The Collapse of Complex Societies

What I found interesting about Joseph Tainter's treatise on civilizations is his application of economic theory to explain how they collapse. After a methodical review the two basic theories of why civilizations develop in the first place, the integration theory and the conflict theory, he launches into why he thinks economics is useful: it explains marginal returns. In simple terms, societies are machines for solving social problems. As problems become more difficult, solutions become more complicated, eating into resources. Eventually, all societies are faced with marginal returns on their investment. Economics is a study of how supply meets demand and management of scarce resources. Tainter begins by exploring the two concepts of civilization. Actually, it really does not matter whether you subscribe to the integration theory or the conflict theory. Economics helps explain complexity. Screw drivers exist because hammers weren't enough. Power drills were eventually developed and so on. Societies created such things as cash because lugging things around to exchange slowed commerce. Eventually, monetary policies developed to both explain transactions and allow regulation and taxation. Taxation pays for society. Here is where the two theories on civilization diverge. Integration theory proposes that societies become more complex because of a growth in people's wants and needs. Conflict theory says that societies exist because an upper class wants to control the output of society to further their own comfort and avarice. Personally, I agree with Tainter that neither theory works, although many societies I've read about, including our own can lean in one of these directions or another. Tainter agrees that economic theory cannot explain everything. After all, society and people have a rational and irrational half. For example, he explains how the taxation of citizens in the later Roman Empire became so unbearable that citizens frequently welcomed invading barbarians; miners in one central European province went over to the barbarians en-mass. Meanwhile, the rich in Rome fled to the countryside to avoid being conscripted into a failing series of governments. Peasants were encouraged to migrate to the cities, where they became a burden, because Roman governments deprived them of even subsistence --- all went to taxes. Getting back to Tainter's approach with economic theory, he supports this theory very well. There are figures showing the declining returns on increased investments in agriculture, medicine, education, pollution control, nutrition and scientific research. Taken as a whole it is very impressive. Unfortunately, I think the author relied too much on Rome as an example. Perhaps it was one he was extensively familiar or just a well-documented example. There are several examples of societies that have moderated their behavior and survived, at least long enough to be taken over by the current, predominant western culture: e.g., Japan. F

In contrast to Jered Diamond's "Collapse," this volume does not just focus on one theory of why societies collapse--depletion of natural resources--but presents in summary several different theories. In academic style, Tainter examines the pros and cons of each, offering a cornucopia of references that would be an invaluable source for future research. While he sees some merit to most theories, one he holds in complete contempt, while another he tends to prefer. Tainter has no patience for "mystical" notions that societies collapse because their moral fiber has degenerated, a theory made famous by Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee. What he does believe is that complex societies always at some point reach a stage where they become too complex, where the costs to citizens and elites alike begin to outweigh the benefits of keeping the society together. At that point, the society is vulnerable to breaking up. This is what happened to the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. The burden of inflation and taxes became so heavy on the populace that even the Italians began to yearn for "liberation" by barbarian tribes. And collapse is not always a bad thing: tribes like the Vandals actually governed their sections of the old empire more effectively. So, what about us? Because of globalization, any collapse would affect all industrialized countries together. So, the US cannot collapse without either being taken over by a competitor or bringing everyone else down with us. Oil running out might be the end of our era of complexity, an anomaly in human history, but we still have time to make changes that could forestall collapse. Overall, a fresh view of history key to understanding the present.

To get an idea of the impact this book has had both among scholars and on the general public one has only to look at its publishing record. It was written by an academic for academics and published by a university press (Cambridge no less) yet it is now in its fourteenth printing since its initial release in 1988. Tainter argues that human societies exist to solve problems. He looks at a score of societal collapses, focusing on three: Rome, the Maya, and the Chacoan Indians of the American Southwest. As these societies solved problems - food production, security, public works - they became increasingly complex. Complexity however carries with it overhead costs, e.g. administration, maintaining an army, tax collection, infrastructure maintenance, etc. As the society confronts new problems additional complexity is required to solve them. Eventually a point is reached where the overhead costs that are generated result in diminishing returns in terms of effectiveness. The society wastefully expends its resources trying to maintain its bloated condition until it finally collapses into smaller, simpler, more efficient units. (Does this sound like any contemporary societies we know?) One of the powerful attractions of this book is that, although written by an academic for a scholarly audience, the author is fully aware of his theory's relevance to the future of our own society, comments upon which he reserves for the final chapter. While Tainter states explicitly (writing in 1988) that he does not believe the collapse of our civilization is imminent, in a remarkably candid passage he characterizes the survivalist movement in the U.S. (excluding the lunatic fringe element) as being a rational response to concerns about the viability of our current political system. The same goes for those in the self reliance, grow you own food movement. "The whole concern with collapse and self-sufficiency may itself be a significant social indicator, the expectable scanning behavior of a social system under stress..." (p.211). Keep in mind that Tainter is writing before the first Gulf War, Y2K, 9-11 and before our current involvement in Iraq. New energy sources are the key, he says, to maintaining economic well-being. "A new energy subsidy is necessary if a declining standard of living and a future global collapse are to be averted." By subsidy he means the development of new forms of energy. This "development must be an item of the highest priority even if, as predicted, this requires reallocation of resources from other economic sectors." (p. 215). Almost twenty years have passed since Tainter wrote those words. I leave it for you the reader of this review to judge the capability of our current political system to respond to such a grave and obvious crisis. I have given this book 5 stars not because it is the final answer to the question of how civilizations or societies collapse but because it represents an important step along the way to that an

