A brilliant book. From the encompassing theorizing to the eloquent prose and acknowledgement of the good intentions of humans. I would appreciate more research on societal collapse to find cracks in the theory. What Tainter provided in this book is minimal, albeit a good start for a new theory.

This was a great complement to Williams Catton's Overshoot. I suggest topping it off with Graebor and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything for a balanced meal of a lovingly concerned, deep understanding of us, humanity, in the current metacrisis.

HOW CAN WE ACCOUNT FOR SOCIETAL COLLAPSE?
Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies is a dialectic investigation into the cause of societal collapse. The book is naturally divided into four sections:

• Survey and criticism of previous attempts to explain the reason for societal collapse
• Delineation of Tainter’s own theory
• Case studies
• Synthesis and application

The criticism section is well thought out and supported with an enormous number of references. So many, in fact, as to interrupt the flow of argument. At times I felt like I was reading a bibliography. Tainter divides previous attempts at explanation into two categories: the incomplete and the mystical. Following Tainter, incomplete explanations aren’t wrong, but their explanatory powers are limited to a few special cases. In his synthesis, Tainter tries to show that each of the incomplete can be subsumed into his explanation. Mystical explanations, on the other hand, fail on epistemological grounds. I.e., they fall short of formal requirements for an explanation. Sort of like an exhausted parent’s response to a child’s continual demands for a reason – Because I say so.

Tainter’s explanation is easy to grasp. Societies (organisations, individuals, ..) initially act to access resources in the simplest way. Once the productive capacity of the simplest approach is exhausted, they move on to the next most accessible pattern of behaviour. Thus, small bands initially rely on hunting and gathering. Once that has been exhausted, they move on to swidden (=cut and burn) agriculture, then to intensive agriculture. Each stage in this progression leads to increased complexity, with an ever more onerous administrative burden. Tainter claims there is an inevitable decrease in the marginal utility associated with each increase in complexity. Eventually, the return on added complexity becomes so tenuous that the society loses viability and is either subsumed by a competing neighbour or, if there is no similar society in the surroundings, it experiences rapid collapse.

It is not hard to see some weak points in this argument and, in fact, Tainter cites some himself, however without effectively rebutting them. So, for instance, Tainter is unable to quantify the decrease in the marginal utility for historical examples. Instead he gives a narrative account of how the dynamic plays out in three societies: the western Roman Empire, the lowland Maya and the Chacoans of the San Juan Basin – three readable and interesting accounts.

Following Tainter, the western Roman Empire was based on serial depredation of neighbouring societies, with each conquest leading to a one-time, rapid infusion of resources. With each conquest financing the next, Rome grew ever larger until it eventually exhausted the availability of resource rich neighbours. Simultaneously, Rome incurred the ever greater cost of defending its disparate empire. Finally Rome inevitably ran into similarly powerful society following the same programme (first Parthian, later Sassanid Persia). Rome’s attempt to meet these challenges led to impoverishment and demographic collapse of its citizenry, even to the point where its own citizens ended up aiding invaders so as to revert back to a better and lower level of complexity.

Mayan society initially consisted of a large number of independent polities in a geographically homogeneous and physically constrained region. During lean years, polities simultaneously experienced critical food shortages. Polities were forced to militarise so as to raid neighbour’s as well as to defend their own food stores. Larger polities undertook ever more monumental ceremonial building projects so as to impress smaller polities to join their military alliance. Examination of graves show that the state of health and level of nutrition of male Mayans to have steadily decreased. (Female Mayans remained well fed. Presumably, so they would be able to bear more children to serve in the military).

Competition with its neighbours made it impossible for any individual Mayan polity to revert to an earlier state where it was still able to meet the needs of its population. Once the point was reached where the benefits of belonging to society were exceeded by its drawbacks, individuals simply walked away.

The third narrative concerns the much less well-known Chacoans, located in what is now the southwest USA. Unlike the Maya, the Chacoans had access to a geographically and climatically diverse regions on their periphery. Whereas Mayan polities suffer simultaneously during bad harvest years, Chacoans were able to develop a system of trade links, providing a kind of insurance against a bad harvest in any locale. The system worked well until increasing population pressure led to expansion into ever more marginal regions as well as ever higher population density in the core location. The Chacoans adapted by developing sophisticated food storage and distribution technologies, together with an bureaucracy for their management. Eventually the administrative cost of this system consumed so large a proportion of the Chacoans’ resources that collapse became preferable to addition of further complexity.

Tainter claims his explanation applies not just to past societies, but has a bearing on present societies. This neglects the fact that we are much better positioned today to overcome the strict limits applying to traditional societies. Not only do we have technologies, but we are in able to invent new technologies. Of course, technology also presents us with novel challenges which traditional societies never encountered. Up until now, our ability to innovate has always exceeded the problems we create for ourselves. On the other hand, we’ve reached a point where a single failure to adapt could lead to a world-wide collapse. This puts to question the relevance of Tainter to our situation today.

Finally, Tainter’s explanation relies very heavily on the notion of decreasing marginal utility – that we do the easiest things first, with later adaptations requiring more effort and producing fewer results. But this neglects the many ways in which the opposite effect can be observe – cases where we begin at something awkwardly, haltingly, but then gain experience, refining and improving our procedures. This is a kind of technology which was available to ancient societies too. And Tainter ignores them.

Detta är en sådan där bok som överbrygger skillnaderna mellan flera fält - i detta fall antropologi, statsvetenskap och historia. Sådana böcker kan antingen bli riktigt bra, eller riktigt dåliga. Denna var riktigt bra.

