Complexity

Complexity is Everywhere:

Understanding the Sustainability of Complex Societies

Understanding complexity can be overwhelming for anyone trying to understand the interactions of economic, social, and ecological systems because humans have the propensity to learn and adapt fast by simplifying problems. A systems thinking foundation is essential to begin to decipher the complexity of the many parts and feedbacks that make up socio-economic systems. By focusing on the embeddedness of socio-economic systems in the biophysical world of energy and matter, ecological economics provides a starting point to decipher this complexity.

Tainter (1995) has elegantly explained that humans have adapted to biophysical limits since time immemorial by increasing complexity, that is by constantly developing problem-solving tools that have allowed humans to harness available flows of energy from the environment to sustain our complex societies. However, this propensity for increasing complexity has led to modern complex societies that are heavily dependent on unsustainable consumption of fossil energy.

Gowdy and Krall (2013) have also written about how the propensity for sociality, and the cooperation among groups that comes with it, enabled humans to transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture ~10,000 years ago. This was a drastic shift of social organization characterized by a very complex division of labor, which led to the coevolution of an economic superorganism that is surplus seeking, expansionary, and self-reinforcing. Therefore, the difficult task of ecological economists is to understand the positive feedbacks in complex societies to be able to structure socio-economic systems with the right negative feedbacks to provide humans and the rest of nature with well-being and stability, while reducing the unsustainable energy and material waste in socio-economic systems in the long-term.

Tainter explains that there are diminishing returns to problem solving because as societies increase complexity in a positive feedback loop this can lead to the deterioration of the environment and the exhaustion of biophysical resources. This explains why complex civilizations of the past such as the Roman Empire and the Mayans collapsed when their complexity led to the deterioration of their biophysical and social foundations (Tainter, 1988).

This calls for using a precautionary approach in deciding what problem-solving technologies to develop to address inequalities and the deterioration of planetary boundaries such as climate change because if we feed into the fossil-fueled positive feedback that we are already in we will run into trouble and possibly collapse. Tainter (1995) provides two “solutions” to this dilemma, which we are paraphrasing here:

• We need to learn from and act on the knowledge of our historical position in a system of evolving complexity a.k.a. apply a socio-ecological coevolutionary framework to analyze the evolution of socio-economic systems within the biophysical world of energy and matter.

• We need to find sustainable ways of harnessing energy flows to finance problem solving.

These perspectives on complexity must be considered by anyone hoping to advance a just and sustainable transition to a right-sized economy to ensure that we are addressing the root causes of our problems and not adding to the problem. The short video below provides a good way of understanding how to make sense of complexity.