alt Hacker NewsIll check the book out as I am extremely interested in these kind of topics. Although I am extremely pessimistic.
You wrote "the west", what system will (in theory) work out? And how much does it value the individual?
I know capitalism for example, can in theory, never succeed as its base premise is built on endless growth (which simply wont work out with finite resources). It's a short term system that we need to improve on. All the other systems we had, like feudalism, I'd rather die than live in... Personally I'd highly prefer socialism, but that also wont work out as too many humans highly reject its concept and its also not safe from corruption.
Tainter suggests that societies collapse because the costs of maintaining complexity eventually outweigh the benefits. “Collapse” in this context is more like a simplification than a catastrophe. And he points out that for a lot of people, the collapse actually made life better for them, as it becomes more local and less totalitarian.
I mentioned the west because I’m a westerner with little experience of other systems, but I don’t think Tainter’s conception of a collapse would be limited to the west.
Interestingly since you edited your comment to talk about capitalism, I think under the lense of Tainter’s theory it’s the most resilient to collapse since it’s simpler, at least in theory. In practice it’s heavily regulated - in fact I’d say no country really is capitalist, at most you could say it’s “state capitalism” which is very different from free market capitalism. But you’re also not wrong in that it has issues of its own.