The second is Joseph Tainter, the American anthropologist who authored “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter argued that societies, when confronted with new challenges, tend to add layers of complexity to solve those problems. By “complexity,” Tainter specifically meant new specializations and new layers of hierarchy. But that complexity comes at a cost: while engaged in those new specializations or performing those new hierarchical roles, these people still need to eat, live in homes, wear clothes, etc. So, as complexity rises, so too does the burden on society’s primary producers who are feeding and clothing those people.

This is sustainable when returns on complexity are high. When returns on complexity stop rising, though, eventually society is directing all its spare resources into maintaining hierarchy. If that society that has no spare resources left encounters a new problem, it might simply not be able to respond, even if it is exploiting more resources than ever before, and collapse—an economizing process of shedding layers of complexity to free up resources.

This is, I think, another way of looking at Piketty’s problem of inequality. US society simply supports too many people who are simply filling roles in hierarchy without returning any benefits to society. Bureaucrats, sure, but mostly capitalists, landlords, and other rentiers. US society now devotes an enormous percentage of its overall economic activity not to anything useful, but to filling the pockets of Donald Trump’s adult sons, or paying for Jeff Bezos’ toy space program, or building LLM slop factories.

US society simply has no slack left and Donald Trump dragged it into a pointless war with Iran and it promptly began losing, even though the US has fought and won wars against much stronger adversaries.

There are two thinkers here who I think are relevant, from two slightly different angles.

The first is French economist Thomas Piketty, who has done exhaustive work on understanding the origins and operation of economic inequality in modern states. Piketty has argued that a state’s rate of taxation essentially reflects the ability of that state to mobilize public resources to achieve its goals. When tax rates are low, especially on the richest, then the rich can amass fortunes that represent a competing ability to mobilize public resources.

In the US, inequality has skyrocketed since the neoliberal rebellion began in the 1970s and tax rates on the wealthiest were slashed. Despite its massive absolute spending, the US government simply cannot mobilize the resources it needs to achieve its goals, because those resources have been captured instead by the rich and especially the ultra-rich.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-spars-with-spacex-over-starlink-price-hike-during-iran-war-2026-05-26/