Tainter defines collapse as major losses in complexity, evaluates some theories of collapse, defines them as inadequate, and proposes a new theory: over time, investments in overall sociopolitical and economic complexity exhibit diminishing returns. He presents solid evidence for it — even though much of our "data" for pre-Industrial Revolution societies is spotty at best — and does a decent job applying it to current industrialized societies.

The writing overall is very stiff; it reads like a long academic paper.

This was a quite interesting book. He makes a convincing case of societal collapse occurring because marginal costs of maintaining the system become too high compared to benefits. Interestingly competition with others may tie states to a competition that avoids collapse (for the time being) since collapse is not possible if another organized state is there to take over. This is of course the situation we have today. Declining marginal benefits are still there and to sustain a complex system requires an external energy subsidy. This was far deeper and nuanced thinking that the standard shallow storyline.

This book gave me the blues, but though I didn't necessarily like what Tainter had to say, I found his arguments driving me to the conclusion that the current push for further complexity in human civilization is not sustainable.

Now, the focus of this book is not on contemporary data which may indicate that our society is headed for collapse, but rather on indirect evidence from archaeological studies of ancient civilizations like the Mayans and Romans. Since these civilizations didn't keep records on their productivity like we do today, scientists have had to apply their measurements of skeletal growth, for example, on what may have happened to impact nutritional status of the working classes that supported the complexity of the civilization. Tainter's conclusion is that inevitably we get a diminishing state of return of investment in complexity.

So if we then think about where we are in contemporary civilization, such as analyzing data that we currently consume 20 fossil fuel calories for every calorie of food we consume, it starts to look like we are heading in a bad direction. Other data such as the amount of patents being produced over time indicate that the cost of innovation is going up. Even scarier, complex systems are quite unpredictable, so if our society as we know it is going to collapse, we won't really know when that will happen. We may think things are going along just fine. After all, it sure looks like new technologies are coming out every day! But that's not necessarily the case. And if a collapse does happen, it will happen within just a few generations. The rapidity of the decline is why Tainter refers to it as "collapse." Reduction in growth is not a smooth downward curve but a sharp precipice.

Does this mean you should give up your dreams of being a parent and consider being a "Dink" (dual income, no kids)? I would say no, but I do think the study of complex systems and economics should be a priority in schools, because there just seems to be too much of an assumption from our leaders that as long as we have free markets that can respond to signals that innovation needs to step up to address new challenges, it'll all be fine. If we have to, we can colonize other planets, right?

But I certainly have seen in my lifetime some disturbing trends. Cars used to run on one means of propulsion, and now with hybrid cars they need two. A household with one modest income could live comfortably and save up a nice nest egg to cover retirement and funeral expenses and still leave a nice inheritence for their kids--now we need two breadwinners. Even in my own industry of medicine, I've seen the rising cost of complexity leading to diminishing returns. The amount of new graduates from medical school is not keeping up with the dying and retiring population of doctors while the amount of healthcare positions NOT directly involved in clinical care, such as practice managers, administrative clerks, and insurance navigators, have risen 300 percent in a decade. I make almost a third more than I did in twenty years ago, but my purchasing power has drastically reduced, while the system desperately searches for cheaper alternatives to actual physicians to provide medical care for a growing population of underserved, such as giving prescription privileges to psychologists and relying more on physician assistants and nurse practitioners. The cost of medications, even the good old stuff invented fifty years ago, is skyrocketing.

Tainter's work gives you a fine background on why some of the economic phenomena around you are happening, and I think it is worth anyone looking into. Tainter makes the point that humans did not evolve to have brains that could look broadly at time and space, and thus we tend to only do what seems best for us at the time, not what's best globally and for the sustainability of future generations. But obviously we have the capability of playing things forward, and books like these certainly give us some appreciation for the complexity of the problem and the need to think ahead.

