To read George Monbiot's best essay of the year

George Monbiot tells us that societies get too complex - more and more effort has to be put into supporting the complexity, marginal returns fall and eventually, collapse. This is explained in his nomination for best essay of the year, which is here:

At some point, however, investment in socio-political complexity typically reaches a point of diminishing returns, meaning that the marginal beneficial returns (i.e. problems solved) of additional complexity begin to decline, leading to a lowered capacity to solve the new problems that arise and to deal with their consequences. These returns may even turn negative, at which point societies are not anymore capable of upholding the level of complexity they have reached. Typically, they then tend to break down to a lower complexity level.

Thus, inevitably, civilisation will come tumbling down as a result of our economic system becoming ever more complex.

This is all based upon the ideas of Joseph Tainter. And there's ever such a slight problem with those ideas. For he thought this was already happening just as he was explaining his ideas. In 1988.

Yes, in that 1988, just before the dual economic explosion of digital technology and globalisation. Both of which are not showing any signs whatsoever of diminishing returns, quite the opposite.

That is, we've got another of those lovely ideas - ones that might be possible, sure. We know very well that there can be diseconomies of scale for example. They could apply to political systems too - we certainly think so at times. But it's entirely non-obvious that this applies to economies. And it has most certainly been non-true since the explanation was proffered. That is, another of those lovely ideas which could possibly be true but seem not to be.

At which point to float an idea that might also fall into that class of possible but not true ones. We;re certainly willing to agree that complexity can have its problems. That the management of complexity can cause inefficiency. Perfectly happy to agree with all of that. We're pretty sure that Hayek was making the same point actually, we can't plan because we can't know enough about the complexity to do so. But then Hayek also gives us the solution here. Use the market - the market can handle complexity precisely because no one is trying to manage the complex system.

Which means that the answer to this complexity question was given several decades before it was actually asked.