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Title: The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter ISBN: 0-521-38673-X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Are Collapses Social or "Thing" events?
Comment: While lots of authors look for a simplistic "single cause" of collapse (that another reviewer seems to have bought into!) Tainter's view is a lot more global. Single causes? Maybe...but they all have a common element: declining marginal return for additional effort. That's the underlying issue that sparked massive protest at the WTO meetings in Seattle. Folks are working harder and harder just to stay even. If Y2K'ers don't understand that our marginal rate of return has headed south, they're missing Tainter's point.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating and deeply disturbing
Comment: Tainter's project here is to find a kind of grand unifying theory to explain the strange and disturbing fact that every complex civilisation the world has ever seen has collapsed.
Tainter first elegantly disposes of the usual theories of social decline (disappearance of natural resources, invasions of barbarians, etc). He then lays out his theory of decline: as societies become more complex, the costs of meeting new challenges increase, until there comes a point where extra resources devoted to meeting new challenges produce diminihsing and then negative returns. At this point, societies become less complex (they collapse into smaller societies).
Complexity, writes Tainter, describes a variety of characteristics in a number of societies-- many differentiated social roles, a large class of administrators not directly involved in the production of primary resources, much energy devoted to different kinds of communication, centralised government, etc. Societies become more complex in order to solve problems. Consider this example:
A simple hunter-gatherer society with limited agriculture (i.e. garden plots) is faced with a problem, such as a seasonal drop in food production (or an invasion from its neighbours who have the same problem and are coming over for food). The bottom line is, this society faces an energy shortage. This society could respond to the food crisis by either declining in numbers (die-off) or by increasing production. Most societies choose the latter. In order to increase production, this society will need to either expand territorially or increase agricultural production . In either case, this investment in complexity can pay off substantially in either increased access to food or increased food production.
Herein, however, lies the rub. Since, as Tainter writes, the "number of challenges with which the Universe can confront a society is infinite," complex societies need to keep on increasing their level of complexity in order to survive new challenges. And there are, as Tainter proves, diminishing returns on all such investments in complexity. The hunter-gatheres of the above example face problems. If they conquer their neighbours, they have to garrison those territories. If they start agriculture ona larger scale, they have to create a new class of citizens to man the farms, distribute and store the grain, and guard it from animals and invaders. In either case, the increases in access to energy (food) are offset somewhat by the increased cost of social complexity. As the society gets MORE complex to confront newer challenges, the returns diminish. Eventually, the costs of maintaining garrisons (as the Romans found) is so high that ht epopualtion revolts and welcoems the invaders with their simpler way of life and their lower taxes. Or, agricultural challenges (a massive drought, or degradation of soils) are so great that the society cannot muster the energy reserves to deal with them.
Tainter's book examines the Maya, Chacoan and Roman collapses in terms of his theory of diminishing marginal returns on investments in complexity. This is the fascinating part of the book; the disturbing section is the final chapter, where Tainter describes the modern world's "arms race of complexity" and makes some uncomfortable suggestions about our own future. Tainter musters an impressive array of statistics to show us that we are facing declining returns on invesments in technology, energy production, etc. (A precis of this book and updated statistics is here : http://dieoff.org/page134.htm). In an age where the U.S. invasion of Iraq has yielded net negative returns on investment even for the invaders (where's that cheap oil?), where the rate of return on oil discovery is dropping monthly, and where additional investments in education and health care in industrialised countries make no signiicant increases in outcomes, the hsitorical focus of Tainter's work starts to become eerily prescient.
The scary thing about this deeply thoughtful and thoroughly researched book is its contention that the future, for all our knowledge and technology, might be an awful lot like the past.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not particularly useful for Y2K'ers
Comment: Yourdon recommends Joseph Tainter's book, _The Collapse of Complex Societies_ (1988).
From a Y2K perspective, after a quick skim, not sure it is worth reading unless you are really interested in detailed history and economics. This book does not attempt to describe the collapses or provide especially helpful info in our context, I think.
The author IS rather proud of himself, though, as he beats up on many other theories of how civilizations collapse (e.g., Roman, Mayan). Other authors have proposed causes such as:
1. Depletion of vital resources, 2. Discovery of brand new resources, 3. Catastrophes, 4. Insufficient response to circumstances, 5. Competition from other complex societies, 6. Intruders, 7. Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement/misbehavior, 8. Social dysfunction, 9. Mystical, 10. Chance concatenation of bad things
He says the cause is not these things, but instead, the fact that the society had achieved a level of complexity such that the economic overhead for maintaining the bureaucracy, etc was so great that the society was weakened. Then, when items like 1-10 occur, the society is less able to handle it.
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Title: The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg ISBN: 0865714827 Publisher: New Society Publishers Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author by Michael T. Klare ISBN: 0805055762 Publisher: Owl Books (NY) Pub. Date: 13 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Overshoot by William Catton ISBN: 0252009886 Publisher: University of Illinois Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1982 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil by David Goodstein ISBN: 0393058573 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2004 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Coming Oil Crisis by C. J. Campbell ISBN: 0906522110 Publisher: Multi-Science Publishing Co. Ltd. Pub. Date: 01 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $33.00 |
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