Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Joseph Tainter.
Joseph Tainter is an anthropologist and retired professor, formerly at Utah State University. He is the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, and co-author with Timothy F. H. Allen and Thomas W. Hoekstra of Supply-Side Sustainability. With Roderick and Susan McIntosh he edited The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action. With Tadeusz Patzek he wrote Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma. Dr. Tainter’s research has been used in over 50 countries and his books have been issued in 10 languages. His work has been consulted in the United Nations Environment Programme, UNESCO, the World Bank, the Rand Corporation, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, the Earth Policy Institute, Technology Transfer Institute/Vanguard, and the Highlands Forum. His research has been applied in economic development and energy.
Having researched the topic of collapse for more than half a decade, I can say with some confidence that interest in it has increased over the past few years. And it makes sense—wherever you look, be it politics, climate change, the economy, tech accelerationism, or otherwise, we’re getting a lot of scary signals. But collapse is a slippery word—what exactly does it mean? And what exactly qualifies a particular breakdown as collapse?
To get granular, I’m happy to share this conversation with collapsology legend, Joseph Tainter, who was researching collapse long before it was en vogue, notably authoring The Collapse of Complex Societies nearly forty years ago. Perhaps his most notable argument from this work is that collapse occurs when a civilization reaches a point of diminishing returns on complexity—that is, when increasing amounts of capital, energy, and resources are required just to sustain the system, until the cost of maintaining it outweighs the benefits.
It’s a provocative argument, and folks like existential risk researcher Luke Kemp, who I had on the show late last year, have proposed alternative viewpoints—but which nevertheless build on Professor Tainter’s remarkable scholarly legacy. This argument is especially worth considering when we look at the current strain on the “rules-based” international order that the United States has (otherwise) maintained since the end of WWII.
There’s so much in this conversation, drawing together his collapsology research with his contributions to energy and sustainability research—and much more, examining how it all fits together in today’s global context.
So without further ado, please enjoy this illuminating conversation with Joseph Tainter.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also edited the video version, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with Qasim Rashid, Esq.:
