Joesph Tainter's 1990 book 'The Collapse of Complex Societies' is a very complete and seminal work in the study of civilizational collapse. Tainter came from a background as an archaeologist, and now is a professor in the department of Environment and Society at the University of Utah.
The book at times reads like a textbook, which makes sense coming from an institutional academic like Tainter. The book is built off of a phenomenal literature review on all of history's theories of collapse, spanning a dozen different themes, and philosphers from Plato to Toynbee. Tainter offers a critique of each of the major themes of collapse, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, before finally presenting his own thesis.
Tainter is a bit like the Stephen Hawking of collapse - searching for a grand unified theory of collapse. He comes to disdain most of the major themes of collapse in the literature review with the exception of economic explanations of collapse, which he deems to be the strongest explanatory theme. Tainter's own economic thesis is built on a four statements that are built upon each other:
1. Human societies are problem solving organizations
2. Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance
3. Increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita and
4. Investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
To put it in another way, societies tend to pursue increases in complexity as a problem-solving response, but after a certain point in time, each new unit of investment in various forms of complexity yields a lower return (benefit) to society, compared the same unit in a previous time. When the return on these marginal investments in complexity falls below certain critical thresholds for a society, the society becomes trapped because there is not enough surplus to cover the expanding costs that come with these increases in complexity. After a certain point, brute economic forces dictate that problems either go unsolved or are solved by solutions that engender reductions in complexity (breaking up of the political structure and beuaracracy, breaking up of the state into smaller pieces, abandonment of expensive construction and maintenance of infrastructure, reduced population, etc).
Tainter explores this thesis in detail for three collapsed societies, which he intentionally picks at three vastly different scales, to illustrate the universal applicability of this theory. On the small scale is the Chacoan Society of present day New Mexico, on the medium scale is the Classic Lowland Maya, and on the large scale is the Roman Empire.
Tainter concludes his book by arguing how the valid components of other theories of collapse can be subsumed under his economic theory of collapse and discussing the implications for today's globalized society.
This post is going to be pretty long because I want to dive into some degree of depth into many of the different chapters of the book which I found illuminating. I'll start with the literature review, broken down into the host of themes that exist in the literature. I'm giving this section special attention because it essentially allows me to expand this series beyond the six perspectives into many more, if only superficially.
1. Depletion of cessation of a vital resource or resources on which the society depends
This theme conists of two subthemes - the depletion of a resource base due to human mismanagement and the more rapid loss of resources due to an environmental fluctuation or shift in climate. Here are various excerpts:
Mesopotamia (R. McC. Adams,1981): "When powerful regimes pursued policies of maximizing resource production, complex irrigation systems were developed that were beyond local abilities to manage and repair. State control was required. When the political realm proved unstable, dangers of salinity increased and the possibility loomed for sudden, catastrophic fluctuations... Impressive accomplishments were built on an unstable political base, and at the expense of increasing ecological fragility. When revenues dropped, the costs of agricultural management remained stable or increased..."
The Roman Empire (Waateringe,1975): "Large markets, the Pax Romana, road networks, and centralized administration created a situation in early roman times where food shortages could be alleviated to a greater degree than previously. The subsequent opportunities to profit from agriculture led to intensification and surplus production. Population consequently increased, leading to still greater demands for food and then to agricultural exhaustion...Deforestation led to erosion, the most readily accessible minerals were mined, lands were overgrazed, and agriculture declined. Food shortages and population decline sapped the empire's strength."
Tainter's own observation is that dealing with resource uncertainties is a common activity of complex societies, and may be one of the things they do best. He thinks that research must focus n the characteristics of the society that prevent an appropriate response rather than on the characteristics of the depleted resource.
2. The occurrence of some insurmountable catastrophe
These generally consist of one-time natura events like hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Tainter observes that "Complex societies regularly provide for catastrophes and routinely experience them without collapsing. If the society cannot absorb a catastrophe, then in many cases the characteristics of the society will be of greater interest, obviating the catastrophe explanation." Essentially, he is saying that catastrophes can provide the final straw that undoes an already weakened society, but any economically healthy society should be able to provide for rebuilding after catastrophes strike.
3. Insufficient response to circumstances
Interestingly, this is one of the conclusions to come from Jared Diamond's 'Collapse'. Various other expanations along this line are presented as well;
Flannery and Rappaport (1977): "Self-sufficiency and autonomy of local systems are reduced as specialization increases. As special-purpose subsystems become increasingly differentiated, stability declines. Disruptions occurring anywhere will be spread everywhere, whereas in less complex settings, a society would be cushioned against disruptions by less specialization, less interlinkage between parts, and greater time delays between cause and ultimate outcome."
Phillips (1979): "Efficiency...leads to inflexibility in resource allocation. [Early on], a large proportion of the new resources will be used in non-critical or low-return ways. This has the consequence of creating a hidden reserve that can be used for emergencies, for such non-critical activities are suspendable in a crisis. But through time, social and political institutions emerge that use this resource base more efficiently (fully). Eventually, most resources are allocated to support of 'efficient' institutions, leaving no reserves or flexibility in resource allocation."
Elman Service's 'Law of Evolutionary Potential': "The more specialized and adapted a form in a given evolutionary stage, the smaller its potential for passing to the next stage" (This seems to me to essentially be a restatement of the law of diminishing returns that Tainter bases his own thesis upon!)
