The Clay Shirky talk, "The Collapse of Complex Business Models" is play on "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter (as mentioned in the post).
Another great person to study in systems and complexity is Jane Jacobs.
One parallel is see is people "warning" about the impending population collapse (which we desperately need), but what we need to do is actively restructure our society to handle it gracefully.
https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/archae...