Although published over 30 years ago this is still an excellent read for those interested in civilizational collapse.

Tainter offers a critique of earlier, singular, theories of collapse then explores his own theory.

An important book for series readers. Not a simple or easy read.

Highly Recommended.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.

LINK: https://narraredistoria.com/2024/12/0...

La consapevolezza che la civiltà non sia eterna è un’idea in realtà antica. Essa nacque ancor prima che il crollo dell’impero romano – uno degli eventi più significativi, evocativi e stimolanti intellettualmente della storia occidentale e quello a cui tutti (addetti ai lavori e non) pensano quando si scrivono parole come “declino” o “caduta” – influenzasse l’immaginario collettivo. Già un autore come Polibio, che scrive nel II secolo a.C. cioè nel momento di ascesa della civiltà romana e declino di quella greca, paragonava popoli e stati ad organismi vitali, sottoposti quindi a cicli di nascita, crescita, declino e morte.

La caduta dell’impero romano in Occidente, che dopo una spettacolare ascesa garantì un lungo periodo di prosperità prima di iniziare un lento declino fino al collasso, che nel V secolo fu rapido, è forse il singolo evento più influente della storia occidentale e forse mondiale. Esso alimenta ancora – anche oggi – le molte paure millenaristiche che agitano le società: la bomba demografica, la crisi energetica, i cambiamenti climatici, le ondate migratorie, l’ascesa di nuove potenze di altri continenti eccetera eccetera. Oltre a questa forte influenza sull’immaginario collettivo e inconscio, lo studio della caduta dell’impero romano ha costituito per generazioni di studiosi terreno fertile di dibattito.

Nonostante ciò, in occidente non si è mai cercato di sviluppare una teoria complessiva, organica e scientifica del concetto di “collasso” di una civiltà. Perché una civiltà, in passato prospera e vitale, declina? Molti hanno risposto a questo domande, ma pochissimi hanno tentato di farlo in modo organico e scientificamente sviluppato.

I tanti “declini” della civiltà
Questo è quello che dice l’autore del libro di cui parliamo oggi, Joseph A. Tainter, storico e antropologo americano. Anzitutto, la terminologia: “declino” e “caduta”, per quanto siano termini d’uso comune, non sono precisi quanto “collasso”. Questa parola, infatti, racchiude in sé il vero significato della caduta di una civiltà: il diminuito livello di complessità. Gli abitanti di Roma, ancora al principio del V secolo d.C., ricevevano rifornimenti alimentari gratuiti dallo stato, che provvedeva a questo facendo arrivare il grano da altre parti dell’impero grazie ad una complessa organizzazione logistica. Soltanto pochi decenni dopo (è sufficiente arrivare alla guerra greco-gotica di metà VI secolo), invece, troviamo Roma spopolata, le province dell’impero occupate dai barbari e gli antichi monumenti riutilizzati per realizzare edifici di fortuna. Questo è ciò di cui si parla quando si usa la parola “collasso” di una civiltà: rotte commerciali che spariscono; strutture burocratiche che perdono di significato; vita urbana che diventa insostenibile; organizzazione e trasmissione del sapere che si interrompe.

Perché dunque l’autore ricorre a questo termine? Perché nel passato, per descrivere le cause del collasso (o, come si diceva spesso, della “caduta”) di una società, si è sempre fatto ricorso a spiegazioni e termini ad hoc. Quasi ogni storico negli ultimi mille anni ha proposto la sua spiegazione per la caduta dell’impero: la diffusione del cristianesimo, le invasioni dei barbari, l’inflazione, la crisi demografica, le continue usurpazioni imperiali eccetera. Lo stesso è avvenuto quando, sviluppatisi gli studi storici e le ricerche archeologiche, l’occidente ha scoperto e indagato altre civiltà come quelle sumeriche, quelle precolombiane e quelle del Mediterraneo antico.

Nessuno, invece, ha cercato di studiare in modo generale il collasso di una civiltà. L’unica eccezione è stata rappresentata dalle “teorie mistiche”, come le chiama l’autore, cioè quelle che paragonano la civiltà ad un organismo biologico – sulla scia di Polibio – e i cui ultimi esponenti sono stati Oswald Spengler e Richard Toynbee. Tali teorie vanno però rigettate, secondo Tainter, perché non sono teorie che poggiano su basi scientifiche ed esprimono idee e concetti accettabili fino alla metà del XX secolo, ma oggi ormai insostenibili; inoltre, per la loro stessa natura, non sono verificabili scientificamente.

Collasso di una civiltà e complessità
Dunque, cos’è il collasso di una società?

“A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.”

“Una società è collassata quando mostra una rapida e significativa perdita di un livello determinato di complessità sociopolitica”.

Non esiste un livello minimo di complessità: qualsiasi società, sia essa la Roma imperiale del II secolo, la civiltà della valle dell’Indo del III millennio a.C., la civiltà Maya o anche popoli seminomadi di raccoglitori, presenta sempre stratificazione interna, ridistribuzione di risorse, meccanismi di condivisione di informazioni, espressioni collettive e artistiche. Il grado di complessità, insomma, può essere diverso, ma mai assente, perché anche una “semplice” tribù costituita da pochi gruppi famigliari esprime una sua complessità. Il collasso, inoltre, non deve essere confuso con la scomparsa di entità politiche (su cui si focalizzavano gli studiosi del passato) ma deve essere limitato alla scomparsa di certi modi di organizzarsi di una società.

Prima di addentrarsi nell’esposizione della teoria dei “rendimenti marginali decrescenti”, l’autore espone le spiegazioni “classiche” del collasso di numerosi casi storici e tenta anche di schematizzare le principali ragioni addotte da storici e studiosi.

Esaurimento di risorse vitali su cui la società dipende;
L’apparire di nuove risorse;
Catastrofi naturali insormontabili;
Risposta insufficiente a circostanze contingenti;
Altre società complesse;
Invasori;
Conflitti di classe e cattiva gestione da parte delle élite;
Disfunzione sociale;
Fattori mistici;
Concatenazione di eventi;
Fattori economici.
In modo un po’ pedante l’autore poi riporta, per ogni singola spiegazione elencata sopra, lo stato delle ricerche sui vari casi storici: l’impero romano, ovviamente; la civiltà minoica e quella micenea; l’impero ittita; le numerose civiltà precolombiane; alcune tribù africane. In conclusione, ognuno di questi approcci – tranne quello mistico – ha un suo merito, ma è incompleto.

La caduta della complessità
Il quarto capitolo è il cuore dell’opera. Ogni società, al crescere della propria complessità, assiste ad un crescere dei costi necessari per l’espansione di tale complessità o per il suo semplice mantenimento. Ogni società quindi alloca risorse sempre più grandi per ottenere, invariabilmente, una crescita sempre minore. Ad un certo punto, qualsiasi ulteriore investimento non produce più un ritorno. Qui avviene il collasso della società: quando il suo mantenimento non è più conveniente o fisicamente possibile, si assiste ad una “caduta”, cioè un crollo di complessità. La società si riorganizza su basi e modi più “semplici”. Dall’impero romano si passa ai regni romano-barbarici.

Qualsiasi aspetto della società umana antica o moderna – dalle rese agricole all’efficacia dell’educazione in età non infantile, dal numero di brevetti rilasciati all’efficacia del sistema sanitario nell’innalzare l’aspettativa di vita – sembra sottoposto a questo andamento: investimenti iniziale molto redditizi e crescita vertiginosa; fase di rallentamento in cui è necessario investire ancora di più per ottenere meno di quanto si facesse in passato; fase di declino, che può essere lento o repentino, e infine collasso.

Il paragrafo precedente potrebbe sembrare oscuro e troppo economicistico per essere applicato alla storia. Vediamo quindi come l’autore spiega, nel capitolo 5, l’evoluzione dell’impero romano (tralascio di parlare della civiltà Maya e della cultura Chaco perché non sono esperto in materia e i casi sono onestamente meno interessanti). La civiltà romana, che aveva le proprie risorse principali nell’agricoltura, visse una grande espansione in età repubblicana. Tale ascesa fu irresistibile: i proventi di ogni conquista chiamavano altre conquiste e immettevano risorse grandissime nella società. La fase di facili conquiste ebbe termine con Ottaviano Augusto e la nascita dell’impero, che in qualche modo stabilì dei limiti all’espansione. Per altri due secoli, Roma poté ancora espandersi ma a costi sempre maggiori e con proventi sempre più limitati nella quantità come nel tempo. Al momento della prova, cioè la crisi demografica di metà II secolo e poi le ondate di invasioni barbariche, il sistema entrò in crisi perché le risorse erano sempre minori e gli “stress” sempre maggiori.

