Attain The Collapse Of Complex Societies Generated By Joseph A. Tainter Conveyed As Booklet

dry read, yes. But very much worth it, Tainter looks at how complex societies great powers, if you will collapse, And at what "collapse" means and at how the word has been misused, While Tainter can be a bit too Colin Renfrew in his use of quantification, his discussion of how complexity unravels and how increasing social complexity ultimately begins to yield lower and lower returns on social investment is fascinating.
All complex societies eventually collapse when the cost of complexity outweighs the value of the return of investment in complexity.
Super fascinating analysis and much food for thought, This book gave me the blues, but though I didn't necessarily like what Tainter had to say, I found his arguments driving me to the conclusion that the current push for further complexity in human civilization is not sustainable.


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

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

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

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

Tainter's work gives you a fine background on why some of the economic phenomena around you are happening, and I think it is worth anyone looking into.
Tainter makes the point that humans did not evolve to have brains that could look broadly at time and space, and thus we tend to only do what seems best for us at the time, not what's best globally and for the sustainability of future generations.
But obviously we have the capability of playing things forward, and books like these certainly give us some appreciation for the complexity of the problem and the need to think ahead.
for the painfully dry academic style, without a drop of liveliness or wit,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, 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, This was a quite interesting book, He makes a convincing case of societal collapse occurring because marginal costs of maintaining the system become too high compared to benefits.
Interestingly competition with others may tie states to a competition that avoids collapse for the time being since collapse is not possible if another organized state is there to take over.
This is of course the situation we have today, Declining marginal benefits are still there and to sustain a complex system requires an external energy subsidy, This was far deeper and nuanced thinking that the standard shallow storyline, In the middle part of the twentieth century, before "The Walking Dead," the historiography of civilizational collapse was dominated by Arnold Toynbees multivolume "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 Spenglers enormously influential "The Decline of the West," published in.
And many other writers over many centuries have, in different ways, examined why civilizations fail, the classic early modern example being Edward Gibbons analysis of Rome.
Joseph Tainter arrived in, with this book, to offer an alternativenamely, 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

underinformed at best.


He probably wouldnt disagree, or rather, he would say that most history is irrelevant, if not bunk.
For Tainter, if it cant be quantified, it doesnt 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 Toynbeetype 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 collapsefor centuries by Romes 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 himcomplexity, 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 variablesones 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 Stegners "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 saysjust 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 authors 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 nonquantifiable ranking that implies, for example, that sophisticated art, literary accomplishments, monumental architecture, or philosophy are characteristics of complex societiesthat 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 societysuch as great traditions of art and writingare 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 nonquantifiable.
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, Machiavellis "Discourses on Livy," and Montesquieus "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 “valueladen,” 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 nonargument 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 contraryif 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 incompletethey 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 Tainters 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 pessimisticTainter talks about how investing in energy production already inoffered sharply diminishing returns, but he neglects countervailing trends, such as the diminishing cost of light production quantified by William Nordhaus in thes.
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 todays 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 “restored 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 counterexamples 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 its 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 Tainters analysis is that his model does not address complex societies where problemsolving 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.
Tainters model of complexity is that of a hierarchy, rather than a network, a distinction made much of in Niall Fergusons 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 dont have to believe that crowdsourcing is a magic cureall to think that the Hayekian model of the market could have more application than to just economicsthat 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 technolibertarian paradise exists nowhere now though maybe certain aspects of the Internet are a step in this direction, but as an alternative, its on offer in a way thats new in human history.


Finally, Tainter applies his model to today, He notes that the modern world is different, not in its possible nonhierarchical 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 existsuntil it does, on a universal scale.
Hes probably right about that, but hes wrong about the economic determinism, which is far too narrow a framework through which to evaluate the fabric of human societies.
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