Hard to rate this book fairly given its age, as many of its claims such as reference to the IK have been since disproven. However, as an introduction to the study of collapse, this book stands out. Tainter comfortably argues against numerous competing explanations of collapse, but his alternative answer fails to be convincing by the end of the work.

This is a very academic and logically well supported analysis of a usually poorly analyzed topic -- why do societies fail? The ultimate conclusion he reaches might not be correct, but the process of getting to it was pretty solid, enlightening the reader about several topics, and the conclusion seems to be at least partially correct, if not sufficient to explain all causes, or valid in the modern world.

Tainter rigorously analyzes "what do we mean by collapse, a society, and complexity", going through a bunch of cases of each. He then focuses on three main collapsed societies (Rome, the Maya, and the Southwestern US cave-dwellers (Chacoan), analyzing why they failed.

Ultimately his argument is "diminishing marginal returns to complexity" -- an economic argument. Each society is necessarily resilient to "normal" challenges, including catastrophic ones, but ultimately what causes them to end is when they just don't make sense anymore for participants. There may be a proximal cause like a famine or drought for it to happen right then, but the reason they're not recovering is that the costs of maintaining the complex society increase over time and with scale, and at some point the value of the society's maintenance exceeds the benefits for participants -- i.e. why most Roman farmers were happy to let barbarians invade and take over and eliminate the Roman imperial government, because it improved their own lives with less of an administrative burden. It isn't so much that the society fails and then the lives of the people get worse, but that their lives have been getting worse for a long time and thus society fails (and then their lives start to improve.). This argument seems reasonably well supported in his argument historically, at least excepting truly massive catastrophes.

The most interesting part of this is application to the modern world. Lots of evidence for "diminishing marginal returns to complexity" in modern society, starting in the 1800s, and probably 20th century decolonialism could be viewed through this model as well. The confounding factor is technology -- many of the costs identified by Tainter are fundamentally computational and communications complexity, and that's one area where modern technology (from the telegraph to AI) have gotten dramatically better, and may present a way to escape from diminishing marginal returns to scale, or at least to bend the curve.

This is a very academic study by an archaeologist; mostly arcane and dull except for chapters 4 & 5. Tainter's thesis, after reviewing many ancient and more recent civilizations, is that complexity brings worthwhile advantages only up to the point where the marginal benefits begin to decline with respect to the added costs and inevitable inefficiencies. His major example is the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. This was very interesting and scary because of the parallels to the 21st century US. This volume is out of print and my severely marked up copy was expensive; on balance not a good investment.

The first few chapters of this book examine other peoples' theories about collapse. Tainter meticulously works through the literature and, at the end of each chapter, concludes everyone is wrong. He's obviously setting up his own theory, and the anticipation builds to such a level that by the time you get to it you are certain that it must either be an absolute banger or fall totally flat.

Unfortunately I think it falls flat. Tainter's theory mostly comes down to decreasing marginal returns to additional societal complexity, which eventually leads to collapse. Parts of it are highly reminiscent of Chaisson's Energy-Rate Density paper (which everyone should read), but much more limited in scope. He's too focused on explaining everything with a single theory, leaving little room for contingency in history. He ignores the aspect of time: just because a system works well for 10 years does not mean it can work for 1000. And he treats rulers as being virtually unconstrained in their policy choices.

The examples he marshals in support of this theory are not particularly convincing, and (at least in some cases like the Western Roman Empire), the Mancur Olson view which focuses on public choice issues (which Tainter pretty much dismisses out of hand) seems like a vastly better fit to me. Especially when it comes to contemporary society, the examples Tainter brings up seem like a slam dunk in favor of Olson and _against_ Tainter! Take education for example: is it really plausible that the ballooning costs and declining efficiency of educational spending over the past few decades is due to increased complexity? Of course not, it's clearly an issue of special interest groups with socially misaligned incentives. Tainter misses it because he never actually dives into the details of exactly _how_ increased complexity is supposed to be working to produce all these effects.

In the middle part of the twentieth century, before "The Walking Dead," the historiography of civilizational collapse was dominated by Arnold Toynbee’s multi-volume "A Study of History," with his “challenge and response” dynamic. Before that, stretching back into the nineteenth century, other analyses analogized the lives of civilizations to the lives of humans, most notably in Oswald Spengler’s enormously influential "The Decline of the West," published in 1918. And many other writers over many centuries have, in different ways, examined why civilizations fail, the classic early modern example being Edward Gibbon’s analysis of Rome. Joseph Tainter arrived in 1988, with this book, to offer an alternative—namely, total economic determinism filtered through a framework of his own devising. Not a very successful framework, to be sure, but at least one that provides some food for thought.

Tainter is an anthropologist, so he views history though that prism. Moreover, "The Collapse of Complex Societies" is an academic monograph, so it has all the defects of that genre. Nobody would call the writing spicy, although there are flashes of humor. The author deliberately frequently summarizes and repeats, even though this is a short book, and he constantly cites other equally boring academics for minor points. Thus, we learn a great deal about the state of anthropological (and archaeological) knowledge as of thirty years ago. But, since this is a narrow anthropological analysis, we are denied any substantial linking of that knowledge to history, of which Tainter seems under-informed at best.

He probably wouldn’t disagree, or rather, he would say that most history is irrelevant, if not bunk. For Tainter, if it can’t be quantified, it doesn’t exist. He has the soul of an economist trapped at the desk of an anthropologist. This is a minor strength and a major weakness of his book. It is a strength in that his hypothesis is somewhat testable, at least relative to a Toynbee-type analysis. It is a weakness in that it leads to a materialist reductio ad absurdum. Not for Tainter any belief in what Keynes called “animal spirits,” and not for Tainter any belief that any culture is superior in any way to any other. All cultures as culture are imprisoned in the iron framework that Tainter builds, subject to the inevitable pressure of econometrics. They are mere ephemera randomly associated with the purely material factors that are wholly determinative of the arc of every society in human history.

Tainter begins, logically enough by defining “collapse.” He acknowledges that modern man, and early modern man, has been fascinated by collapse—for centuries by Rome’s collapse, and today by fears and premonitions of our own collapse, as the early modern belief in inevitable progress has eroded. Here Tainter unveils the variable that explains everything for him—complexity. He uses complexity as both a definitional marker for societies and as a yardstick for measuring their collapse. “A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” Elements of complexity as thus defined include everything from centralized control to social stratification to acquisition of territory. This is unexceptional enough, in that it paints the definition with a broad enough brush that few would disagree. Nowhere, though, is complexity evaluated other than with respect to quantifiable variables—ones that, if they have not been quantified because of lack of data, could at least be quantified with the right data.

Next Tainter applies this definition to capsule summaries of seventeen collapsed complex societies, from the Western Chou Empire to the Hohokam (who feature in Wallace Stegner’s "Mormon Country") to the Minoans to the Ik. (He paints the Ik, in Uganda, as an example of extreme collapse, alleging, for example, that children are abandoned by their mothers at age three and that sharing is nonexistent in the society. As with all fieldwork anthropological assessments that seem to contradict human nature, it appears that the researchers who drew this conclusion were fooled by their interlocutors, and it is now realized that Ik society is not nearly as dreadful as Tainter says—just like Margaret Mead was led around by the nose by her Samoan interlocutors while they laughed at her behind her back for being gullible.) In each summarized case, he briefly applies a few of his markers for collapse to a truncated history of the society, along with a short postscript about the society and geographical area, and concludes that most or all of his quantifiable markers characterize collapse, so his definition is correct.

Naturally enough, the next topic to get the author’s focus is complexity itself, in the form of states, and how it develops from simpler modes of human existence. This is well trodden ground, from those like Francis Fukuyama who ascribe most development of complex societies to warfare to those with a more anarchist bent, like James C. Scott, who view complex societies as a dubious blessing resulting from changes in food production. Tainter groups theories into “conflict” and “integration” theories, with the former claiming that states resulted from individuals and groups subjugating others for their own benefit, and the latter claiming that states arose to benefit society as a whole. He boldly decides that both are partially right, and moves on, since, after all, what he cares about is complexity, not how we got there.

Tainter proceeds to evaluate the study of collapse itself, with an eye to establishing himself as unique, and all predecessors as pretenders. The core of his objection to other analyses of collapse is that they too often revolve around “value judgments,” an epithet Tainter hurls around with wild abandon. He loathes any kind of non-quantifiable ranking that implies, for example, that sophisticated art, literary accomplishments, monumental architecture, or philosophy are characteristics of complex societies—that is, of civilizations. Similarly, he rejects as not wrong, but incoherent, the idea that civilized societies are superior to uncivilized societies. For Tainter the economic determinist, superiority is only superior when it is measurable, using a scale of which he approves, and all other superiority is a value judgment, and hence anathema. Therefore, he concludes that “A civilization is the cultural system of a complex society,” and “features that popularly define a civilized society—such as great traditions of art and writing—are [merely] epiphenomena or covariables of social, political, and economic complexity. Complexity calls these traditions into being, for such art and literature serve social and economic purposes and classes that exist only in complex settings.”

Tainter then offers what purports to be a survey of all theories of collapse, separated into eleven in all. These include resource depletion, catastrophe, intruders, class conflict, and what he calls “mystical factors,” under which rubric he includes Toynbee, Spengler, Gibbon, and anything non-quantifiable. He evaluates, both in the abstract and by reference to one or more collapsed civilizations, and rejects, all of these theories, as either just wrong, or as insufficient and needing to be integrated into a more competent theory not yet advanced (no prize for guessing whose theory that is). Most of his focus, though, is on class conflict theories and mystical theories, both of which he attacks in scathing terms.

On class conflict, he notes that since “exploitation is a normal cost of stratification” and “bad government is a normal cost of government,” so “if exploitation and misadministration are normal aspects of hierarchy, then it is difficult to see these as sources for the collapse of hierarchies.” Touché. On mystical theories, though, Tainter is less convincing. He complains that there are far too many incompatible theories of why virtue and morality, however defined, created or destroyed civilizations, citing, among others, Sallust, Machiavelli’s "Discourses on Livy," and Montesquieu’s "Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline," as well as more modern writers such as Henry Adams, and, of course, Spengler and Toynbee. He complains all these are “value-laden,” his ultimate censure, and calls them “murky,” “superficial,” “narrow,” and “hateful.” OK, then. At no point, though, does he make any effort to actually address any such theory; he bootstraps his disgust into a conclusion, in essence treating Toynbee as no better than an Aztec priest tearing the hearts out of sacrificial victims to appease Huitzilopochtli and ensure the rising of the Sun. Then he says “It seems almost unsporting to treat Spengler and Toynbee so severely,” having not treated them at all other than with insults, and supports his non-argument with ranting “Value judgments are another matter altogether. A scholar trained in anthropology learns early on that such valuations are scientifically inadmissible, detrimental to the cause of understanding, intellectual indefensible, and simply unfair. . . . Cultural relativity may be one of the most important contributions anthropology can make to the social and historical sciences, and to the public at large.” Preening himself on his importance and superior insight, but offering zero evidence or argument, he moves on.

Now, perhaps, “mystical arguments” (a better term for which would be “virtue arguments”) are, as compared with deterministic, quantifiable arguments, like ships passing in the night, or like dark matter and baryonic matter, weakly interacting at best. But that does not mean that virtue arguments have nothing to offer. Any person with a deep knowledge of history (which Tainter very evidently lacks) knows that there is a tide in the affairs of men, that is purely qualitative yet is very real. Thus, Tainter, when discussing the Ottomans and their slow collapse, says of another scholar, “He simply stated that later Islam was not willing to learn from others, which clarifies nothing.” Quite the contrary—if true, it clarifies everything. It is just not quantifiable. This is not to say that what Tainter offers is wrong, but it is most definitely incomplete. Virtue cannot be quantified, and if it can be quantified it is not virtue, but that does not mean that virtue, as well as other intangible cultural characteristics, do not exist and are not critically important for the growth and decline of a civilization, or for the globe itself. (Kipling perhaps captured the role of moral virtues in civilizations best in "The Gods of the Copybook Headings") This is why purely economic theories for the Great Divergence are always miserably incomplete—they take no account of culture, which cannot be quantified, but is determinative of the course of a civilization. But for Tainter, culture does not exist, except as irrelevant “epiphenomena,” and this means that at best his book is weak.

In any case, the rest of the book is devoted to developing Tainter’s economic model of collapse, which is in essence that as complexity increases, which it must as a society responds to challenges, because of diminishing returns, eventually a society cannot increase complexity without paying more for it than the marginal benefit received, and thus the society becomes unable to respond effectively to challenges, and it collapses to a lower level of complexity in order to become economically coherent again. The only way to put this off, according to Tainter, is to obtain some new “energy subsidy,” which can be anything from conquering new territory to actual energy in the form of fossil fuels (he thankfully does not mention nuclear fusion, which ever since I was a small child forty years ago I have been told is going to supply all our energy in twenty years).

All this is pretty obvious, actually, just prettied up with graphs and attempts at quantification. Some of it is overly pessimistic—Tainter talks about how investing in energy production already (in 1988) offered sharply diminishing returns, but he neglects countervailing trends, such as the diminishing cost of light production (quantified by William Nordhaus in the 1990s). Tainter applies his diminishing marginal returns analysis broadly, to everything from agriculture to scientific progress. Then he applies it in detail to Rome (obsessively focusing, for some reason, on the debasement of coinage), the Classic Maya, and the Chaco Canyon culture (in today’s New Mexico), attempting to show that all traditional models of collapse are inadequate specifically for these three cultures and that his model of diminishing marginal return on investment explains their collapse satisfactorily. He concludes, as well, that the peoples of these collapsed societies were, on the whole, better off after the collapse, since collapse is an “economizing process,” and, after all, a collapsed society has “restore[d] the marginal return on organizational investment to a more favorable level.” (Tainter explicitly claims that no other society moves in on a collapsed society with the intent of sheer destruction, rather than getting an “energy subsidy,” ignoring counter-examples like the Mongols.) Along with James C. Scott in "Against the Grain," Tainter thinks that the costs of a complex society may simply exceed its benefits to the people in that society, who will therefore be better off at a less complex level of organization. A collapsed society has not failed to adapt; it has taken the best path available. Collapse is not synonymous with anarchy or a Hobbesian state of nature; it’s just another way of organizing, at least much of the time. We may listen to tunes on a reed flute rather than Bach, and die in our twenties, but at least our marginal returns on investing in complexity will be up!

One gap in Tainter’s analysis is that his model does not address complex societies where problem-solving does not require increases in complexity. He nods vaguely in this direction when answering the anticipated criticism that he does not take into account possible equilibria, but only vaguely. Tainter’s model of complexity is that of a hierarchy, rather than a network, a distinction made much of in Niall Ferguson’s recent The Square and the Tower. Arguably this make sense, for all past complex societies have been strongly hierarchical in nature. However, there is a plausible argument that modern technology, as well as modern habits of thought, whatever their drawbacks may be, permit a society to be organized with dispersed problem solving by networks, which may, to some extent, be immune from diminishing returns. You don’t have to believe that crowdsourcing is a magic cure-all to think that the Hayekian model of the market could have more application than to just economics—that perhaps a complex society could still be decentralized and less hierarchical, in a way that, even if Tainter is right, new problems can be addressed without increases in complexity that necessarily experience diminishing returns. Sure, such a techno-libertarian paradise exists nowhere now (though maybe certain aspects of the Internet are a step in this direction), but as an alternative, it’s on offer in a way that’s new in human history.

Finally, Tainter applies his model to today. He notes that the modern world is different, not in its possible non-hierarchical approach to complexity, but in that collapse can only occur in a power vacuum, where no competitor will move in immediately, and no such power vacuum exists in the modern world on any relevant scale. While trying not to be pessimistic, he rejects the idea that technology will substitute for (supposedly) necessary investments in increased complexity, so ever less profitable investments will continue to be required even over the objections of the masses, and concludes that if and when modern society collapses, it will take longer, but be global, because no power vacuum exists—until it does, on a universal scale. He’s probably right about that, but he’s wrong about the economic determinism, which is far too narrow a framework through which to evaluate the fabric of human societies.

Some aspects are a bit dated, for instance the descriptions of the Ik people. The book says they are a mean, egotistical, and highly individualistic people, but a quick browse on Wikipedia shows this is no longer true: they share and they care for others. This makes me think that many other parts of the book may be just as subconsciously paternalistic towards different cultures and full of misinterpretations and outdated information. Otherwise it still seems like a good introduction to the topic.

-1* for the painfully dry academic style, without a drop of liveliness or wit. -1* for not convincing me, assumptions, and ignoring evidence that did not support his position. Were I not typing this review out on a tablet, I might be more eloquent, but here's the gist of my reaction.

Page 50, trying to refute resource depletion as a cause of collapse: " As it becomes apparent to members or administrators of a complex society that a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some rational steps are taken toward a resolution. The alternative assumption – of idleness in the face of disaster – requires a leap of faith at which we may rightly hesitate . "

Indeed it might be rational to do something, but look around you. We don't. We know oil is finite, yet we do little about it. We know in the USA that salinization of soil in California, where most of our produce is grown, is an increasing problem that will lead to starvation . We do nothing about it. We know that monoculture farming is a bad idea, yet we subsidize it. We know cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas are unsustainable because of lack of water, but we can't even bring ourselves to do some tiny thing like outlaw lawns, golf courses, or fountains in front of the casinos, much less write strict, sane zoning laws. We are, in short, fookin idiots. One would think we long for collapse, and the sooner, the better. Our motto may as well be "idleness in the face of disaster."

However , it was good to reconsider, reading his ideas, that "collapse " or the fall of a civilization likely is actually nothing worse than a decline, decentralization, collapse only of the elite, with the overtaxed working people basically taking their marbles and going home. He bemoans rich white guy art and literature disappearing , leading to a "dark age". However I would say that folk arts are every bit as good as "high" art, which gets defined as high only by the makers of it, after all. You'll never convince me Duchamp's urinal in a museum is vastly superior to an Appalachian woman's lovely quilt, sorry to say.

Some of what he said let me to think of England in the last hundred years . Here's a nation that has "collapsed" by choosing to stop being an empire and instead become a stable small state, a lower form. It didn't hurt them at all, and its citizens are in many ways better off than I am. Therefore collapse can be good, and it needn't be feared.

Engaging but very repetitive treatment of the subject; you can really just read the Conclusion and you wouldn't be missing much, or may to put it more appropriately, if you start with the Conclusion, there are diminishing marginal returns to reading the preceding chapters.

The core argument is essentially that a) collapse is a loss of complexity in a societies that have made various investments to become increasingly complex in various dimensions over time, and that b) as marginal return on additional investment declines (i.e. the benefit of investment in additional complexity falls as systems become more costly to maintain and expand in linear fashion), eventually the society reaches a point where, for some segment of the population, the (perceived) cost/benefit analysis of reducing complexity exceeds the cost/benefit analysis of increasing it, and the society will slip down to a state of lower complexity. There is of course more to it than that, but as Tainter goes through the list of alternative collapse arguments, his response to each, almost without exception, boils down to "diminishing marginal returns".

He makes his case well, but I couldn't help but think that the pure reductionism of people to 'econs' misses some harder-to-quantify points that are probably relevant, such as the strength / value of the identity that people derive from being part of whatever national project they are involved in, and that, yes, while ultimately there comes a point probably for most everyone where the cost/benefit of citizenship becomes not worth it, I think there are certain investments that nations can make during good times to bolster this and improve resiliency in times of stress, as ultimately the collapse scenario arrives when a society has inadequate resources to deal with stress / available options for mitigating stress are not economically feasible. It would have been interesting to see more treatment given to those sorts of questions, but as his task is mainly to provide a cohesive general theory as to why societies collapse, he does a fine job of arguing why ultimately it is the economic basis of diminishing marginal return rather than general types of stresses (economic, famine, war, etc) that cause societies to collapse.

Would also recommend Carroll Quigley's great "The Evolution of Civilizations" to anyone interested in this topic.

Highlights:
- His thesis that complex societies collapse due to decreasing marginal returns makes sense and he gives great examples of how this has happened historically in specific areas (population growth, military expansion, etc.)
- Good arguments against other theories of collapse.
- Great in-depth look at the collapse of Roman, Mayan, and Chacoan societies.

Lowlights:
- He brushes aside the collapse theories of Spengler, Plato, and others as being "mystical".

SUMMARY: This should be titled the Collapse of Political Discourse because the author, under the guise of academic research, asserts that the “collapse” of the Roman Empire was due to (1) taxes and (2) regulation, even though the evidence he presents does not show this. However, when we realize that this was published in the 1980s when the business lobby had started its aggressive attacks against the federal government, you can begin to connect the dots of this political put-up job.

What do we talk about when we talk about the collapse of complex societies? Tainter performs a service to posterity, throwing out all the old rhetoric of moaners and naysayers, blindly reading their own bias into the tea leaves sitting atop the stinking garbage heap of history. Let’s look at the data, he says. Let’s be reasonable, he says. It is a very reasonable start and encouraging—refreshing even, to be able to sit back and disregard so many ridiculous reasons that complex things fall apart. Tainter’s theory is a combination of classic economics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Increasing complexity requires increasing amounts of energy inputs, and when those inputs cease to produce outputs equal to or greater than the cost of the inputs, society devolves to lesser and lesser complexity until the outputs again meet or exceed the cost of the inputs. Why do outputs have to exceed inputs? Tainter concedes that not everyone is greedy (without defining the term—Greed can be defined as requiring for oneself more than others have, and also more than one had the previous year/week/day). But the need for a society to continually produce more than its inputs seems to be linked to this phenomenon in some way. In dismissing his consideration of greed, Tainter points out that greed, like the poor, will always be with us. We cannot delve into the wormhole of human psychology, he says, because if you are trying to build a model, you have to be able to account for your variables. What is the point of building a model? To try to understand a phenomenon, to try to get at its roots so that you can perhaps manipulate it in the future, to cure some forms of human blindness, a commendable motive.

Tainter selects three collapses on which to test his diminishing returns theory: the Roman Empire, the Mayans, and the canyon dwellers of the North American southwest (Chacoans).

The sparse Mayan and Chacoan data do not contradict, and seem to fit, his theory, but the bulk of his analysis is spent on the Roman Empire, which presumably has data galore. For the Roman analysis, though, he does not show us charts of input costs and outputs. Rather, we get a lot of description. The Roman Empire grew so long as it had some other territory to invade and tax; the sums raised by conquest compared favorably to the cost of campaign (returns were good, the market was up!). But the running costs of administration, garrison and defense became burdensome, and the Romans, at heart soldiers, not accountants, couldn’t hack it. (They did not do a lot of forward looking modeling, and apparently did not work much with percentages, because, on his description, they were unable to obtain increases in tax revenue with rising income or inflation, but instead were forced to raise fixed amounts of taxes and/or debase the currency in order to maintain their revenue stream.)

In the evaluation section, Tainter describes the Roman collapse as due to inflation, taxes and regulation, the combination of which so reduced the marginal return to peasants that, after years of plague, the central government lost the support of the local regions. The impacts of inflation (devaluation) and the plague are self-evident, but Tainter has only mentioned regulations once in his analysis section. After devaluation of coinage, his main discussion has been about taxes. His focus on regulations and taxes makes one feel Tainter is in with the Chi-town gang. But there is another point demonstrated by his long description that he misses: the way wealth draws resources unto itself.

Here’s Tainter on the Roman collapse: “The wealthy, as long as they avoided injudicious political entanglements, generally continued to fare well. Large landowners emerged during the third century in increased numbers in all parts of the Empire. The middle class in towns, however, was burdened by the cost of civil obligations. … Small peasant proprietors lost their holdings, attaching themselves as tenants to large estates. … The rate of taxation was generally not progressive, so it rested more heavily on the poor. … When wealthy influentials got their land under-assessed, the extra share was distributed among the remainder.” Tenant farmers were worse off in the long run: “As tenants they paid 1/2 their crops in rent, while proprietors owed 1/3 in taxes.” This means that the tax burden was less burdensome than the rent burden, but Tainter does not dwell on it.

So the plague would have had the effect of a severe recession, and owners who no longer had the labor resources to make their land produce enough for the land tax would have to abandon it or sell to wealthy landowners, much like the wealthy have the extra resources to increase their investments in a downturn and acquire more income producing property at lower rates which they continue to own in the next upturn. Tainter blames the Roman government for overtaxing the peasants, and certainly taxes should have been relaxed during and after the plague, but the purpose of doing so would not be only to lessen the burden on the middle class (his term), but also to restrain the amalgamation process that is so natural to wealth. (At a recent visit to a planetarium, I was reminded of this phenomena in watching the stars picking up more mass as they get larger, sucking up the gravitationally weaker gas around them. Professor Pickney documents the same process in the present day economy.)

While Tainter’s argument can be read in support of less taxation generally, IMHO it should be more properly read as a warning against regressive taxation and over concentration of wealth.

One final point on rationality, a key assumption made by Tainter. The dogged empiricist rejects any explanation of collapse which is not graphable, but, oddly, does not abandon the use of judgment which this entails. Here he is, dismissing as unreasonable a phenomenon that should be familiar to us:

“As it becomes apparent to the members or administrators of a complex society that a resource base is deteriorating, it seems most reasonable to assume that some rational steps are taken toward a resolution. The alternative assumption—of idleness in the face of disaster—requires a leap of faith at which we may rightly hesitate.”

Yes, it would seem reasonable to assume that rational steps are taken in the face of disaster, but self-interested humans are not always rational, and can be willfully blind to the threat of disaster. For example, did Germany under the Nazis act rationally? In 1932 and 1933 the German voters’ immediate self-interest took priority over unthinkable long term outcomes. When did the Japanese leadership decide it had had enough? It was not following the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more civilians than the bombing of Hiroshima five months later. Did the wealthy members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club do the right thing and install a runoff valve after being warned of the design weaknesses of their dam by an engineer sent by the Johnston Iron Works? Nope. They did not want to spend the money, and hundreds of people downstream drowned or were crushed by the deluge. Heck, even solid, respected John Glenn did not believe Chris Kraft and team about the cause of the wing failures on the Chance Vought F8U, and instead continued to believe Chance Vought’s company line. Does the continued failure in the United States government to regulate the production of greenhouse gases, having known about the phenomenon since the 1940s (see, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World), appear rational? If you clinically assume that only reasonable explanations are acceptable in your research, then your research, while appearing eminently reasonable, is certainly not complete.

Yet, despite this lacuna, Tainter concludes his study with this prescient question: “Will we find, as have some past societies, that the cost of overcoming our problems is too high relative to the benefits conferred, and that not solving the problem is the economical option?”

That certainly seems like the place we are headed. But, no matter, because, from an economist’s viewpoint, collapse is just another word for “adjustment to a level where outputs can again exceed inputs”, much like “nothing left to lose” is just another word for freedom.

This book seems to be the workhorse of the industrial-collapse intellectual set (Jared Diamond,Derrick Jensen,John Michael Greer, etc). It is a fairly straightforward, academic entry in the anthropological search for a grand theory to explain collapse. It is in this way a sort of counterpart to Earle and Johnson's The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, which advanced explanations for increases in social compexity and integration.

Tainter begins by swiftly and often mercilessly batting aside all available explanations for collapse in the market at his time. (This perceived paucity seems to be his inspiration for the book.) These are, for the most part, very nicely done and quickly key in to the major flaws each theory has as an explanatory device. This clarity is extremely gratifying and I wish more thinkers would drink from Tainter's cup, so to speak. However, this incisiveness may come at the expense of nuanced, cautious, and case-specific history: Tainter is very much set on finding a 'global theory,' which can explain the recurring phenomenon of collapse found in any given place. He has no patience for theories that are overly dependent on the specific nature of each case, a trait that many historians and anthropologists would take issue with (cf. Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire).

After dispensing handily with the crowd of existing theories, Tainter offers his own suggestion: diminishing marginal returns (DMR). That is, any given strategy of social organization has large initial benefits that are easily obtained - this is why the transition occurs in the first place (as in Earle and Johnson). As time goes on, the most easily obtained benefits become the status quo, or are exhausted, or demand increases, forcing ever-higher costs to maintain the same level of growth/maintain stasis. This theory is handy in its versatility - it can apply to whatever the most fundamental resource of a society is, from soil nutrition to fisheries to information flow to technical development to oil. It works in tribal and chiefdom societies as well as state and industrial ones.

It is so versatile, in fact, that I'm almost uncomfortable with it: based on the definitions offered in Earle and Johnson, and by Tainter himself, collapse is essentially synonymous with the cheapest strategy when costs of complexity begin to exceed benefits. DMR theory is thus uncomfortably tautological. As noted above, Tainter critiques other theories for being too parochial. His theory is so abstract and general, that in every application Tainter must call back the theories he eschewed and ask them to fill in the specifics of his theory, as subordinates to it.

Tainter has nothing positive to say about the modern global situation. He concludes that, since the collapse of any one state would only result in its incorporation into a competitor, all the states must collapse at once if collapse does occur. He also sees no way out - with no new territory to conquer and no new energy subsidy to replace oil, the industrial lifestyle will outlive its value and be replaced by a more adaptive organization at some point (he wisely declines to say when he thinks this will happen).

As an aside, John Michael Greer premises The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age on the idea that, by Tainter's requirement that collapse occurs "within a few decades," collapse is rare. Instead, societies tend to decline over a period of a century or more. This is a strange oversight in Tainter's book, since most of the examples of "collapse" he uses don't fit his own definition.

"Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner."

"Among those less specialized, severing the ties that link local groups to a regional entity is often attractive. Collapse then is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population."

In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter is seeking a central theory of why states collapse within which the myriad of theories (resource depletion, barbarian incursion, catastrophe, etc.) can be subsumed. If collapse is defined as the sudden reduction of complexity in a polity, the question is why does a state collapse, especially if that collapse appears as a result of pressures that it should have easily overcome.
That civilizations collapse is, Tainer argues, due to the marginal returns generated by a constantly rising complexity. Initially, a state that expands and acquires a wider resource base (as well as loot and often slaves) is able to grow rapidly as this expansion essentially pays for itself. This surplus allows the development of higher levels of complexity as the civil service expands, the army grows, monuments are established, the priesthood develops. All this grown in complexity is expensive, and while initially this complexity can create greater surpluses (organized societies developing canals, powerful militaries defeating weaker ones) eventually these new surpluses start to level off and decrease, or at least increase at a lower rate than before. While these surpluses decrease, the costs of maintenance continue to increase as more intensive resource cultivation is required to feed the growing population. Taxes are increased, the coinage is debased, the peasantry is oppressed, labor shortages begin to appear as the rate of reproduction declines. Where before there was a surplus in case of a catastrophe, now the state is barely capable of standing up in the good times.
To say that a barbarian incursion ended the Western Roman Empire is to miss the point. When the Romans had successfully defeated even larger invasions before, why did it succumb to this one? The state was already on its last legs, and the peasantry likely preferred collapse and its concomitant decrease in oppression and taxation to continued Roman rule. "Collapse" is such a loaded term, it is easy to miss that for many of the people who lived through it, the "Dark Ages" were a more prosperous and liberated time the Pax Romana. Decentralization and simplification of society are often an economical "choice" rather than an absolute calamity. The collapse of an Empire is bad for the archaeologist, but likely good for the peasant.