Finally found a copy of this in the Nuffield College library. Only took me 9 years! It was worth the wait though. As a non-archaeologist, non-anthropologist and non-sociologist, with some background in IR theory, it took a bit of time to chew through this — accessible as it is. While pretty old now, I think it generally stands up, though my next trick is to find out where the scholarship has gone in the last 35 years. His theory of collapse as a result of declining marginal returns on investment in complexity seems like an important explanatory step, but not perhaps as powerful or as comprehensive as he hoped.

Now THIS is a fantastic book! Normally I am a bit skeptical of the analysis of historians as they seem to often have soft logic, often recurring to very subjective values or opinions, and telling long and boring stories about concepts such as heroism, some small details, series of random eveniments and such things, which are all good and great, but seem to me to have little explanatory power... NOT THIS BOOK though! I was delighted to see the author picking a large spectrum of historical events in the treatment of hist subject, trying to pick common and logical similarities and differences that would allow one to form a bigger picture!

I was delighted that he found through his research evidence of some things i have long partially suspected and that he is quite mercilessly critical of theories which ascribe collapse of certain societies to invasions, moral weakness, natural events or resource depletions, even though often the same civilization had not that long ago proven more than resilient and able to deal with relatively bigger invasions, resource shocks or series of coincidences. Instead his analysis of Mayan, Roman, Cacoan civilizations (and others, but these mainly) lead him to arrive at a bigger theory, that seems to explain much better and analytically all of the cases and even cases which are given unsatisfactory answers by other historians leading them to say obscure stuff such as "this great civilization disappeared suddenly and without reason".

The explanation, he finds has to do with society's investment in complexity: in the initial stages people get great advantages from investments in society & complexity, security, protection, organization, safety against random but recurring events, however as they grow societies reach levels so complex that additional investments in complexity produce diminishing returns, until they reach a point where it pays for them to go back to lower levels of complexity.

I also love that unlike most authors he does not have this super negative view of these collapses that one often encounters, and far from threating them as failures to adapt realizes that they are in fact great successes in adapting, even though the adaptation might be in a direction that many dislike. He identifies many of our biases, including the biases of historians and culture people to see these collapses as negative events even though they might have been positive steps for the actual real people living then then there: living in an advanced complex world we only see values in such complex things, and historians/archeologists/art collectors/philosophers feel value only in the works of complex civilizations, as they are grand and imposing and well kept, even if they were produced at the edge of the precipice, at great social and human costs and in inefficient ways.

Of the many fantastic examples in the book one of the most interesting is the fall of the roman empire in the 4-5th centuries when a traditional historian might say that roman provinces fell under barbarian conquest the author brings forth evidence that many of the peasants, long exhausted by the roman bureaucratic parasitic aparatus not only became apathetic towards the roman empire but actually invited the barbarians to conquer them as their lives would improve with lower taxes for the same or better levels of protection. Indeed they were to be proven right in time as for the centuries to come these decentralized units were better able to protect at much smaller costs. I find such historical examples very interesting and relevant in our age when centralization and bureaucratization has become such a huge taxing burden on the back of society. This and the many historical examples of what has in the past happened to the freedom/money/wealth of the peoples who's governments have constantly expanded, first naturally and then by growing deeper and deeper into debt should be an eye opening view into the past for things that are probably going to happen again and again... well, at least as long as humans remain humans :P Brilliant book! I warmly recommend it to anybody who's willing to learn from the experiences of our grand-grand-grand-grand-grand... fathers

Book reviews are sometimes uncertain exercises and of questionable value, especially mine. I'll confess up front that I often review on the utility of the work at hand and its relation to me, me, ME! not on the book's actual scholarly merit.
Take this book. This is probably a fine academic work. Tainter certainly knows his shit, so to speak. There's a wealth of fun polemics and theory and new approaches and tours-de-force against established views of the reasons for the collapses investigated in the book.
What you don't get is what I selfishly expected: actual histories, and maybe even some comparative histories writ large, of a slew of societies that're touched on in the beginning. In the end, we only really get a big focus on three: Rome, the Maya, and the Chaco (not be confused with Chaka from 'Land of the Lost' ((cf my "Chaka Make Fire: Primitivist Archetypes in 1980s Children's Programming"))). These bits are neat, but this is only a small part of the book. Much is given over to exploring dominant views and paradigms and collapse and yes and so on and mhm.
So, I wouldn't say this is for the layman. Or laywoman. That doesn't sound right. Layfolk. And again, it's not to say it isn't a fine specimen, it just wasn't very good. To me. Me me ME!

This book is a rather dry read but it is very informative. Tainter seeks to develop a universal explanation for the collapse of complex societies. He provides a thorough overview of the many explanations offered by historians to explain the many frequent occurrences of societal collapse throughout history. He then discounts all of them as inadequate. He offers a framework for explaining collapse which he sums up in four concepts:

1) human societies are problem-solving organizations
2) sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance
3) increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita
4) investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.

(see what I mean by "dry"?) Basically complexity becomes too costly and so collapse occurs.

Tainter applies his framework to three well-known societal collapses to see how well it holds up: Western Roman Empire, Classical Maya, and Chaco Canyon. These offer different levels of complexity and different sources of evidence to compare against each other. This was probably the most interesting part of the book.

Very interesting and really makes you think about current societies like the USA and it’s current situation.

Review of The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter

The Roman Empire is paradoxically one of history’s greatest successes and one of its greatest failures,” said Joseph A. Tainter.

The author seeks to find out what happened to Rome and many civilizations that declined after long periods of splendor in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies.

There is a discussion of natural disasters, the depletion of natural resources, invasions, or government mismanagement as the causes of the decline of many outstanding civilizations. Theories on the collapse of the Mayan civilization come to mind, for example, in which a simple Google search provides us with multiple results.

But it is hard to imagine a complex society with skills to resolve big problems, not being able to reverse challenges.

Tainter explores how humanity has gone from living in simple societies, with little division of labor and ephemeral political leaders, to complex societies with a population that has many and quite varied occupations, a defined territory and a government that exercises a monopoly in the use of force to avoid internal conflicts.

In this evolution toward complexity, which in principle aims to solve the problems that are posed to humanity and improve the population’s standard of living, a serious situation has emerged. It is increasingly necessary to invest more in activities that generate lower yields, and it is possible that this is where societies may collapse — that is, they become simpler again.

A complex society involves:

The processing of increasing amounts of information, which implies difficulties in handling data and a considerable quantity of interrelated and, at times, redundant information.
The consumption of a large amount of scarce natural resources, which are obtained with increasingly greater effort.
Having a greater number of bureaucrats to organize and regulate the varied amount of human activities, which, in turn, requires proportionately more taxes.
Thus, the economy has to divert increasing amounts of resources directly related to its very complexity. This translates into increasingly lower growth in the production of goods.
We have a clear example of this in the United States, with huge expenditures on national security — fighting even in countries that are literally on the other side of the world — or strategies and programs to contain the financial crisis, without this enabling the population to improve its standard of living.

Today, Europe also provides us with a variety of clear examples of public finances totally out of control, from Greece to Italy, to Spain, Ireland and the United Kingdom. Some analysts believe that this situation will again lead the global economy into a recession.

Another example is Mexico, where we have created large bureaucratic structures that ultimately slow economic activity and then require more taxes to sustain them.

At the same time, today we see that the so-called welfare state has failed and if we do not prevent its collapse we will generate social costs of incalculable dimensions.

The book helps to understand our history and extrapolate lessons to the delicate global situation of public finances, especially since governments that claim to be the solution to the global crisis often represent the problem.

Our quick and simple value refers precisely to the need to avoid needless complexity. It means doing without redundant functions and processes and bureaucracies.