Diocleziono riformò il sistema aumentando a dismisura esercito e burocrazia; il costo dell’impero, una volta capace di autoalimentarsi, ricadde sempre più sulle plebi, sui contadini, sulle aristocrazie locali. Ben presto, ovviamente, per questi ceti oppressi rimanere nell’impero divenne più oneroso che uscirne e non poche realtà locali, all’arrivo dei barbari, videro in questi dei liberatori dall’oppressione imperiale.

Where under the Principate the strategy had been to tax the future to pay for the present, the Dominate paid for the present by undermining the future’s ability to pay taxes.

Laddove nel Principato la strategia era stata di tassare il futuro per pagare il presente [svalutazione della moneta], il Dominato pagava per il presente minando l’abilità futura di pagare le tasse.

Il risultato fu la caduta dell’impero e la sua sostituzione per mano di entità statali o parastatali costituite dai regni barbarici, che partivano da un livello di complessità assai minore e potevano quindi, inizialmente, investire poco e ottenere un grande ritorno.

Conclusioni
Nelle conclusioni, ovviamente, l’autore tenta delle considerazioni sulla propria epoca e sul futuro. Saggiamente, invece che addentrarsi in previsioni geopolitiche, Tainter individua la particolarità della nostra epoca, che ci differenzia dai Maya, dall’impero romano, dalla Cina antica e da ogni altro caso studiato: i singoli stati, oggi, non sono separati, ma convivono in una più grande società globale. Il vuoto dell’eventuale caduta di un singolo stato verrebbe subito riempito dai vicini. Questo “vantaggio” è apparente, però. Il collasso, infatti, potrebbe riguardare, in un futuro, l’intera società globale.

Un difetto del libro è senza dubbio dovuto all’età: trentacinque anni sono ormai parecchi. Il libro è denso di citazioni e dipendente, in molti punti, dai dati archeologici, che sono ovviamente in continua evoluzione. Un esempio che mi ha colpito è quella del popolo degli Ik, piccola tribù dell’Uganda che Tainter porta come esempio di collasso estremo, cioè tale da portare alla recisione anche dei legami familiari e personali. L’unica fonte citata sugli Ik è il famoso The mountain people dell’antropologo Colin Turnbull che, da una breve ricerca online, ho visto essere stato contestato e in parte smentito nel corso degli anni. Non ho verificato gli altri casi (come detto, Tainter porta dozzine di esempi di civiltà collassate) ma questo esempio mi ha fatto leggere con un pizzico di diffidenza gli altri casi citati.

Tuttavia questi difetti non inficiano la qualità dell’opera, perché sono contigenti a singole parti, laddove il cuore è l’esposizione della teoria dei rendimenti marginali decrescenti. Un neo più grosso, invece, è la tendenza dell’autore a ripetere i concetti. Un’altra criticità è, che nonostante la pretesa di scientificità, quello di Tainter rimane un discorso qualitativo e non quantitativo; questo perché i casi studiati appartengono tutti ad un passato remoto di cui non abbiamo e non potremo mai avere statistiche precise. Chi vi scrive ha fatto studi scientifici seri e impegnativi e perciò, confesso, guardo sempre con un po’ di compatimento all’uso della parola scientifico in ambito di scienze umane e sociali. Avrei dunque preferito, da parte dell’autore, un’analisi che si limitasse all’oggi o comunque ad una storia più recente ed entrasse nel dettaglio portando esempi, casi e numeri: non, quindi, il declino di civiltà precolombiane di cui non sappiamo quasi nulla; ma il collasso di imperi più recenti, ad esempio come quelli coloniali delle potenze europee (e di cui disponiamo di molti più dati).

Nonostante tutto questo il libro di Tainter rimane un’opera stimolante con una tesi di fondo brillante e che, inoltre, è quasi didascalica nell’enumerazione dei casi storici più antichi di collassi di civiltà. L’opera, purtroppo, è in inglese e non di facile reperimento ma, per chi può, vale davvero la pena di recuperarla.

LINK: https://narraredistoria.com/2024/12/0...

3.75/5. A good, general theory with wide applications (the best kind of knowledge: the general), but loses points for pissing on the theories of history of Spengler, Toynbee, Plato, Vico, Aristotle, Hegel, Machiavelli, Polybius, et al. for being "Mystical". Such is the peak of academic know-it-all-ism. Just because one cannot describe a causal mechanism in an historical process does not mean that it does not exist. Perhaps it is just out of the viewpoint of our feeble human minds and description is the best we can do.

This is a tough book to summarize, both because it's so dense and well-sourced it reminds me of grad school, and because it tackles a bunch of big, abstract questions, like what makes societies fail. What does it mean for societies to fail? Here Tainter analyzes many of the ways that groups of people can completely fail to maintain the complicated but fragile webs of interaction that separate us from animals (trade, governance, food production, resource extraction), with examples from the Mayans, Romans, Hittites, Babylonians, and many more. His basic thesis is that human societies are really problem-solving organizations (e.g. the wheel reduces travel time, agriculture reduces vulnerability to famine, steam power increases mechanical capability, sewer systems reduce plagues), and civilization is nothing more than overlapping layers of complex problem-solving networks, skills, and technologies. At low complexity, adding more layers of doers, thinkers, and paper-shufflers makes society more productive and everyone better off, but each additional layer takes energy, and eventually you run into the law of diminishing marginal returns, meaning that after a certain point society becomes paralyzed under the weight of its own corporate and governmental bureaucracies and can no longer adapt to changing conditions like resource shortage, environmental change, economic shifts, or external threats. The implications for modern society are many and thought-provoking. I really can't do this book justice in terms of its scope and analysis, but if you liked Jared Diamond's works (Collapse cites this a bunch), check this out pronto.

The question of why complex societies collapse is one that people today have a long-standing and understandable interest in answering. It’s also one for which a single answer seems impossible to identify. After all, the very nature of complexity implies that no one reason exists for why civilizations decline, as some may do so for reasons specific or even unique to their circumstances. Can a common explanation even exist for societal collapses as far apart as those in time and space as those of the Harappan, the Mycenaeans, and the Mayans, to name just three?

To provide one, Joseph Tainter looks beyond immediate causal explanations to focus instead on a common dynamic he identifies in the nature of complex societies. As he notes, while more complex organizations are by their nature costlier to maintain, they provide benefits to their members in terms of superior problem-solving. At some point, however, the marginal returns on this increasing social complexity decline, requiring ever-greater resource investments for decreasing gains. This concentration of investment necessary to achieve these gains reduces the society’s ability to cope with such stressors as resource depletion, environmental catastrophes, or external invaders. The result is that these societies suffer a steep decline in sociopolitical complexity, which becomes collapse when no other complex societies are present to fill the vacuum created by this decline.

It’s an interesting theory, and one that Tainter presents with reference to the full range of collapsed ancient societies. Yet herein lies the first problem with his book, which is his preference for theory over facts. Early in the book he announces that his focus is on the logic of his theory rather than the historical evidence, stating that “(f)actual matters will from time to time be discussed, but these are never of major importance.”(43) This a startling declaration, and one that immediately raises doubts about his argument. After all, what good is a theory about a historical process if it isn’t supportable by the facts?

To be fair, one likely factor in Tainter’s adoption of this stance is that the data about his subject – societies that collapsed hundreds, if not thousands of years ago – is limited in most circumstances. After all, societies in crisis generally are not ones with capability to accumulate and store data, and what they do acquire is often lost to the vagaries of time. Yet Tainter’s use of examples from modern society to explain the concept of marginal returns point to his superficial employment of it. One of the more egregious cases of this is his use of Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s criticism of the increased number of the officials and clerks in the postwar British Admiralty and the simultaneous decline in the number of capital ships, officers and enlisted men, and dockyard workers as an example of declining marginal productivity. Does it matter that many of the Royal Navy’s warships in the postwar era possessed destructive capabilities several times greater than those of the Grand Fleet of 1914, or that such ships required far more complex logistical and organizational support than their predecessors? In this respect, the return is far greater than their before, yet that Trainter misses such distinctions is indicative of his often casual application of his theory, even before he gets to his actual subject.

This he does in his penultimate chapter, where he attempts to apply his theory to the historical examples of the western Roman Empire, the Mayans, and the Chaocans or ancestral Puebloans of the southwestern United States. The majority of this space in this chapter is devoted to the Roman example, with no effort to employ the marginal returns calculations that make up such a prominent part of his argument to the Mayans or the Chaocans. While he does do this for his Roman example, his application of it is spotty and loaded with unproven assumptions. For example, never does he prove that the growing complexity of the later Roman empire was because of systemic complexity and not, for example, the ongoing challenges the Romans faced on multiple frontiers simultaneously, a challenge that was hardly the “stress surge” that Tainter claims. This reflects his unfamiliarity with the vast amount of available textual documentation as well as the research on the empire and the question of its collapse, as works only seem to appear when they conveniently support his claims.

