he didn't know about fossil hydrocarbons. When Paul Ehrlich wrote about the population decline, he didn't know about globalization and debt. In the early 2000s, we didn't know about Central Bank. and access to debt to increase the shale bonanza and kick the can further. All these can kicks that we've done have been ways of we're accessing more pools of energy.

But maybe the next can to kick is one in our minds where we don't need 100 to one exosomatic surplus to live a meaningful life. Or in Spain, 50 to 1, granted, there are many countries in Africa that have very tiny energy gain. I mean, my refrigerator uses more energy than a lot of countries in Africa per capita use the entire year. Is there any way that we could have the next can kick be in our minds instead of using energy and materials? I don't know the answer to that, but I'm wondering if you have an opinion. Well, I'm not optimistic. Politics seems to make that impossible. I think it was the senior George Bush who said this was back when global warming was becoming more widely known,

I think he said something like, I'm not going to ask the American people to curtail their standard of living. And that's the problem in a nutshell, is that people won't accept a life of lower consumption, of lower material well-being when they can't see that it will do them individually. any good and they can't see that it's necessary. In a way, this is a variety of the tragedy of the commons because people reason, well, I only contribute a little pollution to the atmosphere, so it's okay.

I don't contribute very much, but of course, everyone thinks that way. So all this pollution keeps going into the commons, the atmosphere. I wish I was 40 years younger, but know what I know now. I think I might want to try to talk to K to 12 educators about this. And if any of them are listening to this, please feel free to contact me about it. I don't know how to do it. I'm not a K to 12 educator. I don't even know whether it's possible.

But if I have hope for our future, that's the reason for it. I agree with you, which is why I taught my college class Reality 101. I think the learning of our situation and the recognition of how important energy is. to our lives at least gives individuals the options for choosing certain paths and aren't quite as energy intensive as our current culture is promoting. But it seems to me that as the years go by, we're getting more energy blind, not less. There was a lot, you know, when you came to that conference with me in 2006, we were talking about oil depletion and things like that.

And now the concept of peak oil is completely discarded in the discourse. And yet we're accessing shale oil, which is the source rock. There's nothing left after that. And it depletes at 40% a year. So we just assume that we will always have this amount of energy into the future. And if we don't, we'd just stop using fossil fuels and go to renewables. Do you have an opinion on renewable energy as it pertains to this energy complexity spiral? There are no simple answers.

And I think we must eventually go to low-polluting renewable sources of energy, but I don't suppose that we could do so without problems. One of the things I got interested in a few years ago was the role of petroleum in World War II. In 1940, we produced oil and gas in the United States at an erie of 100 to 1. For every barrel of oil we'd invest in finding and producing oil, we got 100 barrels back. Today, that's now down to 15 to 1, and the trend is not reversible. But the reason why I bring up this example is mainly because in 1940, something like 30% of our oil production capacity was shut in. So all we had to do in World War II was open valves. We didn't actually have to find more petroleum to fight World War II.

We provided all the oil we needed and much of the oil that our allies needed. And we did this simply by opening valves and using up that 30% of oil production capacity that had been shut in. So I look at renewable energy sources, and I wonder if we were faced with a crisis, could we increase energy output as quickly as we did at the time? start of World War II. I'll emphasize that I'm not a technology specialist. I'm a social scientist. I don't know whether it's possible to increase energy production rapidly under a renewable energy economy or whether it's not possible, whether it takes investment of several years. I suspect it takes investment of several years to do it. Just look at the problems we are having with with with oil supply today and the massive increases in price that are affecting

people's lives. I'm fortunate. I mostly work out of a home office except for days when I go to the university to teach or to hold my office hours. But for the most part, you know, people have to drive to work. They're stuck. They have to drive to work. And, you know, when here's news stories and reads news stories about how.

