Understanding collapse
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nature' the difficulty of achieving the breakthroughs which lie ahead is in creased (1980: 94, 97). The declining productivity of medicine is due to the fact that the inexpensive diseases and ailments were conquered first (the basic research that led to penicillin costing no more than $20,000), so that those remaining are more difficult and costly to resolve (Rescher 1978: 85-6, 1980: 52). Moreover, as each increasingly expensive disease is conquered, the increment to average life expectancy becomes ever smaller. And in fighting a new malady such as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, large sums are spent simply trying to prevent a drop in life expectancy. Sociopolitical control and specialization
Control and specialization are the very essence of a complex society. The reasons why investment in complexity yields a declining marginal return are: (a) increasing size of bureaucracies; (b) increasing specialization of bureaucracies; (c) the cumulative nature of organizational solutions; (d) increasing taxation; (e) increasing costs of legitimizing activities; and (f) increasing costs of internal control and external defense. These spheres are intertwined, and will be discussed together. Human social evolution has proceeded from lower to higher cost. As discussed earlier in this chapter, more complex social forms require greater support costs per capita. In the process of increasing complexity, less costly social features have been added before more costly ones. Thus, part-time leadership has preceded full-time; generalized administration has preceded and given way to specialized. Where at one stage in the development of a political hierarchy multiple administrative functions tend to be carried out by a single individual, a common trend among human organizations is to respond to problems by developing specialized administrators, and by increasing the proportion of the population engaged in administrative tasks. In many cases this increased, more costly complexity will yield no increased benefits, at other times the benefits will not be proportionate to the added costs. If increased complexity develops to deal with internal unrest or external threats, this solution may yield no tangible benefit for much of the population. Arms races present a classic example. Increasing costs of military hardware, and military and civilian personnel, when undertaken to meet a competitor's like increases, yield no increased security for the added cost. Such increased costs are often undertaken merely to maintain the balance-of-power status quo. As a military apparatus increases in complexity its administrative costs increase disproportionately, as Parkinson's ( 1957, 197 1 ) figures indicate, usually to little or no competitive advantage. Technological investments in military hardware, moreover, follow the marginal return curve of all technological developments . Improvement innovations (as in the steam engine) become harder to achieve and yield declining marginal benefits. Scherer concludes, for example, that the F-4 warplane was a greater technological leap relative to the subsonic F-85 or F-86 than the more recent F- 15 was to the F-4 (1984: 266). Similarly, if increased complexity is undertaken because of a need for hierarchical