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That appears to be the point of the comparison, no? If you are operating a machine so complex and unpredictable you don't truly know how it works (a Roman Empire, in this case), you'll never know which way to pull the lever until you have already done so.

Just speculation, but I think complexity provides decisive advantages, at least initially, and that's why we see complex societies dominate. Human groups that can avert catastrophe by adding complexity will do so, and those who do not may be unknown to history.

If civilization survival were as simple as KISS, we probably wouldn't struggle with it as much. We need smart, strategic complexity, and humans are limited in their strategic smarts.

Also short term beneficial choices may be long term bad choices.

The industrial revolution was great for humanity for well over a century. The standard of living in industrial countries advanced farther and quicker than ever before. But that same industrial activity had long term effects that we (as a society) are only just starting to accept and are still in disagreement about how to handle.

I think it’s even simpler:

We have a cognitive bias that undervalues “negative design” — removing things from a design — and so our social structures ratchet towards more complexity until they break.

We encounter that in software or mechanical design as well.

This. But I'd also suggest couching it in different psychological terms.

We have a "cognitive bias" (fear) against relinquishing control. Therefore our social structures ratchet towards more bureaucracy and rigidity until they snap. A skidding car, careening this way and that, needs the driver to stop over-steering. Alternately pulling the wheel the wrong way in a desperate frenzy to take control is the problem.

Many things just work out when you take your hands off the levers. But we also have a political and commercial class who are way too proud to do so. That would seem to invalidate their "scientific management" ideology [1]. The Wizard of Oz would be exposed as a fraud.

I think what's going on in the digital realm shows we've already entered that phase of overcompensation, because so many technologies simply go against common-sense survival instinct, and we seem stuck in cycles of solutionism, adding ever more layers of sticking plasters to fix the stuff we broke last week. We know we are building dangerously brittle and irresilient systems such as a "cashless society". It is this fetish for control that contains the seeds of breakdown.

[1] pretty much the thesis of Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over...", "The Trap" and "Hypernormalisation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

We don't like negative interest rates because of loss aversion. We would rather be fooled into believing that we have something that doesn't decay, rust or rot and then be surprised that it is gone at some point instead of seeing and being fully aware of much we are losing over time.

For example, suburban sprawl tries to cover up the negative yield of suburban roads, at some point growth is no longer possible, suddenly, the negative yield of underutilized and overbuilt infrastructure rears its ugly head. The local government is now bankrupt.

It is also the same with capitalism. We need endless growth of the population and the economy. To paper over the fact that each individual ages and their body decays over time, the same applies to a lot of physical capital which rusts, rots or decays in another way. The moment growth stops you will have an aging population, your short lived physical capital will disappear.

The ancient Egyptians understood decay, that is why they tried to make their civilization immortal, that is why they invested in extremely long lived capital, capital that survived four thousand years. The pyramids.

Can you suggest any reading about this?

This is a fascinating concept and I'd like to learn more.

There was an article related to this idea that received some popular attention last year [1][2] and one of the authors wrote a book on it. [3]

[1] People systematically overlook subtractive changes. Adams, Converse, Hales & Klotz. Nature, 592, 258–261 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03380-y

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727878

[3] https://www.leidyklotz.com/

Thanks!

Jay Forrester may be better known here as an inventor of magnetic core memory and creator of the groundbreaking MIT Whirlwind computer (1951).

The article seems to argue that the capacity to do optimal control was there but the gold standard resulted in hoarding of currency and therefore required deficit spending by the state which was driven by the state. At some point the government could no longer dig out more gold to paper over the deficiencies of a gold standard and was forced to adopt suboptimal control instead. There are common stories about soldiers simply switching over to those with money in the Roman empire.

I don't think it's just pulling the levers the wrong way. The problem is that the same attributes that made a system successful initially are the ones that bring it down. One example might be the ancient Maya: they had a king who was also the head of their religion (and an athlete, and a musician.. he was a big celebrity). That worked great for a while because it helped to bring people together to have a leader like that. Anyways the Maya were having issues with deforestation, and trade routes moving, and so forth. Now the king was supposed to be talking to the gods to avoid this sort of thing. If he was to say, "we need to go back to more sustainable agriculture, and deal intelligently with having less wealth for a while" his subjects would probably kill him. He's not supposed to tell them to make sacrifices, he's supposed to be perfect and he's supposed to arrange things with the gods so they don't have to make compromises. So he has to say "the gods are angry, they demand temples and sacrifice" and so the Maya went on a construction spree while also launching costly wars against their neighbors. This did not improve the situation.

Take a look at capitalism. It's predicated on competition in which the company that can expand the fastest, grow the fastest, wins and eats the other companies. And profits must increase every year or else capital just packs up and goes somewhere else. It's great if you want development at maximum speed. But not so great if you grow so much you threaten the earth you live on. But, our whole society is structurally unable to do anything else than this. Faced with economic problems, the only answer our system can give is to double down, do more capitalism faster and more aggressively. The bigger the problems, the more we double down on what worked before. Not the best idea. But since power and wealth in our society comes from holding capital, and since holding capital only brings you that power and wealth if it can move and grow- that means to do anything else than double down would require all the people to hold power and wealth in our society to lose that power and wealth. They'll see any threat to their power as a more immediate problem than global warming, which is slow moving and will affect everyone else first before they suffer at all.

> And profits must increase every year or else capital just packs up and goes somewhere else

Close the loopholes. Implement negative interest on cash. Break up monopolies. Tax land value. If there are no god like safe havens of capital that no actually productive investment can win against, the pressure to do the impossible will greatly diminish.