Recommended by Dmitry Orlov in episode 96.

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Product Description

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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26846 in Books
• Published on: 1990-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 260 pages

Review
'Tainter's model accommodates all levels of complexity and all kinds of evidence. It deserves to be widely read.' Antiquity 'Tainter's is an attractive and compelling thesis, of a genre which is nearly extinct among domestic historians.' History Today

Review
"While the theoretical part of the book is quite remarkable and based on exceptional erudition, I also found the accumulation of the supporting data to be interesting reading . . . The merit of the book is that it is interesting. It modifies some of our views about early states and their collapse mainly by using data. It also shows how archaeology in alliance with social sciences opens the way for a comparative analysis of change in political and other cultural institutions." European Cultural Heritage

"Tainter's is an attractive and compelling thesis of a genre which is nearly extinct among domestic historians." History Today

"This is a lucid and stimulating book. Tainter does provide a framework for organizing and evaluating the evidence of collapse. One of the strengths of his framework is the broadness of its terms of reference...Tainter's model accomodates all levels of complexity and all kinds of evidence, from fiscal policy to the acquisition of raw materials. It deserves to be widely read." Antiquity

"Tainter has provided copious grist for the intellectual mill in this remarkable piece of scholarship. The breadth of its coverage is given order by a model that qualifies, I believe, as one of the covering laws archaeologists have sought. In addition, Old World and New World scholars alike can profit from a reading of this book." P. Nick Kardulias, American Journal of Archaeology

"The Collapse of Complex Societies contains much useful historical and archeological information on empires that have abruptly disappeared." James B. Rule, SUNY, Stony Brook, in Population and Environment

"The book is thought-provoking, engaging, and often witty, and well illustrates the relevancy of classical antiquity to contemporary concerns." Classical World

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Customer Reviews

Fascinating and deeply disturbing
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.

A Landmark Study in Why Societies Collapse
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.

Scholarly but gripping
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.