The problem of complexification

[next_migration]

In my last post, I summarized Joseph Tainter’s view of the collapse of numerous historical civilizations. His conclusion that complex powerful societies continue to add complexity until its net benefits become negative, which then leads to rapid decomplexification or “collapse,” is surely oversimplified as a single universal explanation, but also surely not irrelevant. We should, therefore, think about the implications for our own, uniquely hypercomplex society.

 

 

As noted in Joseph Tainter’s analyses, there’s a rough relationship between the amount of energy available per capita and the amount of complexity in a society (see Leslie White’s The Science of Culture [1949]). When people are living at a bare subsistence level of foraging or farming using manual labor, few other social roles or specialist labor can be supported. Access to other supplies of energy enables more productivity per unit of labor, both in agriculture and in other important fields, so that some of the population can (and often must) find other things to do. Further energy surplus allows the employment of more people in roles that aren’t directly involved in producing desired goods and services, such as middle management, or that simply consume them, such as government spies in regimes that use repression to gain obedience.

In the late fossil fuel era, we have and consume far more energy per capita than any past civilization that ever existed. Correspondingly, while other civilizations certainly had skilled professionals, artisans, artists, soldiers, bureaucrats, and so on, we have greater socioeconomic complexity than has ever existed before. We have been taught to think of that as a benefit, as a way in which we are superior to past cultures. However, as Tainter pointed out, that complexity has costs. Moreover, if—or when—energy supplies decline too much, the costs of maintaining some aspects of complexity would increase, but their benefits would not, potentially dropping their net benefit below zero. Is America near the point where complexification is doing us more harm than good? Let’s consider a couple of examples.

Complexification of the economy adds layers of management and bureaucracy to formerly simple transactions. At best, these make transactions more efficient or safer, but at worst, they make them more expensive and difficult. Here is a small but painful example. As reported by The Guardian, federal law now demands that home health workers paid by Medicaid document their activities not with paper timesheets, but with Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) smartphone apps that track the workers’ locations. Caregivers must purchase a cellphone, therefore, and use it to clock in regularly, sometimes interrupting actual care, to be paid.

The state of Arkansas chose to apply this to live-in family caregivers, whose “clients” must provide time-consuming daily approvals, and to implement “geofencing.” If the caregiver’s phone is ever too far from the client’s house, the state may accuse the caregiver of filing a false report and delay or withhold their paycheck, with devastating consequences for low-wage workers. Disabled people complained that this creates a norm that they will be homebound, making them afraid to leave the house lest their caregiver not be paid. It also means that whenever they do leave the house with their EVV-tracked caregiver, their movements are effectively tracked and databased.

The federal policy was inspired by for-profit corporations that produce EVV apps, who claimed that it would save lots of money allegedly paid to cheating caregivers. A report claimed that $290 million dollars could be saved over a ten-year period (i.e., $29 million per year, nationwide). However, The Guardian revealed that Arkansas alone had already spent $5.7 million on its brand-new EVV program, AuthentiCare. Add to that the expenses of 49 other states, and the idea that this will save overall costs seems laughable. EVV is not a way of keeping more money in the pockets of taxpayers or government agencies, much less people with disabilities or their working-poor home aides. Instead, it is a way of transferring money from all those groups to tech-bros by forcing them to pay some Silicon Valley corporation for a novel, unnecessary service before they may continue to do what they have always done.

Another example from health care is the fact that many doctors are now coerced to evaluate patients in pain, even in emergency rooms during life-threatening health crises, using computerized algorithms owned by for-profit companies that claim to rate patients’ risk of becoming drug addicts if they are granted pain medication. Whether from bias or fear of being prosecuted themselves, doctors often refuse relief to, or even “fire,” patients who are given high scores by these algorithms. Wired reported that this market is now dominated by a corporation called Appriss, which refuses to detail, and apparently lies about, the factors used in patient ratings. Moreover, many people have been denied needed treatment as “potential addicts” because they had been sexually abused as children (think carefully before ever revealing your unhappy childhood to an allopath!), had had sick pets who got prescriptions, or had traveled long distances for medical care—because they lived in a rural area that had no doctors!

Most people would describe this as bigotry, cowardice, or callousness, not just such a dry-sounding thing as “complexification.” But that’s the underlying driver. Back in “the good ol’ days” (which, to be very clear, weren’t so good for some categories of Americans) there were no federal cops breathing down the doctor’s neck, or tech-bros breathing down the patient’s. Only two people, the doctor and the patient, were involved in the act of prescribing a useful drug. Those (and, later, the pharmacist or nurse) are the only people who really need to be involved to complete this transaction.

Now, invisibly standing around them are a bunch of other people all with their hands out: the corporations that profit from running electronic health records, the bureaucrats and enforcers, the insurance company drones whose full-time job it is to deny coverage for prescribed treatments. None of these really contribute to the service, but all of them have to get their cut of the action before person A can treat person B. Collapse theorist John Michael Greer, in his thought-provoking book Dark Age America (2016), refers to this process as intermediation, which he defines as “the insertion of an assortment of persons, professions, and institutions between the producer and the consumer of any given good or service.” The higher our population, and the more “efficiently” the valuable work is done (which reduces the number who can be employed doing it), the more people must find economic niches as intermediates, siphoning off a fraction of the cost of each transaction that actually benefits people.

To be clear, I am not saying that no management or regulation is beneficial, and Greer probably wasn’t either. Things done “for our protection” that really protect us, in a way that most of us want, shouldn’t be termed intermediation. People who want to have zero laws or regulations, if they don’t desire to be subsistence farmers in isolated anarchist villages, probably desire to make a living by harming or cheating others. In the globalized processed-food era, if you don’t have food inspection, you’ll be eating a lot of melamine. A manufacturer of triple sinks is a provider of a valuable good to someone who is opening a restaurant and really needs to wash lots of dishes with a disinfectant rinse. However, if someone only wants to sell a few loaves of homemade bread each week at a farmer’s market but her state’s health regulations require that she first remodel her house to have a full commercial kitchen with self-closing doors and a triple sink, then both the bureaucrat and the sink-maker become intermediates extracting money from transactions between two people who neither want nor need what they have to “contribute.”

Remember that complexity depends upon energy supplies. In a poor society, where there is little excess energy, or money, left after basic needs are met, it isn’t possible to have large numbers of people employed in jobs that don’t meet real needs. In a society as rich as ours, complexification of the process of producing goods and services is bearable, or actually better than having large numbers of people unemployed and desperate. Thanks to fossil fuels, we can afford to employ more of our population, not just doing tasks that are not strictly necessary, but doing tasks that hardly anyone really wants to have done, than ever before in human history.

This applies not only in government, but in business and other walks of life. It is impossible to run a large business without management, but in modern times there is often layer upon layer of management between the company president and the folks who produce the goods or deliver the services. Even non-profit organizations suffer from corporate, bureaucratic management systems. If there is any advantage to this, it is that given enough time, we could unwind quite a bit of complexity, if as a society we pursued that option, without losing the ability to defend ourselves militarily, as Joseph Tainter noted to be the traditional fate of collapsing states.

But what will happen if declines in energy and productivity per capita, which analyses like the Limits to Growth model and Tainter’s model assure us we must someday face, relatively quickly reach a point where we can’t support so much complexity? Many of the people now doing unnecessary tasks have no experience in any other kind of skilled work, and are too old or ill or not strong enough to suddenly take up unskilled manual labor. Not just their status, but their survival could be threatened by rapid decomplexification. The super-rich few behind and above them (tech-bros and corporate executives and shareholders) are not at real personal risk, but are obsessed with increasing their power, wealth, and status. They will spend whatever it takes to buy the political influence to squash any proposed changes that would reduce their power, or even simply increase their tax bills.

Therefore there would be many interests fighting to preserve the status quo, even as it was dragging us down. How can such deeply entrenched complexity be simplified rapidly? Unfortunately, one common way is by violence.

I've already begun to discuss the ways in which we are creeping towards civil war or worse, and will return to that theme shortly, but for now, I want to stick with the subject of our present economic arrangements a little longer.