Den korta sammanfattningen är att samhällen som blir för komplexa kollapsar. För många ekonomiska och kulturella band och ritualer, leder till överreglering, som i sin tur gör att för många resurser tvingas in i modeller där de inte gör nytta. De produktiva delarna av samhället förlorar därför sin lojalitet till dess normer och intressen, och försöker istället bryta ut delar, och göra dessa till lokalstater. Decentralisering blir ett sätt att överleva, men resulterar ofta i mindre befolkningar och kulturella och teknologiska förluster. Detta i de fall där inte handelsnätverk eller resurssystem som kollapsar leder till direkta civilisationsförluster. Civilisationsförlusterna möjliggör brutalare beteenden, som att mörda belastningar, och förslava de som är störande, vilket skapar lokala vinster, på kort sikt.

Boken är skrämmande, tvingar fram tankar, och manar till handling. Förra gången jag läste den tappade jag fokus och anteckningar, så jag kände att jag behövde göra det igen. Den svarar effektivt på Spenglers utmaning, och ger en bättre förklaringsmodell. Toynbees modell tillhör de som jag jobbar med, men inte har begripit ännu; om de Tainter lyckas överbygga den får alltså vara osagt. Han introducerar också teorier jag knappt känner till, och det är alltid ett nöje.

Om jag skall destillera denna läsning till något användbart: kollaps ersätter erövring endast om det finns ett maktvakum; korruption och resurseffektiviseringar blir ofta lika kostbara i längden; samhällen behöver uppleva både yttre tryck, och inre konflikt för att överleva; etik hjälper, men kan inte ersätta ekonomi; ständig tillväxt är ett sätt att skjuta på de ekonomiska problem som leder till kollapsen, men i slutändan är den enda lösningen depolitisering och ökad förmåga till intern problemlösning.

Jag har sällan läst ett bättre försvar för liberalkonservatism. Jag kan inte annat än konstatera att det ligger i linje med samma principer som förordats sedan Salamancaskolan eller Fysiokraterna. Vårt hot ligger i så fall i att vi kapitulerar allt för villigt för internationella handelsnät till förmån för decentraliserade lokala sådana. Här är jag medskyldig.

Jag kan inte annat än att vilja jämföra denna med Hegels rättvisans historia - båda två landar i samma problemkomplex, vilket också Tainter tar upp - men från olika ingångar.

Frånvaron av en messiansk slutkläm, ett recept för att minska risken för imperieförfall, är utmanande. Det finns några smånoter, men det verkar som om författaren överlämnar åt oss att förvalta. Jag hoppas att vi visar oss värdiga.

Jag rekommenderar boken starkt, till alla som bryr sig om sin omvärld, och civilisationens överlevnad. Om vi fortfarande gör det.

The first half of this book made me really look at the American hegemony and consider if we’re about to witness a true collapse.

That said, the second half of his book (ie his theory) was not super interesting. Marginal thinking is relatively intuitive. So once he mentioned it, the analysis was obvious. The rest of the book I was simply validating my extrapolation.

Good book about key things to consider about complex societies. However his understanding of Marx and class struggle is simplistic and it's this simplistic version that he argues against, that's a disservice to both Marx and his own theory. Hopefully I can expand on this in the future when I go back through the book.

Basically complexity has an energy cost and you get diminishing returns. It prompts the question how can we retain the essentials and some comforts without compounding issues, how can we keep a high level of coordination without the high cost of growing complexity.

I'm fairly obsessed with civilizational collapse and this is an excellent treatment of the subject matter. So it goes without saying that I'm predisposed to love this book.

However, I think the real value in this book is with respect to organizational collapse. This should be on every MBA's reading list. This is the best and most approachable treatment of how organizations creep in complexity until they are so brittle the only acceptable way forward is collapse.

Exemplary book. States its aims clearly, surveys the state of the art, proposes its own theory. Easy to read too. At this point I don't even have to be convinced by the theory (although I am).

I'm glad I slogged through the first half of the book which, as has been pointed out, was a slightly tedious academic summary of historical theories of Civilizational Collapse. It had to be done I suppose, all good.

The second half of the book is where Tainter lays out his own thesis and to me (admittedly not well acquainted with this field) it was illuminating and profound. Enough summaries have been done here that mine won't warrant doing, but this is one of those books that might change your perspective on the world. Certainly, as one who is prone to systems thinking, I am likely to chew on Tainter's work until my last days.

A dry read, yes. But very much worth it. Tainter looks at how complex societies--- great powers, if you will ---collapse. And at what "collapse" means and at how the word has been misused. While Tainter can be a bit too Colin Renfrew in his use of quantification, his discussion of how complexity unravels and how increasing social complexity ultimately begins to yield lower and lower returns on social investment is fascinating.

Moved to gwern.net.

Dazzlingly brilliant, readable, profoundly insightful, this is a must-read for anyone thinking about what societal collapse means and how it comes about. Much shorter, deeper and more convincing than Jared Diamond's one-note work, Tainter's deftly analyzes the logic of and evidence for some dozen definitions of collapse in application to a range of ancient civilizations, honing down to a robust and satisfying model, despite its leaning on rational-actor assumptions.

If you think we might be on our way to becoming a case study of collapse, read this work now.

This is one of my few foundational books that explain the fate of nations. Mechanisms underpinning outcomes are not just important in organic chemistry, but in our lives and the courses taken by political leadership.

Written in the Reagan years, it has held up very, very well. He said we have nothing to worry about, in a coda explaining how his theories are relevant, in the present 1980s. What he has written is not happening because the US of A is strong, Europe is strong, and the Soviet Union is strong. Gulp.