wombat_socho

Apparently, it was this "Nulan" who sent the article to Cobb, but the article is mine; and it is basically a summary of Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. I disagree with the point of Cobb's post, which he also left a paragraph of as a comment on my article, so I will quote my response to him:

Since you left a similar comment on the post itself, I'll simply quote my response there:

By that logic, states would be less complex than tribes, because states consolidate many tribes into a single entity. But this isn't the case at all; rather, states institute additional layers of complexity on top of the tribe.

Does corporate consolidation really simplify the economy? Does 1 WalMart replacing 17 smaller stores make things simpler? I would argue that it does not, since the functionality of those stores are now subsumed as departments at WalMart. In other words, all the complexity once carried on by each of those 17 stores remains, though now as a department at WalMart rather than an independent store. What WalMart does is the same as what the state does: it adds a level of complexity on top of those other stores.

This has obvious benefits, most immediately an economy of scale (but see Jeff Vail (http://jeffvail.net)'s "Anti-Economies (http://www.jeffvail.net/2005/10/anti-economies.html)"). Whether or not complexity has benefits is not the issue, though; the issue is the marginal return one can get from that investment in complexity—or, for example, whether the benefit of an economy of scale is worth the added costs in overhead, management, and other costs of increased complexity.

As I added in response to his own article:

To illustrate the general nature of this, let's take a look at another example you raise here—varieties of fuel. There are certain areas where complexty limits further complexity, such as fuel. By reducing the types of fuel available, interoperability increases, and you can produce more complexity based on that. Yes, we have reduced the types of fuel, but we have done so in order to increase the types of machines that can use it. Net complexity increases. That's an important point—it's net complexity that civilization is always compelled to expand, and that sometimes means reducing complexity in one niche, but the net result is always more complexity.

Jason Godesky
http://anthropik.com