The anthropologist and academic Joseph A. Tainter argued, in a book published in 1988, that complex societies are bound to collapse due to diminishing marginal returns of complexity. Subsequently, a team led by Professor Ugo Bardi has verified this tendency to collapse in a simple system dynamics model of a society without a circular economy or renewable energy use.
Without leaving the framework of analysis of Ugo Bardi’s team, this work shows, however, that a complex society can remain in a steady state and away from collapse if it achieves a sufficient degree of circularity of resources, sustained on the use of renewable energy flows. It is also essential that the functioning of civilization presents negative feedbacks that, by controlling the growth of the economy, guarantee the achievement of steady state and resilience to instabilities.
Ants offer us a beautiful example that it is possible to achieve a complex social system with an enormous but beneficial impact on the environment, and that complexity also allows to evolve over tens of millions of years avoiding collapse.
The main cause of the risk of collapse of the current civilization is not the complexity or size of the economy. Avoiding collapse requires increasing circularity and above all creating control mechanisms through negative feedbacks that will lead us to a sustainable steady state, in which human civilization can satisfy its needs in a way that is compatible and coherent with the functioning of the rest of the planet.
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