More about Jared Diamond’s book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”

“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”

Diamond’s discussion focuses significantly on relatively small societies such as the Polynesian societies on small Pacific islands, the Anasazi, the ancient Maya, and the medieval Norse society of Greenland. His focus on these groups had the great benefit that their collapses were made intelligible in the space of a readable book.

In my previous posting I focused on institutions, emphasizing the unintended consequences that are emergent properties of people acting independently with incomplete information in complex institutional situations.

Diamond’s small societies are less complex institutionally than large societies. Indeed, I think Japan’s feudal society in the Tokugawa era was less complex institutionally than its modern society. In this respect I don’t mean to imply that the individual institutions were simpler. Kinship systems and clan institutions may well have been very complex – indeed more so than the family institutions in modern societies marked by nuclear family units.

I am simply suggesting that there are more institutions today, more individuals participating in these institutions, and that they form a more complex web than in the collapsed societies described by Diamond. To understand the point, consider the complexity of the institutional systems in China, India or the European Union – with many different cultures, speaking many languages, and therefore many different cultural institutions. Moreover, these are societies that include some one billion people each. There are city, county, state, national and supranational governments with their different political institutions. Societies are no longer composed mostly of subsistence farmers, but are divided into thousands of specialized trades, skills and professions – each marked by its own institutions. And so on, and so on!

The likelihood of unintended consequences emerging from the interplay of more people in the more complex set of institutions seems higher than for institutionally-simpler small societies.

On the other hand, as Diamond point out, people in modern societies have more and richer experience on which to predict the consequences of institutions and institutional changes. So to have modern societies evolved specialized occupations for professionals to study such matters, and have developed institutions to plan such change.

Here we have another race between:

· the increasing complexity of institutional webs and the increasing possibility of such webs producing serious, unintended consequences, versus
· the increasing power of modern institutions to understand complex situations and to intervene to assure that beneficial consequences accrue, negative consequences are reduced, and catastrophic consequences are avoided entirely.