Joe Tainter: “Surplus, Complexity, and Simplification”
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
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The Evolution of Complexity in Human History
Complexity always has a cost and ultimately the cost is energy. We're largely not aware of that today, it doesn't occur to us because to us complexity seems to be free. But in the past, increasing the complexity of a society meant that people had to work harder. As ancient societies engaged in campaigns of conquest as they grew complex themselves, they required higher and higher levels of taxes from their support population who would have been farmers.
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