Tainter's book is a seminal and thorough analysis on the collapse of societies. Writing in a somewhat academic language, the author gives the stories of collapsed civilizations and one by one refutes the generally accepted theories searching for a explanation with a larger scope, which accounts for the outcome of all the collapse stories. Naturally, he comes up with one and in the real contribution of the book, the second half, gives this explanation in detail. Other reviewers have very nicely summarized the refuted theories (catastrophe, intruders and the like) and the idea of the book: More investment brings less marginal return and then society will inevitably collapse. I very much like the integration of the beautiful law of "declining marginal returns" which is functioning in all cases all the the time, into this context. But quite frankly, I think the Tainter's theory on collapse is a revised version of the resource depletion theory. Extreme makeover maybe, but a makeover. Simply put, if there were no resource depletion, there would be no reason to jump into the next level of complexity. And since obviously first the easiest resources are the first to be depleted, the return from the next resource will inevitably be smaller. Tainter, while refuting the previous ideas for collapse, gives an analogy between a dinosaur and a complex society. He says, it is often thought they are both giants locked in an evolutionary dead-end. They are both adapted to their present surrounding but will die away if it changes. But he then says a complex society is in itself something designed to adapt to its changing surroundings. So this analogy cannot be true. I actually think it is true, and the author fails to scrutinize his own theory as he did the previous "incomplete" theories. After reading his view, a very trivial question to ask the author would be "Why the once triumphant complex societies did not find a new resource, or a new way to govern that had a high marginal return, when they realized that their returns were diminishing?" A fine example could be: Why did Romans not use petroleum, why didn't Ottomans discover the New World? I do not believe Tainter answers this question, and the obvious answer to this question is, they were locked up in an evolutionary dead-end: They were dinosaurs! A minor thing to add is, while the idea that complexity and civilization is something that emerged only in the last several thousand years and it could prove to be a bad experiment is cute, it is flawed in the sense that only in the same range humanity has accrued a certain population density. Still, the book is marvelous in its scale and content, and I think it adds a lot to our thinking on how societies collapse and how we can avoid our fate: Find new ways for getting returns, the new ways which have large marginal returns (or use birth control and somehow avoid arms race between nations).

Tainter's project here is to articulate his grand unifying theory to explain the strange and disturbing fact that every complex civilisation the world has ever seen has collapsed. Tainter first elegantly disposes of the usual theories of social decline (disappearance of natural resources, invasions of barbarians, etc). He then lays out his theory of decline: as societies become more complex, the costs of meeting new challenges increase, until there comes a point where extra resources devoted to meeting new challenges produce diminihsing and then negative returns. At this point, societies become less complex (they collapse into smaller societies). For Tainter, social problems are always (ultimately) a problem of recruiting enough energy to "fuel" the increasing social complexity which is necessary to solve ever-newer problems. Complexity, writes Tainter, describes a variety of characteristics in a number of societies. SOm aspects of complexity include many differentiated social roles, a large class of administrators not involved in the production of primary resources, energy devoted to different kinds of communication, centralised government, etc. Societies become more complex in order to solve problems. Complexity, for Tainter, is quantifiable. Where, for example, the Cherokee natives of the U.S. had about 5,000 cultural artifacts (things ranging from recipes to tools to tents) which were integral to their culture, the Allied troops landing on the Normandy coast in 1944 had about 40,000. Herein, however, lies the rub. Since, as Tainter writes, the "number of challenges with which the Universe can confront a society is, for practical purposes, infinite," complex societies need to keep on increasing their level of complexity in order to survive new challenges. Tainter's thesis is that these "investments in aditional complexity" produce fewer and fewer returns with time, until eventually society cannot muster enough energy to fuel complexity. At this point, society collapses. Consider this example: A simple hunter-gatherer society with limited agriculture (i.e. garden plots) is faced with a problem, such as a seasonal drop in food production (or an invasion from its neighbours who have the same problem and are coming over for food). The bottom line is, this society faces an energy shortage. This society could respond to the food crisis by either voluntarily declining in numbers (die-off, and unlikely) or by increasing production. Most societies choose the latter. In order to increase production, this society will need to either expand territorially (invade somebody else)or increase agricultural production . In either case, this investment can pay off substantially in either increased access to already-produced food or increased food production. But the hunter-gatheres of the above example incur costs as they try to solve their food-shortage problem. If they conquer their neighbours, they have to garrison those territories, th