None of this necessarily invalidates what is an interesting theory for societal collapse. But theories are only useful if they correspond to the facts, and in the end Tainter fails to do this in his book. It is a work that practically begs for revision, both to incorporate the work he left out and the excellent archaeological and historical research on many of these civilizations since then. Absent that, however, Tainter’s preference for the purity of theory over its messier but more relevant application to reality limits severely the usefulness of his book as a common explanation for why complex societies decline and fall.

I ought read this because (a) it sounds fascinating and (b) good or bad, I can extrapolate from it into a far-reaching stereotype of modern archae/sociological trends, something I know not a blessed thing about (I can say that, despite its off-putting appellation, Biblical Archaeology Review is one of the finest magazines around and absolutely worth the read if you're one day stuck in some highbrow pipe-smoking ecumenicalist of a dentist's office).

A well-researched and erudite account of why ancient complex societies collapsed. Tainter makes a solid point that increasing complexity is a natural and rational response as a society grows. The author refreshingly argues that collapse is not an unmitigated disaster but a rational reversal to a society of lower complexity and smaller units when the overhead of the complex society no longer offers a benefit larger than its cost.

Tainter correctly identified the mechanism of diminishing returns as the main reason why a society runs up against its limits. However, instead of growth and complexity leveling off as the marginal benefits decrease, he argues that societies continue to increase in complexity even when the cost exceeds the benefit. He rightly debunks insufficient leadership as a reason for collapse but, at the same time, assumes that a society would sleepwalk into increasing bureaucracy beyond what makes economic sense.

He makes a much stronger argument about societal fragility. A society with a resource surplus can respond to various calamities, but as complexity increases, it will eventually consume all available resources, leaving no buffer to handle situations that were previously manageable.

Unless you are a scholar of archeology, you do not have to read the entire book. John Danaher has written a great summary here: https://philosophicaldisquisitions.bl...

Occasionally hard to read, due to the academic writing style, but full of insights. Well worth the time it took to read it.

I don’t want to talk about the way I consumed this book. It was shameful

A good overview into the true mechanisms of what lies behind the collapse of major civilization and well-done reflection on it's implications for modernity. Criticizing most major points rather objectively, it gives me a better impression of sociology as a study than I previously had, going into a wide variety of civilizational collapses and argued causes with good sourcing, and I think it really touches at the heart of how civilization comes to be, works, and why it has collapsed as a principle...

I do have two critiques that bar me from giving it a perfect score though. For one, I frankly though that some of the accounts and statistics regarding specifics were excessive (especially in chapter 4-5) for the point he was trying to make, and secondly I felt the dismissal of mystical reasons (and their cultural implications) was rather midwit. Attachment to a society and willpower on a mass scale will objectively affect the efficiency of the people, size and morale of the army, and most of all trust in the system (which ties into his point and argument for civilizational collapse in the first place).

Take his criticism of Spengler and civilizational mystique/"energy" with a grain of salt, and feel free to skim over some of the more lengthy accounts of specifics (as he does repeat himself at times), but overall it's a great insight into the topic at hand.

Diminishing marginal returns lead to collapse when there is power vacuum because parts of the society are less motivated to support the system rather than detach from it or even sabotage it.
It's a believable idea. But it's hard for me to grasp the reasons for the inevitability of diminishing marginal returns.
Tainter explains that people grasp for the lower hanging fruit first so what's left after that is harder to get fruit - so you move from high marginal return to lower marginal return. But as a general metaphor for all kinds of processes it's hard to swallow.
- Oil companies develop easier to get oil wells first.
- Education provides general knowledge first which has a higher marginal return than specialized knowledge because it can be applied to more situations.
- Scientists discover easier knowledge first.
- Socio-political structure of a society is less complex first.

I can sense that there is truth to these examples. Over time those processes do seem to become more complicated and brittle. But i also feel like there could be counter examples. What about the notion of critical mass or breakthroughs? Like when you move from coal to oil, isn't there a big spike in marginal utility? I don't know. Perhaps Tainter accounts for such local spikes and talks more about the big picture where the trend is for diminishing.

