The growing complexity of society, along with the reduced returns produced by such complexity, has been considered by Dr. Joseph Tainter. He's produced a paper that gives pause.

LINK

In planning or preparing for the future, we face the challenge of first discerning the future. What might it hold? Let us consider the following quotation from the cited paper:

In the half-century from 235 to 284 the empire nearly came to an end. There were foreign and civil wars almost without interruption. The period witnessed 26 legitimate emperors and perhaps 50 usurpers. Cities were sacked and frontier provinces devastated. The empire shrank in the 260s to Italy, the Balkans, and North Africa. By prodigious effort the empire survived the crisis, but it emerged at the turn of the fourth century AD as a very different organization....

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