Customer Reviews

The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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, thus raising the cost of government. If they start agriculture on a larger or more intense scale in their own territories, they have to create a new class of citizens to man the farms, distribute and store the grain, and guard it from animals and invaders. In either case, the increases in access to energy (food) are offset somewhat by the increased cost of social complexity.

But, as the society gets MORE complex to confront newer challenges, the returns on these increases in complexity diminish. Eventually, the costs of maintaining garrisons (as the Romans found) is so high that both home and occupied populations revolt, and welcome the invaders with their simpler way of life and their lower taxes. Or, agricultural challenges (a massive drought, or degradation of soils) are so great that the society cannot muster the energy reserves to deal with them.

Tainter's book examines the Mayan, Chacoan and Roman collapses in terms of his theory of diminishing marginal returns on investments in complexity. This is the fascinating part of the book; the disturbing sections are Chapter Four and the final chapter. In Chapter 4, Tainter musters a massive array of statistics that show that modern society has been facing diminishing returns on investments in complexity. There is a very simple reason for this: we solve the easiest problems first. Take oil, for example. In 1950, spending the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil in searching for more oil yielded 100 barrels in discovered oil. In 2004, the world's five largest energy companies found less oil energy than they expended in looking for that energy. The per-dollar return on R&D investment has dropped for fifty years. In education, additional investments in programs, technology etc. no longer produce increases in outcomes. In short, industrial society is looking at steadily fewer returns on its investments in both non-human and human capital.

When a new challenge comes, Tainter argues, society will eventually be unable to muster the necessary resources to deal with the crisis, and will revert-- in a painful and unhappy way-- to a much simpler way of life.

In his final chapter, Tainter describes the modern world's "arms race of complexity" and makes some uncomfortable suggestions about our own future. (...). In an age where, for example, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has yielded net negative returns on investment even for the invaders (where's that cheap oil?), and where additional investments in education and health care in industrialised countries make no significant increases in outcomes, the historical focus of Tainter's work starts to become eerily prescient.

The scary thing about this deeply thoughtful and thoroughly researched book is its contention that the future, for all our knowledge and technology, might be an awful lot like the past.

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 answer. As Jared Diamond correctly points out in his new "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," complex societies would be expected to be the best at staving off collapse because they are by definition the most highly organized, with the best information, resource and administrative structures to deal with new challenges. Clearly other factors must be at work. Tainter however dismisses all previous theories of collapse, calling many of them `mystical'. Included in this latter group are many of the world's greatest thinkers from Plato and Polybius to Gibbon and Toynbee.

What Tainter really means is that their explanations are not quantifiable, therefore not scientific, and therefore unworthy of further consideration. This is a most unfortunate mistake. Insight is insight regardless of whether or not it is quantifiable. If a scientific approach to societal decision-making always worked Robert McNamara's faith in body count statistics should surely have resulted in a U.S. victory in Vietnam.

At one point Tainter states that individuals can never alter the course of world history, only powerful long-term societal forces. This flies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, from the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae to Lee's bungling at Gettysburg, to Winston Churchill and Lord Dowding in the Battle of Britain. (See my review on the latter.) The fact that at critical junctures in history a handful of individuals have made a huge difference is extremely frustrating to those in the `social science' community. They would like to believe that with enough good statistics you can predict the future with precision. This has never been and likely never will be the case, a reality I came to terms with many years ago and the main reason I never completed my doctoral studies in `political science'.

Allowing that Tainter's complexity model really does have considerable explanatory power, the important question is can you have an advanced society that is immune to complexity's dangers? The answer in this reviewer's opinion is a qualified `yes' but such a society would have to be organized very differently with far less interdependence, and hence fragility, than anything we now know. If world events (terrorism, Iran, North Korea, etc.) continue along the track they have taken in recent years, we may soon, for better or worse, have the opportunity to find out.

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.

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. Faced with resource problems since the beginning they showed a remarkable ability to adapt without the widespread famines that seemed to plague the Chinese.

As for the current crisis that western civilization is experiencing now, Tainter provides a few clues but no concrete predictions. He believes that the civilization will adapt and survive. I believe that instead it will break down. Some countries will be abandoned to their fate while others, such as India and the European Union will strive to exist as separate entities long after the collapse of the United States and China. Tainter believes, while providing a few historical examples as proof, that societies existing together, like the European Union, cannot collapse because they are bonded together in competition. I, however, feel that as collapse becomes inevitable, worrying about what your neighbors will do becomes less important than worrying about your own survival.

Eventually, we in the US will climb out of the hole created by our demise but generations to come will wonder at our foolishness.

If this review helps, please add your vote.

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).

This is well researched and well written overview of complex societies, describing their strengths and weaknesses. As the author states "This is a work of archeology and history, but more basically of social theory." It investigates societies as complex adaptive systems.

One of the most useful lists describes that Collapse is manifest in such things as:

* A lower degree of stratification and differentiation
* Less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and territories
* Less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse economic and political groups by elites
* Less behavioral control and regimentation
* Less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity, those elements that define the concept of "civilization": monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like
* Less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery
* Less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources
* Less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups
* A smaller territory integrated within a single political unit.

This is not a simple book to read. To really understand the message you need to read the whole book and not key sections.

Tainter skewers most castrophe theorists, then provides his own ideas, with supportive evidence from three different cultures. The fact that this book is still in print nearly 20 years after publication should serve as evidence of its worth. Pleasantly free of jargon, well-balanced, and hewing to a scientific, quantifiable perspective whenever possible, it is well worth your exploration.

While lots of authors look for a simplistic "single cause" of collapse (that another reviewer seems to have bought into!) Tainter's view is a lot more global. Single causes? Maybe...but they all have a common element: declining marginal return for additional effort. That's the underlying issue that sparked massive protest at the WTO meetings in Seattle. Folks are working harder and harder just to stay even. If Y2K'ers don't understand that our marginal rate of return has headed south, they're missing Tainter's point.

This is an utterly brilliant stunning work of genius. It begins with a comprehensive review of what appears to be every work in English relative to the topic being considered. The author has done a phenomenal job of both dissecting and then discussed the varied authors contributing to each of the following lists explanations for prior collapse of civilizations (from page 42):

1) Depletion or cessation of a vital resource
2) The establishment of a new resource base
3) The occurrence of some insurmountable catatrosphe
4) Insufficient response to circumstance
5) Other complex societies
6) Intruders
7) Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior
8) Social dysfunction
9) Mystical factors
10) Chance concatenation of events
11) Economic factors

This book is exceptionally well organized, well presented, and well spoken. The complex discussion is delivered in easy to read and absorb constructs. After a review and elegant dismissal of all of the prevailing theories, the author leads us into his approach by positing the collapse of civiliazations as resulting from the collapse of the larger systemic process for processing information to effect the increasingly complicated system of systems. In the author's words, at some point the cost of micro-managing a complex system is so high, and yields such poor returns on investment, that the natural and beneficial response of the whole is to collapse into more readily sustainable and resilience smaller parts.

I am reminded of Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, in which he discusses how simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and correct; sophisticated systems have multiple points of failure that interact in largely unforeseen ways and are very difficult to diagnose and correct; and the finally, Earth and Humanity, a system of systems so complex that "Intelligent Design" is failing us, and a natural Darwinian selection is kicking in.

For America to have 27 robust secessionist movements and a plethora of "Home Rule" regimes springing up local levels, while the Bush-Cheney regime runs the nation into bankruptcy with their elective war in Iraq that has cost half a trillion dollars that could have been better used to restore our failing infrastructure and our failed schools, tells us all we need to know: the federal government has collapsed, and the Republic as a whole is next absent draconian public engagement and mandated electoral reform prior to 2008.

The author concludes that "complexity is a problem-solving strategy" and that when it fails to solve the high-level threats or challenges, then the society collapses so that smaller and more resilient parts might be more innovative and adaptive, and hence survive better without the burden of inept "guidance" from above.

In the context of this book, the 27 secessionist movements in America are clearly what the author calls "resistance" to the now unaffordable higher costs and lower results of the federal mismanagement of the nation, best depicted by the grotesquely inept and even inhuman lack of effectiveness with respect to New Orleans and the Katrina hurricane.

There are gems throughout the work, which joins that of Philip Allott, also of Cambridge, who in his The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State suggested that the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge mistake, and we should have elevated and recognized peoples instead of sovereign states, as the latter have been too easily corrupted into aided the global elite to loot every commonwealth. A few that I noted:

Military expenditures and arms races suck the health out of nations. See my review of The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs), a book in which one author discusses the consequences of allowing the military to dominate what passes for strategy in the budget, while the politicians pander to domestic interests bereft of any grasp of international reality, and the intellectuals posit solutions that have no political, military, or overall holistic integration of all the sources of national power over time and space. The books on War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It and The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy, 1898-2005 are mounting in influence today.

The author notes that the physics of time and space make an extended dominance of distant cultures and places impossible when relying solely on the force of arms. I am of course reminding of Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People as well as Derek Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World.

The author notes that no strategy can be considered viable that steals from the future to support the present. This observation is in perfect harmony will all that has been done by Herman Daly in Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications and Paul Hawkins in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, among other works.

Collapse is cultural, systemic, a collapse of process, not of any discrete event, institution, or location. The information processing becomes impossible for a complex system that does not adapt from an industrial-era model of command and control to an information era model of distributed localized resilience. I think of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) and The The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back on the one hand, and the varied books on the "wealth of knowledge," wealth of networks.

Although others including myself in my US Institute of Peace paper on virtual diplomacy have expressed concern over the growing gap between people with power and people with knowledge, this author has provided us with what may well be the most erudite focused diagnosis of the coming collapse of the West, a lumbering industrial era mammoth whose small elite brain cannot compete with the sleeker Third World "tigers" that are using leap-ahead technologies to avoid our legacy of ashes.

In my view, the West can be saved only if America achieves electoral reform and restores the constitution, with a draconian reduction of federalism and the federal budget, while restoring to the states all of the powers not explicitly assigned to the three branches. Open Carry, Open Spectrum, all of the "opens" must prevail against the rule of secrecy and the use of scarcity to impoverish rather than enrich what should be "seven billion billionaires (forthcoming from Medard Gabel)."

This is a righteous book. I have loaded two images from my own earlier work (at my web site under the photo in Early Papers) and am now working on War and Peace in the Digital Era. This book here is Ref A.

Professor Tainter aimed to uncover the common denominator of major collapses of complex societies throughout history. That runs the risk of either producing an answer so vague and general as to be useless or shoehorning data where it does not belong. Instead, his analysis of marginal returns to investments in complexity allows for an empirically verifiable definition of conditions likely to lead to collapse without being so narrow as to preclude flexible application to widely different circumstances. He demonstrated the approach with credible explanations for the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses. He distinguished what does and does not constitute a decline in marginal returns, gave examples of situations that produce declining returns, and described the context in which declining returns will or will not likely lead to collapse. Finally, Dr. Tainter did a fine job of demolishing some older theories of collapse. My main suggestion for future development of the theory would be to consider the interplay of complexity, technology, climate change, and resource depletion in the context of an updated understanding of "carrying capacity" where complex institutions are "carried" (with a variable cushion against collapse) at a "capacity" defined by resources with levels influenced by climate and technology.