Besides this complication with diminishing returns I learned a lot from this book. A glimpse into how and why societies are born and collapse.

I first heard of this book when I was reading an uninspiring book by Eric Cline called "1177 BC. The Year Civilization Collapsed." The books presented to me what seems to be an unlikely cause of the 1200 BC Bronze Age collapse. Cline argued that the chief cause of the collapse was a drought. As if, somehow, a drought caused the simultaneous political fragmentation of not only the Hittites, but the Assyrians, Kassite Babylonians, Elamites, and the Egyptians. That must have been one major drought to have affected such a massive region! But I digress. Cline referenced Tainter when he said that Tainter, “…literally wrote the book on the collapse of complex societies.” Being very skeptical of Cline’s analytical skills, and subsequently becoming very misinformed about Tainter’s overall thesis due to the fact that Cline presented Tainter’s thesis in a very strange way, the well had already been poisoned for me as I began to read Tainter’s book. In fact, I specifically sought out the book simply because I thought I would vehemently disagree with his thesis. When trying discover truth, one must always seek out the views of the opposition! But in this case, Tainter proved to be incredibly insightful.

Tainter began this book by listing the common explanations given for the collapse of civilizations. Tainter painstakingly dismantles many of the overall theories ranging from resource depletion, new resources, catastrophes, intruders, mismanagement, leadership’s pursuit of costly political goals, social dysfunction, and economic explanations. While Tainter gives the most credence to economic explanations, he says that even the economic explanations are inadequate. He then presents his major thesis. At the risk of oversimplifying the thesis, it appears that Tainter argues that as societies inevitably become increasingly complex, the marginal return upon each additional layer of complexity begins to diminish. Eventually, the marginal returns decline to the point where marginal costs outweigh the marginal returns. For those familiar with economics this might ring a bell. Tainter is essentially using the law of diminishing returns to point out that civilizations tend to find themselves upon a trajectory that is at first very rational and fruitful, but eventually becomes increasingly costly and ultimately contributes to the collapse of the entire society. Sound vague? Yeah, it is vague. Which is probably why Tainter presents, in depth, three major case studies to illustrate his thesis. He explains the collapse of the Roman, Mayan, and Chacoan societies in order to illustrate how his thesis holds up for each of these dramatically different civilizations.

tHere is where I must confess to my overall ignorance of each of the three civilizations previously mentioned. Most of my historical investigation for the past year and a half has focused almost exclusively upon ancient Egypt and the ancient Near East. I have not extensively studied the Romans nor have I ever studied the Mayans or Chacoans. But I will say that my limited forays into Roman history left me with an eerily similar conclusion to that of Tainter’s. Basically, Tainter argues that Rome fell due to the unsustainable nature of its political model. Rome was, in essence, a cannibalistic political entity who lived off the consumption of militarily weaker political entities. In other words, Rome was an imperialistic aggressor who plundered her neighbors, pillaged their treasuries, ransacked their cities, and then used the stolen treasure to fund the construction of aqueducts, coliseums, temples, and more military adventures! But this is not a sustainable political model. Eventually, you run out of people to plunder. The increasing costs of more and more distant military expeditions begins to outweigh the benefits that come from the plunder gained. Rome’s money maker began to slow down. Rome began a series of ill-fated decisions in order to put off their impending collapse such as inflating their currency, banning farmers from fleeing their land (in essence creating serfdom – a huge blight upon the later middle ages), handing out free bread and circuses to the populace in order to appease them, etc. Good thing modern-day governments don’t do anything like that! Cough, cough… Excuse me. As I was saying, Rome was essentially engaged in a series of decisions that had increasingly adverse effects as time progressed. This unsustainable model eventually caused the collapse of Rome. Rome did not fall to the barbarians. It imploded from within due to its own series of poor choices that may have made sense to them at the time but ultimately contributed their own demise. Through Rome’s behavior, a dark age ensued. And no one was to blame for this more than the Roman government itself.

tTainter offers a similar explanation for the collapse of the Mayans and the Chacoans that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, Tainter’s model does seem to have a significant degree of explanatory scope. I would argue that his model works in many other circumstances as well. A similar case could be made for the fall of the Hittite Kingdom in c. 1200 BC as well as the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 612 BC. Both of these civilizations also made a series of poor choices whose marginal utility was overshadowed by the increasingly exorbitant costs of each additional layer of unnecessary complexity.