badly people are being affected by this. And yet we seem unable to overcome it rapidly now, because we have used up the supply of what's called easy oil, oil that we could get just by essentially sticking a straw in the ground. Those days seem to be over, and increasing energy supply today, even with fossil fuels, seems to take time. And increasing energy supply in the future, under a renewable energy economy, I don't know whether it can be done. A couple responses there. You mentioned sticking a straw on the ground. I think what we've done with fracking technology has made the straw bigger, so we get stuff out faster, but we're much closer to the slurping sound at the end of the milkshake. I think we can see in contrast

to your World War II example, where we just had to turn the valves, what's happening in Ukraine and Russia right now, countries like Germany and Japan that aren't like the United States where we produce 80 some percent of our own energy, they have to import the majority of their energy. And lo and behold, Germany and Europe are becoming less energy blind under the fire, as it were, because they have to pay a lot more for the natural gas and oil that they get from Russia. Paradoxically, the euro has significantly weakened against the ruble since this war started. They're not massively building new solar and wind because that stuff is intermittent.

It has a lower energy gain and it's not quickly turn on dispatchable like oil and gas are. And I don't know, Joe, if you've seen, but this Freeport LNG explosion a couple weeks ago, So now today they announced that it's going to be at least 90 days, if not the rest of the year, that this is going to be need repairs. So what's happening is our natural gas prices are crashing and Europe's are skyrocketing because we are not going to be able to export that gas to Germany and the UK, which means we're going to have to use it here. so it depresses prices here. But the LNG that would have made it to Germany is now not going to be there until at least three months from now. So they're in a real pickle with access to energy, which is why this entire story of energy

in society is about to become much more prevalent. Back in 2008, I was severely worried. And what worried me was not the great recession that we were experiencing then. it was the price of oil and the declining E. Roy on oil. And back in those days, most people don't remember this, you know, oil was up to $140 a barrel. People were paying $450 a gallon for gas in the United States, up to about the levels that we're experiencing now after a lot of inflation, of course. So even taking inflation into account, we're not paying now what we did in 2008. I was seriously worried, but fracking bailed us out.

Fracking came along at just the right time to bail us out. Now, we all deplore the environmental consequences of fracking, but fracking gave us a reprieve. It allowed us to have a space of a few decades in which to develop alternatives to oil. without fracking in 2008, I strongly suspect that industrial societies would have experienced a collapse, and it would have been the most catastrophic thing in human history. But we didn't because fracking came along. And have we used the intervening 15 years wisely? No.

Well, to a certain extent we have. You know, it takes 40 to 60 years to undergo a major energy transition. where are we in that transition? I don't know. I don't know where the starting point is. But what I see today in terms of planning and referring to dates for reducing carbon emissions or eliminating them altogether as if that were possible, it does give me a certain optimism that we may make the transition, although we won't find the transition easy.

It may affect the way of life that a lot of people have come to, expect, and that will mean even more political conflict than we experience now. But it's possible that we'll make the transition, but I think we're going to find that an energy future based on renewables and electricity just has certain drawbacks to it that we don't have with fossil fuels. I mean, one of the things is often pointed out is that a liquid fuel is the most versatile thing you can have for transportation. And we're looking at a future where we won't have that or we'll have much less of it than we use now.

So as I say, I'm a realist. I'm not an idealist. I don't think that renewable energy is going to be some sort of panacea or the ultimate human paradise. I think it's going to be a challenge. But it's a challenge we're going to have to meet. Well, I think the issue isn't renewable energy or fossil energy. That's not the problem that needs to be solved. The problem needs to be solved is we're optimizing our societies for growth.

And even all the net zero and all the different forecasts for a more sustainable future still say that the aggregate size of the human economy will be bigger because politically, like you mentioned earlier, we can't say we have to have a smaller economy in the future. Here's how we're going to get there. Then if that was the case, we could use our robust renewable technology in tandem with our remaining hydrocarbons towards some sort of a glide path to a non-collapse sort of thing. But how can that conversation even politically happen? Is there ever been a society that had a ruler in a Democratic or otherwise where it said,

you know what, we're going to have to use less? And here's the pathway we're going to get there. Could that happen even? Well, it's a curiosity. I'm going to refer to Jared Diamond's book, Collapse. the main thing I took away from that book was that Diamond likes dictators. The most interesting case in that book was, I think, the Dominican Republic ruled by a dictator named Trujillo for several decades, who simply protected the forests. Even though people were poor, his people were starving, they needed to use the forests, and he wouldn't allow them to do it.

He preserved the forests, and he had the political power to do so. So I certainly would not advocate a future of autocracy. But if you're concerned about requiring people to live a simpler way of life with lower material consumption, that is an efficient route. So by the way, you may probably don't know this, but when I was getting my PhD, my colleagues, fellow students, we referred to you as Jared Diamond's Jared Diamond. Yes. I've also been referred to as the real thing. Right. That was the sentiment.

So how does modern finance fit into your model of complexity? Does it add another layer of risk? I say that because the way that money is created and the availability of leverage to hedge funds and money managers means we have a lot more of paper claims representing energy than there actually is energy. available to solve problems. So is this a big part of the risk to complexity that you see today? And does this change anything in your thesis? Yes, you're absolutely right. It's been pointed out, I think probably by you, among others, debt assumes a growing economy. And then of course, a growing economy means a growing supply of energy. So that depends on energy. In the future, if we have less energy per capita and it's

harder to get energy than what we experience now. What does this mean for all of the outstanding debt? I'm not a finance specialist. I'll let others address that, but I can foresee some serious problems emerging from that, but you'd probably be a better place to answer that than I am. So this podcast is called the Great Simplification, in part because we're simplifying complex science topics to a general audience, but mostly because after the great complexification that has resulted from the last two centuries of the carbon pulse, human societies, self-organizing and growing our access to fossil hydrocarbons, that the coming century is going to be the reverse, a great simplification.

So in your research, you posit that collapse is specifically a sociopolitical phenomenon that affects other areas of human society to varying degrees over differing time horizons. But to my knowledge, and correct me if I'm wrong, you don't mention complexities inverse specifically simplification. Would you please comment on whether the simplification of complex societies is a feasible outcome of collapse, or what are your thoughts on this? A rapid simplification is my definition of collapse, that a collapse is the rapid loss of a level of complexity and established level of complexity.

That's the language that I used when I published the collapse book in 88. I didn't use the term simplification in that, but I could have because a rapid simplification and a rapid collapse are the same thing. A collapse is a loss of an established level of complexity, a rapid loss of an established level of complexity. I teach a class in sustainability and much of it focuses on energy and innovation. And I start the class with a little anecdote. I tell students what life would have been like in, let's say, someplace in, let's say, someplace in, northern and western Europe, let's say about the year 1750. What would people's lives have been like? Life expectancy would have been about 40 years. 90% of us would be farmers. Being a farmer is a

noble occupation, but it doesn't appeal to everyone. What we know today's education would be almost non-existent. It would exist only for nobles and for the clergy. There would be very little of what we know today as medicine, something that we take for granted as simple to deal with like appendicitis would become, once again, I simply gruesome way to die. And I tell my students that the difference between that and the way we live today is what we want to sustain. So I would say we don't want a rapid simplification because a rapid simplification would be a collapse and it would be the worst calamity in human history. Now, a transition to a moderate simplification,

well, if we can aim toward that, if we can figure out a way to achieve it, that is a possibility, but it involves people thinking differently, which brings me back to my points about K-12 education. Can children be thought to think differently in terms of their expectations for their material well-being, going into the future.

I have to defer to the K to 12 educators on whether it's possible to teach young children that and to change society in that way. One of the challenges that I put to my students in that class is that based on factors that I look at or trends that I look at,

what I see as a possible future is what's called a steady state economy and economy that doesn't grow. And I ask them to think about what the consequences. of that would be and to talk to me about it at the end of the semester. Well, they can't conceive of it. They cannot conceive of an economy that doesn't grow or what the consequences of that would be. Now, I'm not, as I say, I'm a realist. I am not advocating a steady state economy. I see a lot of

problems with it. But I wonder often, is that what we're headed toward? I don't see a steady state economy either. I could see a rapid simplification or a miniature simplification followed by then a continued smaller growth after that. I just don't know what that a human society could have literally a steady state. It's one of the only disagreements I've had over the years with Herman Daly, who was one of my mentors and got me into this path. I just wonder biologically, are we capable of something kind of flat? What do you think about that? Well, consider what some of the consequences would be. For one thing, birth rates have to equal death rates. What does that mean? It means you have to have a permit to have a child. How many of us

are willing to put up with that? It also means that for someone to ascend the economic ladder, someone else has to go down by the same amount. This is what steady state means. So these are two of the main reasons why I just don't see a steady state economy as politically feasible. Yeah. So what have you been writing about and researching about since you wrote the collapse of complex societies? What are the interesting questions to you today in your research and your thinking? Well, I've always been concerned about the human future. I don't know why. I grew up in San Francisco in the Cold War. San Francisco would have been a target. I grew up doing exercises of crouching under my desk and put in my arms around my head. This is the sort of thing I

grew up with. And as I look back on how I thought and felt in those days, I realized that I just assumed it was going to happen. I assumed that it would be a nuclear exchange in San Francisco would be blown up. And I think that has conditioned a lot of my feeling in life. Remember what I said, that early experiences and early socialization condition a person's brain for life. So perhaps that's why I became, one of the reasons why I became interested in collapse. Because you had, you had already grieved for the outcome, so you were psychologically more prepared to research it? Well, as I did the collapse book, I realized that what I was learning and doing the research

for it wasn't just about ancient societies, that it applied to us today and to our future very explicitly. So I began working on sustainability, and after several years of thinking about sustainability, and working on the issue of complexity in problem solving in sustainability, I came to the conclusion that sustainability boils down to two factors, energy and innovation. Energy we've been talking about, and we know by this point how important it is. But innovation is largely not discussed, except where people assume that innovation is going to solve all our problems, that we don't need to worry about the future.

It's sometimes suggested that resources are never scarce. They're just price-strong. That as a resource seems to become scarce, as long as we have a market economy and the government doesn't mess things up, there will always be incentives to innovate, which would mean inventing new technologies, finding new resources,

finding new ways to use the resource, and so forth and so on. Well, what you just described is exactly what any economist listening to my show would say is what I'm missing, is that innovation, if oil gets scarce, the price will go up high enough and will develop an alternative, so no problem. Yeah, well, I don't want to disparage my colleagues in economics. Some of them are quite bright and are aware of the things we're discussing. But it seemed to me that there's a basic assumption in relying on innovation for the future,

and it's assumption that economists and technological optimists don't know they're making. The assumption is that the productivity of innovation in the future will be the same as it is today. And I thought, that's a problem. For one thing, the research process grows increasingly complex and costly over time. If you think back to the 18th and 19th centuries, the days of what are called lone wolf naturalists like Charles Darwin, Murie, Kuree, Gregor Mendel, people who were, worked as lone individual scientists and revolutionized entire fields of learning. And we still benefit from the legacy of their efforts today. But science today is largely a multidisciplinary effort.

When I was an up-and-coming young scholar, you could pick up an issue of science or nature, the two top journals in the area of science. and you would see maybe one or two or three authors per paper. Today you pick up a copy of one of those journals or any journal, and you're very likely to see five or six or ten authors per paper. And what has happened is that the research process has grown in size and it's grown in complexity and costliness because largely we have depleted the stock of easy innovations to achieve.

I like to say electricity is no longer out there waiting for us to discover it. We did discover it. So now what do we do? So for a number of years, I didn't know what to do with this thought, although it always nagged at me. Then a few years ago, when I spent some time in Arizona State University, I met a couple of colleagues, Deborah Strumbsky and Jose Lobo, and I want to give a lot of credit to them, who had a database from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

And I thought, here's a database we could use to investigate this question. Does innovation become less productive over time? And what we found with a database of three million, over three million patents beginning in the early 1970s, is that, in fact, the productivity of our system of innovation is declining. And we measured this as how many authors does it take to achieve a patent? And conversely, patents per author. What we are fined is that it takes more and more individual scientists, which means more and more scientific fields to achieve a scientific breakthrough that merits a patent. And conversely, the productivity of innovation measured as patents per author is declining and has been declining throughout. Now, this was in the patent database as a whole.

we then broke it down into individual fields, and we find the same thing in individual fields, and it may surprise people to learn that even in information technology in both hardware and software, the productivity of innovation has been and is declining today, and it will continue to do so. So what does this mean for our future? Well, innovation has to yield a net profit of one form or another, and we are looking at a future where innovation continues to grow in complexity, meaning it has to integrate, meaning an individual breakthrough has to integrate more scientific fields, more technical fields, and innovation will become increasingly costly and decreasingly productive.

So I think by the end of this century, our system of innovation will be very different from how it is today. And this is why I'm very concerned that innovation is not going to bail us out forever. as many people assume that it will. So let me summarize that we, our wealth is described by our productivity. An economist would say how productive our capital and our labor are. Both of those variables are actually dependent on energy. And so we have energy and innovation that are describing our wealth, our productivity. And if energy declines or becomes more expensive, we can offset that by increases in innovation.

What you're saying is there's an embodied energy component that's growing because of the complexity embedded in our system on the innovation and discovery itself. So that the amount of new productivity we're getting from innovation is declining over time. And all that is happening while our... energy globally, total amount of access to energy has been increasing. So what happens with innovation once our energy starts to decline is a really central question? Well, yes, that a decline in energy will lead to a decline in innovation. But what I would argue also is that a decline in innovation will lead to energy problems in the future

because we will not be able to invent our way out of the problem. I want to use again the example of Charles Darwin working in his study in the mid-19th century compared to how innovation is done today with large teams in large institutions with buildings that have energy costs, with support staff who need salaries and have energy costs, with equipment and fleets of vehicles and so forth, that innovation today simply costs much more than it used to. It's more complex, and that depends on energy. without fossil fuels, we'd be back in the days of Charles Darwin. So as the benefits of social complexity diminish and eventually become outweighed by the costs,

do the benefits of voluntary simplification increase? Is there a way that people as individuals can use the knowledge from your book and your research and other inferences to personally step outside of this energy complexity spiral and make simplifications in their own life facing what we do as a culture. Well, and some people do. Certainly this is a choice that individuals can make to a certain extent. It's not possible to get away from fossil fuels entirely, but we'll never get away from fossil fuels entirely.

I mean, among other things, we're going to need them for lubricants and for petrochemicals. The challenge is that we need to greatly reduce our particularly burning of fossil fuels. You know, I always think of the old Shaw of Iran who used to say that that petroleum was too valuable to burn as a fuel. And what he meant by that was that it's so valuable for other things for, you know, as I say, lubricants and petrochemicals. Well, we conflate the difference between price, cost, and value. And I think the value of this stuff on a long-term human timescale is indistinguishable from

magic and we're just, it's the civilizational equivalent of burning a Puckasso for heat. But in the short term, it doesn't feel that way. In the short term, we want our hamburgers and Netflix and airplane junkets to Vegas and what have you. So if you don't mind, Joe, I will conclude with asking you some personal questions that I ask all my guests. Firstly, you are a college professor. What recommendations do you have specifically for young people who become aware of our energy,

environment and biophysical constraints to the human enterprise? And do you give your students some advice at the end of every semester? Well, what I teach, one of the things I teach them and what I say to audiences when I get questions like this is that the first step is awareness. We have to be aware of what sustains our way of life. And most fundamentally, that's energy. So I try to make students aware of issues in energy, in issues in innovation, and in the challenges to sustainability. I don't teach a happy talk course. I don't give them simple solutions. I teach them the true complexity of the subject and how difficulty it is to come up with a solution to developing a sustainable society with anything like our material way of life. And I suggest at the end

