Societal Collapse
I start with archaeologist Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies – here’s a link at Thriftbooks:
His Summary, chapter 6, works pretty well. Close to 20 societal collapses studied; a variety of ultimate causes are found, but always the same underlying problem – more and more “good” things added to society, and to its overhead, and its debt. Eventually, you’ve eaten the seed corn, and no longer have the resources to fend off another invasion or plague or hurricane. A summary of the summary might be ”In each of the cases examined, the costliness of complexity increased over time while benefits to the population declined.”
Economist Mancur Olsen in his The Rise and Decline of Nations demonstrates that increasing complexity (accumulation of rent seekers, regulations, and of necessary solutions to problems: all increase societal overhead: none can be abolished without a really major dust up – along the lines of a French Revolution):
Hoover’s John Cogan’s The High Cost of Good Intentions gives an example in Federal entitlement programs. He chanced to be looking a Civil War veterans’ pensions and noticed that from there being several thousand disabled veterans’ on pensions shortly after the War, by the turn of the century, veterans’ pensions consumed over half of the total Federal budget – simply by Congress broadening coverage. And, the more he looked, the more similar examples he found:
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-high-cost-of-good-intentions-a-history-of-us-federal-entitlement-programs_john-f-cogan/36991966/?resultid=e9b7138a-e304-472e-8df6-0e95a42dedf0#edition=21159309&idiq=32351129 (This one I bought but haven’t read…)
Finally, Goodhart and Pradhan’s The Great Demographic Reversal explores why we likely cannot produce our way out of this fix – too many consumers chasing too few producers. It’s only gonna get worse: