The Collapse of Complex Societies (Book Review)

note: I’ve been reading a dozen different version s of Lao tzu recently, and various commentaries (the Chinese have over 700). The political aspects of the Tao Te Ching (daodejing) suggest he is calling for a similar, nearly anarchist (no central govt., only local community governments) form of political organization. This book suggests there is a political “reversion to the mean ” of some level of simplicityi.
NN has earlier posted extensive predictions about the coming forced reversion to simpler ways of living.
One question in all this is whether simpler society will be enabled at a comfortable elvel by either alien or lost ancient technology that are tapped into cleaner energy systems if run with wisdom by enlightened leaders……and maybe this all connects to what Dan Burishch is taliking about – looking into our future…to download those technologies in time. –Michael

THE COLLAPSE OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES (New Studies in Archaeology)
By Joseph Tainter
Paperback: 260 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (March 30, 1990)
Average Customer Review: 4.5 Stars

Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The
Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will
therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of
societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient
societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and
future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews
more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and
far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of
societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of
disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan
collapses.

————–

REVIEW:

FASCINATING AND DEEPLY DISTURBING
May 29, 2004
By Chris Stolz

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 diminishing 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. Some 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 additional 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 neighbors 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-gatherers of the above example incur costs as they try to
solve their food-shortage problem. If they conquer their neighbors, 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.