a classic book, highly recommended for anyone becoming aware of the coming collapse of industrial society, or just anyone who is interested in the origins and failings of civilization more generally. tainter approaches the subject as an archaeologist, and attempts to decipher a general theory behind collapse, a process he describes as declining returns on investments by the ruling class. tainter doesn't view it in terms of class, so he strangely falls into the realm of historical materialism while criticizing marxism for not being materialistic enough. the examples given (rome, maya, chaco canyon) help elucidate the topic, and despite some academic and boring language, my only major complaint is the lack of substantive mention of oil and fossil fuel depletion, which has doomed global capitalism. but the book is 20 years old, i guess he didnt see it coming.

All in all, probably more 4.5 than 5, but this was really great. Tainter's prose is very readable, especially given it's from an academic press. He presents a clear and persuasive economic argument for societal collapse, which I overview on my blog. Reading this book brought up a lot of questions I'd never considered before, such as why societies form in the first place, and do they develop in stages or on a continuum?

This felt like appropriate reading in January 2021. Its implications will stick with me for so much longer.

This is a short, dense, book about a difficult subject. Tainter does a good job with his argument, which I admit even I though I disagree with it in part.

His argument boils down to a few key points:

1. Major civilizations tend to experience an early period of rapid growth through the 'low hanging fruit' of available territory, resources, etc. When
2. This growth inevitably leads to specialization, stratification, and complexity which initially serves growth
3. The civilization plateau's and the structure established to help it grow becomes a part of society.
4. When the 'low hanging fruit' disappears, further expansion (be it territorial, trade oriented) becomes less and less profitable, and eventually starts to work against the civilization.
5. Finally, the complex structure begins to a positive drain on the civilization as it has to spend more and more to get less and less. But now we depend on the structure, which has become brittle, and like a house of cards, easy to knock over.

Tainter supports his theory well from civilizations across time, and uses very obvious info, like territory, and some other more unusual information, like crop yields, colonial administrations, and so on. No doubt there are many lessons for economists here.

But -- while his book is valuable, it has big holes.

In his quest for absolute objectivity, he rejects all value-judgment theories of collapse. If you can't measure it, it's not useful. A civilizations beliefs, or our interpretation of those beliefs are not 'objective' and so have nothing to contribute to the study of collapse. So, after summarizing the work of people like Gibbon, Toynbee, Spengler, and others he essentially dismisses with a wave of his hand. But as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, very few people are actually German economists. Any study of history must involve people, which will involve more than economic exchanges.

This over-emphasizing of economics shows up in what is actually a thought provoking idea. What happens after collapse, he argues, may actually be beneficial to society, because it removes a great deal of inefficiency that the old system labored under. Collapse, might be the cleansing forest fires of history, events to almost welcome.

This sounds good on paper, but no actual human being who lived through collapses would have agreed with him. Imagine living in Western Europe ca. 550 AD and thinking, "Boy, I sure am glad for the fall of Rome. Of course, our ramshackle village could be overrun, destroyed, and our people pillaged who knows when by some Goth, Ostrogoth, Visigoth, Vandal, Hun, or some other kind of Goth I have forgotten about. But I'll take that any day over the economic inefficiency of the late Roman Empire."

To augment Chesterton's oft quoted phrase, "If civilization is worth doing, it's worth doing badly."

Overall, the book was good with a thesis on the collapse of complex societies that the author supports in great detail (anecdotal detail but, as presented, enough to fairly support his thesis). I don't know if I am convinced. I am still convincable but will have to put more thought in it. I probably will learn more in our book club discussion of the book in the next couple of weeks.

To me, it was a bit of a hard read because it is written in academic style rather than the more general audience style (even for deep topics) that is most of my reading content in my retirement (other than the law stuff I still read). I think that the content of the book could have been presented in the style of Yuval Noah Harari that would have made it much more accessible to the better educated general audience.

But it is a good book that challenges the mind to think about our future. One can imagine the trend to disorder in recent events in our polity with the social fabric seeming to come apart. While that is highly anecdotal and could not support some broader these, the trajectory of society in its political views might be consistent with some entropic notion consistent with Tainter's thesis. Will have to think more about that as well.

First off, this is more like a long academic paper than a book. Tainter has a thesis whereby he attempts to explain the collapse of all complex societies (quite a tall order of business) and goes about this by establishing a lot of background information and existing theory review in the first part of the book.

I am by no means an archeologist (professional or amateur) but was able to make my way through this part, picking most of what Tainter was trying to communicate. I'd say to give the early sections a shot because they do form the basis for his later arguments. Sort of scary in retrospect how many complex, seemingly stable societies basically evaporated over the course of only a few generations and that civilization as we know it has a relatively short existence compared to the totality of human existence. Civilization is more the exception than the rule.

So the crux of Tainter's argument is that the development of a complex society is predicated on the explotation of low hanging resources. The investment to acquire these resources is (at first) easily outwighed by their benefits. This allows for the support of specialized roles that do not necessarily contribute to the sustainability of the society (aristocrats, priest castes, etc.). Subsequent resource extraction (be it in the form of new mines, new agricultural lands, or new conquests) have a lower return on energy invested generating a smaller surplus to sustain the complex society.

Eventually a society will reach a point where existing resources or potential new resources cannot maintain the level of complexity the society currently has. The result is a decline in public works/investments, the loss of centralized control and influence, and the loss of the periphery regions of the society (and not always a peaceful or gradual process). Eventually the society will "decline" to a level of lower complexity: more local control, less public works, etc.

To Tainter the story of a complex society is a race against the resource clock. To maintain and expand complexity (which is a good strategy when new resources are low investment accessible) a society must continue to increase the amount of resources available to it to support classes that do not contribute to resource expansion. Just to maintain the status quo new resources are needed and when they are not available the center of the complex society begins to crumble.

I really enjoyed this book because of the unique perspective Tainter presents in explaining the collapse of complex societies. The examples he provides are quite illustrative and can provide guidance to the challenges we face today. I'm not going to lie, this book majorly bummed me out, but I'd rather we had this perspective and a chance to avoid past mistakes than blindly blunder into the same fate that has befallen many past societies.

A rigorous academic work that strives to identify general principles and characteristics of collapse. Extraordinarily well researched and somewhat dry (it's certainly not written for a general audience), Tainter enumerates and explores in great detail existing theories and case studies from history.

As a fan of ancient history, I really appreciated the section on the political and economic history of the Roman empire and its slow, grinding inevitability to collapse.

On the phenomenon of collapse itself, Tainter's theory argues that it is an economical process which occurs when the investment in organisational complexity reaches diminishing returns, so societies revert to a lower state to regain a better return on investment. A very simple and familiar model to to those of us who work in software, but with wide applicability.

On its implications for our current society, Tainter declines to speculate and offers only comparisons to previous models of "competing polities".

A difficult read due to the technical, academic tone of it, but an excellent book overall.

Basically, no one really knows why societies fail except God.

A review of this book requires a different standard than your everyday 'fun' book. This is very much an academic publication. That's not inherently bad but the reader needs to understand up front the implications on audience, argument, structure, and aims.

Overall, the book accomplishes what it sets out to do. The background is sufficiently deep and the argument is well-developed both logically and from comparative analysis. The comparisons didn't appear to be "cherry picked" because they fit the thesis; several other reviewers levied this critique but I didn't feel the same. Such is the nature of comparative case-based research.

2024.09.27–2024.10.03

Contents

Tainter JA (1988) (10:26) Collapse of Complex Societies, The

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction to collapse
• What is collapse?
• Collapse in history
• • The Western Chou Empire
• • The Harappan Civilization
• • Mesopotamia
• • The Egyptian Old Kingdom
• • The Hittite Empire
• • Minoan Civilization
• • Mycenaean Civilization
• • The Western Roman Empire
• • The Olmec
• • The Lowland Classic Maya
• • The Mesoamerican Highlands
• • Casas Grandes
• • The Chacoans
• • The Hohokam
• • The Eastern Woodlands
• • The Huari and Tiahuanaco Empires
• • The Kachin
• • The Ik
• • Remarks
• After collapse

2. The nature of complex societies
• Introduction
• Complexity
• • Nature of complexity
• • Simpler societies
• • States
• • Levels of complexity
• The evolution of complexity
• Summary and implications

3. The study of collapse
• Introduction
• What collapses? More on definitions
• Classification of theories
• Framework of discussion
• Resource depletion
• • Mesoamerica
• • Peru
• • The American Southwest
• • Eastern North America
• • Egypt
• • The Harappan Civilization
• • Mesopotamia
• • Mycenaean Civilization
• • The Roman Empire
• • Assessment
• New resources
• • Assessment
• Catastrophes
• • Mesoamerica
• • Minoan Civilization
• • The Roman Empire
• • Assessment
• Insufficient response to circumstances
• • Assessment
• Other complex societies
• • Assessment
• Intruders
• • North and South America
• • The Harappan Civilization
• • Mesopotamia
• • The Hittite Empire
• • Minoan Civilization
• • Mycenaean Civilization
• • The Roman Empire
• • China
• • Assessment
• Conflict/contradictions/mismanagement
• • General
• • Mesoamerica
• • Peru
• • China
• • Mesopotamia
• • The Roman Empire
• • The Byzantine Empire
• • Spain
• • The Netherlands
• • The Harappans
• • Easter Island
• • Assessment
• Social dysfunction
• • Assessment
• Mystical factors
• • Assessment
• Chance concatenation of events
• • Assessment
• Economic explanations
• • Assessment
• Summary and discussion

4. Understanding collapse: the marginal productivity of sociopolitical change
• The marginal productivity of increasing complexity
• • Agriculture and resource production
• • Information processing
• • Sociopolitical control and specialization
• • Overall economic productivity
• Explaining declining marginal returns in complex societies
• • Agriculture and resource production
• • Information processing
• • Sociopolitical control and specialization
• • Overall economic productivity
• Explaining collapse
• Alternatives to collapse

5. Evaluation: complexity and marginal returns in collapsing societies
• The collapse of the Western Roman Empire
• • Assessment of the Roman collapse
• The Classic Maya collapse
• • The setting
• • Views of the Maya
• • The evolution of Maya Civilization
• • Population
• • Subsistence
• • Sociopolitical complexity
• • Warfare
• • The collapse
• • Assessment of the Maya collapse
• The Chacoan collapse
• • Assessment of the Chacoan collapse
• Evaluation
• • The Roman collapse
• • The Mayan collapse
• • The Chacoan collapse
• Conclusions

6. Summary and implications
• Summary
• Collapse and the declining productivity of complexity
• Further implications of declining marginal returns
• Suggestions for further applications
• Declining marginal returns and other theories of collapse
• Contemporary conditions

References
Index

This book gave me much to think about. No easy reading, more like a scientific thesis than a popular science book, but thanks to the shortness and the Finnish translation, reading this wasn’t too much of a drag. The main point - diminishing returns play a huge role in complex societies and their collapse - was well argued.

I loved this. So dense. Plenty of juicy graphs and tables. The first 100 pages reads as a scientific literature review of collapsology, then Tainter settles in to present his theory - marginal return on complexity. Which I can buy as an explanation, to an extent. Tainter posits that societies increase complexity due to various external and internal factors (population growth, competition, war, resource depletion, etc.) and initially that return on increased complexity is large but eventually increases in complexity only return marginal increases in productivity/happiness. Pushed far enough and the curve descends where further complexity results in decreasing social conditions unless temporarily saved by radical technological advancement or resource capture. Collapse occurs somewhere on this downward curve when it is no longer worth it for the civilization to hold together. Examples abound and Tainter does a decent job convincing.

One huge issue though is Tainter's dismissal of what he calls the "mystical" theory of collapse. Promoted by Spengler and Toynbee this is the idea that civilization is united by ideology and when that ideology is corrupted or decayed the population fractures, causing collapse. Tainter dismisses this explanation out of hand because it is impossible to prove scientifically. Agreed, but that doesn't mean you can dismiss it - ideology being that intangible factor that is hard to isolate but so very powerful.

Obvious relevancy to our current predicament. Complete economic shutdown seems to make collapse inevitable. Interestingly Tainter acknowledges that complete collapse isn't possible in a globalized system because something neighbouring or something stronger will take over rather than allow complete failure to occur. We shall see.

Mám raději spíš populárně naučnou literaturu. Tahle knížka už je hodně naučná na můj vkus. Zajímavá, ale dost vědecky podaná.
Nicméně její závěry stojí za přečtení.
Vůbec bych nevěřila, že už je tak stará. Zdá se aktuální.
Na druhou stranu jsem si ale uvědomila, že nějakých tisíc, dva tisíce let je strašně málo pro lidstvo i když se to zdá hodně pro člověka.
Není to první knížka, kterou jsem na toto téma četla, ale určitě první takhle komplexně zpracovaná.