Professor at USU says U.S. society may collapse

If the past few months have felt like America's institutions and maybe society itself are falling completely apart, it could be because that's exactly what's happening.

History says so. So does anthropology. An expert in both disciplines says human civilizations provide a template for those societies that have come together, become steadily more complex, then head almost inexorably toward collapse.

Even the society that has risen up here between the shining seas is well down the same path, according to a widely cited and published historical anthropologist.

Joseph Tainter, who heads the department of environment and society at Utah State University, told the newspaper that the current course of the economy and what some believe is a desperate effort to shore up the complex and almost inscrutable financial sector of the economy are manifestations of at least a partial collapse that invariably follows a society's boom.

Tainter and his research are included in "Earth 2100," the ABC News assessment of how life might be 100 years from now. He is also a source in "The 11th Hour," actor Leonardo DiCaprio's documentary that connects the dots of how our doing ultimately leads to our undoing. Tainter's original research is published in the book "The Collapse of Complex Societies."

Tainter is not a doomsdayer, but his research amounts to a chilling prognostication that the very nature of civilization means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse.

"For the past 10,000 years, problem-solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies," Tainter said, noting that for every extra layer of organization imposed, it takes extra energy of the society to maintain. "And the more complex a society becomes, the more energy it takes to maintain it and the more it produces diminishing returns."

To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet success generates a larger population, more specialists, more resources to manage and more information to handle that ultimately provides less bang per buck.

Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilizations. Western industrial civilization has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited, and constant innovation is needed.

The threat of a coming pandemic that would wipe out everyone rose again and seemed to quickly void, although briefly, the belief that our society has achieved a scale, a complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from collapse.