of the semester what I say to them is that if you pay attention to anything in your lives, I mean, other than your families, pay attention to what's happening in the energy field because it's going to condition how your lives will turn out. I don't know how well they take this advice. I know I've had a few students who do, who get in touch with me after they've left and tell me how much they appreciated what I taught them. But I suspect most of them just become average people. They live their daily lives, concerned about paying the mortgage,

getting the car repaired, driving the kids to piano lessons or soccer practice, that sort of thing. And that's what occupies people's lives. And I will admit that when our son was young, a lot of my energy was consumed by that. Fortunately, I've always been interested in human history and in energy questions. So even during the years when I was focused primarily on... on studying ancient North American societies, I always had in mind the questions of sustainability and collapse. So that's not a short answer to your question, but it is an answer. Excellent. Thank you. So do you have suggestions for how people living in advanced economies

today, like the United States and Europe, can prepare themselves and their communities for what I refer to as the Great Simplification? You refer to as the inverse of the inverse of the of the built complexity, whether it's a rapid or a slow simplification, do you have any broad recommendations? Again, it's the same answer. Awareness. Try to become aware. Try to understand what drives events today, the fundamental things that drive events today,

but I don't mean politics and wars. I mean energy and innovation as the fundamentals that drive things today and will in the future and for the rest of my students' lifetimes and probably their students' lifetimes and for forever after that. That awareness is the most critical thing. Once people achieve awareness, there's some real possibilities that open up. When I'm asked a question like this, I don't give any definitive answer or guidance or suggestions. What I say is that we're a species that muddles through. That's all we've ever done and all we ever will do. But if I'm going to be optimistic it would be on the basis of an educated intelligent population muddling through.

And this is again where we come back to early childhood education. Well, I agree with you. And I've stopped using the word solutions because solutions implies that it's a problem with a solution. I prefer the word responses. And that's what we're trying to do, Joe, is change the initial conditions of the future via awareness of the importance of energy and systems to our human society so that better reactions can happen in the moment. So of all the things we've talked about or anything else, what personally are you most concerned about in the coming decade or so in the world? I am concerned about how changes in our material standard of living, the possibility of

a steady-state economy, declining innovation, declining energy per capita will generate political conflict in the industrialized countries. That's my immediate and short-term concern for the long-term, say going into the next century, your great simplification could be correct. It could be that's what's going to happen. I just don't know. And in contrast, what are you most hopeful about in the coming decade or so. Well, I am hopeful that people become aware, that the population becomes educated and more intelligent than it is now. I don't know how to bring it about except through, as I've said so many times in this interview, early childhood education. So if you were benevolent dictator and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what one thing would you do to improve human and planetary

futures. And would it be the changing in our education system from K to 12 or what other idea would you have? I think it would be education. Can we change our education system? I don't know. It seems to me that universities today are miniature superorganisms and there's all kinds of hierarchy and built complexity in the education system itself, that they need more energy and resources. And I think we're not preparing young people for the future that's ahead. with all this complicated and complex education and teaching that mattered the last 50 years, but might not be so relevant to the next 50 years. What do you think?

Well, I'm always gratified when students who've finished up and left right back to me and thanked me for what I have taught them. But as far as optimism for the future, I don't think it relies on university-level education. Because by the time they get to college, their thought patterns are already set. We have to start earlier in life. Once they get to college, we can teach them things, but we can't teach them to think. So a Montessori sort of model scaled more widely, perhaps. Yeah, I don't have firsthand familiarity with that.

Excellent, Joe. Thank you so much for spending your time today. And thank you for your career of researching what to me was a life-changing recognition, reading your book along with Herman Daly and some others caused me to leave my Wall Street job and spend time, full-time learning and educating people on the importance of energy to our society and to our future. Do you have any closing thoughts or advice or wisdom for the listeners of the show? I don't know if I have any wisdom, just the things I've suggested.

May they become aware. Yeah. Thanks so much, Joe. Okay, my pleasure. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit ThegreatSimplification.com for more information on future releases.