Simple things are taught and learned quickly and can be handled more efficiently. These are essential ingredients of the competitiveness and growth of any company that does not want to collapse under the weight of its own complexity. I hope that those in power understand these principles to avoid the collapse of our societies.

A good book but also what a ramble!

Understandable, Engaging, Not Depressing
The best nonfiction books usually do 5 things:
They answer the questions you had before you started.
They tell you things you didn't know that you didn't know.
They completely destroy your comfortable preconceptions and get you to view the whole world in a new way.
They also say that they don't know, when they just don't know.
And Oh so important. They tell you the things you thought you knew that are wrong.

I've got a short list of brain breaking books that redirected my thinking. This easily made the list
Germs, Guns, & Steel. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Darwin Comes to Town. and How Religion Evolved.
Now add this to the list.
Oh, and if you are leery that this is some political polemic that will say bad things will happen if we all don't conform the author's ideology Never fear! This has cold hard facts enough to stop any attempt to hijack it from either side of the spectrum. Yes, even my cherished notions of justice and fairness were swept aside with out being a downer. (How did he do that?)

With the global economy teetering on a shaky foundation and prepper-types everywhere heralding the end of global civilization as we know it, the nature and mechanism of the collapse of complex societies has rarely seemed as relevant as it does today.

Tainter's opus is a work of the sort that I have missed in my post-graduate world: a meticulously-researched assessment of existing theories — using a variety of primary and secondary sources — culminating in the assertion of a paradigm of his own.

His explanation goes like this:

1. human societies are problem-solving organizations
2. sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance
3. increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
4. investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving responses often reaches a point of declining marginal returns

In short, he rejects most of the conventional explanations for collapse. Causal mechanisms that judge the underlying "character" or "vitality" of a civilization are dismissed out of hand as baseless moralizing. Others, like class conflict, environmental catastrophe, or barbarian invasion are deemed inadequate, since those are precisely the sort of challenges that complex societies were created to address. It is the inability to deal with these "stress surges" that is responsible for collapse, not the surges themselves.

Tainter uses the examples of the Romans, the Maya and the Chacoans to demonstrate how his theory plays out. While the conditions in all three are wildly different, the declining returns on sociopolitical complexity are implicated each time.

For the Romans, the empire was essentially founded on conquest. They were able to finance their complex society by plundering their areas of conquest. When their borders reached a certain point, the costs of maintaining the empire exceeded the possible gains by further conquest. They reverted to taxation, debasing the currency, and turning to slavery, which ultimately weakened their society to barbarian incursion.

The Maya suffered under a kind of crisis of the commons. They were constrained geographically, which lead to competition between various political centers. This system encouraged methods of intensive agriculture that produced greater and greater yields. But faced with continued competition, there was upward pressure on population numbers. But this increased population required greater agricultural efforts and eventually they reached a point at which they could not continue this upward spiral.

The Chacoans of the American Southwest based their society on "energy averaging," where a confederation of local communities could feed into a larger system such that they would pay into it in times of surplus and take from it in times of need. But when more and more communities were added that were subject to the same stress surges like drought or invasion, the utility of the system declined.

In every case, when the advantages of maintaining a complex society dip below those to be gained by a breakup into smaller units, a civilization disintegrates. Full collapse, though, only occurs in the presence of a power vacuum. When there are warring polities declining marginal utility simply opens one up to conquest by one's neighbors.

That's why collapse as it has historically occurred isn't really possible today. Linked as we are by globalization, if any one nation collapses, they'll just be bailed out and subsumed by another. But obviously, without a new energy input, this state of affairs can't go forever. So when the modern, globalized economy goes down, it basically has to all go down together.

What I like about Tainter is that he doesn't assume that complex societies are the ultimate good. He rejects outlooks that can't be backed by empirical evidence. He takes ideas like Marxist conflict theory and includes them in his overall theory. He seems fair and level-headed.

And ultimately, it's that that makes me look at his conclusions for modern society seriously.