R.N. Adams (1975): "Rigidity and conservatism result from investment in controlling major energy sources." I see this as saying that societies become unwilling to walk away from major sunk costs, even when it is prudent.
Renfrew (1979): "Under stress, complex societies lack the option to diversify, to become less specialized. By doing more of what may have caused the problem in the first place, the breakdown of the system is made inevitable." Under the same umbrella, Ferraro (1914) argues in regard to Rome "A situation developed in which the problems of cities were treated with a dose of the very remedy sure to aggravate things: furhter expenditures on the cities and more taxes on agriculture. Ultimately this system exceeded its tolerance and collapsed"
Along the line of Jared Diamond's thesis, Conrad and Demarest (1984) argue, in regard to the Inca, "Ideological factors which were beneficial early in the histories of these empires became maladaptive later"
Friedman and Rowlands (1977) present an explanation for tribal societies that seems like an eerie rewording of present-day problems: "Competitive feasting in tribal societies gives an incentive for surplus production. By the acquisition of captive external slaves and internal debt slaves, a conical clan forms in which one descent group promotes itself to chiefly rank. The expanding chiefdom, practicing perhaps swidden agriculture, will inevitably collapse due to declining productivity in an economy demanding accelerating surpluses."
Tainter is a little more sympathetic to these views. He organizes them into
A. the Dinosaur model, where a coplex society is seen as a lumbering colossus, fixed in its morphology and incapable of rapid change Locked into an evolutionary dead-end, it represents an investment in structure, size, and complexity that is awesome and admirable, yet highly maladaptive. Interestingly, this fits exactly with my discussion of the cementing of adaptations.
B. The runaway train model - A complex society is seen as impelled along a path of increasing complexity, unable to switch directions, regress or remain static. When obstacles impinge, it can continue only in the direction that it is headed, so that catastrophe ultimately results.
C. The house of cards model - suggests that complex societies, either as a rule or in certain kinds of environments, are inherently fragile, operating on low margins of reserve, so that their collapse is inevitable.
Tainter's response is that these may be true, but are insufficient explanations. He asks the question "Why might societies develop these characteristics?"
4. Other complex societies
This is essentially the explanation that societies collapse due to interactions with other competing societies. Tainter argues that conflict between societies more often leads to cycles of expansion and contraction than to collapse.
5. Intruders
This would be the case of the overthrow of a complex society by various barbarians.
Tainter wonders in this case why barbarians would destroy a civilization if it is worth invading in the first place. More concretely, he asks the question, 'Why would a larger and more complex society be defeated or overthrown by a simpler one?' Obviously further explanation is required.
6. Class Conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior
This is one theme that really spans the centuries. Plato believed proper government to be a balance of democracy and despotism, with an excess of either leading to decay.
Ibn Khaldun (14th century): "Dynasties run their course from accession to fall in three to four generations...When taxes are low, the population is more productive and tax yield is greater. Yet as the dynasty evolves, increased spending on luxury leads to higher taxes. Eventually taxes become so burdensome that productivity first declines, then is stifled. As more taxes are enacted to counter this, the point is finally reached where the polity is destroyed."
G. Vico (18th century): "In a civil society, discord fanned by demagoguery leads to the abandonment of civic responsibilities for the pursuit of individual goals. This in turn leads to barbarism."
M. Olson (1982): "In complex societies, special interest groups promote their own welfare above that of the state. The resulting damage leads to national economic weakness."
Jankowsa (1969) on Mesopotamian collapse: "Jankakowski constructs a scenario where trade within the neo-Assyrian Empire and tribute imposed on subject countries brought advantage only to Assyria: any goods bought from subject countries were purchased with their own tribute. The subject countries then had to seek alternative trade routes, avoiding Assyrian commercial centers. Increasing economic differentiation of regions was in 'cntradiction' to the predatory policy of the Assyrian Empire. As this contradiction grew there came to be more traffic along new trade routes, and less along old ones."
Tainter states "We cannot cite collapse as a function of greed if greed itself is not fully understood. To the extent that elite self-aggrandizement is controlled by social, political, and economic factors, then it is these factors that are relevant to understanding collapse."
7. Mystical Factors
Tainter, as a scientific academic, is particularly disdainful of any mystical approaches to understanding collapse, essentially arguing that they present no causal framework for understanding the factors that lead to collapse. These theories are pretty far-ranging, from Saint Augustine to Hegel, to Spengler and Toynbee. Many of them embrace cyclical models of civilization, ascribing to them the stages of the life (infancy, adolescence/growth, adulthood/flourishing, senescence, death). Many others like Toynbee, Schwietzer, and St. Augustine focused on the moral and ethical character of a nation as implicating its collapse. A common ground between most of these philosophers is the idea that a society can be roundly imbued with character traits that define its identity or its trajectory along some postulated cycle. These are definitely part of an age-old (Think Noah and the Ark; God's punishment for society's loss of morals as a metaphor for collapse) approach of stereotyping of an entire society according to a perceived zeitgeist. Of course, there are usually grains of truth behind every stereotype, and there can certainly be internal and external factors that drive cyclical generalized human behavior. So I think these theories should not be wholly waved off as Tainter does, but we should seek to understand what factors drive these cycles.
8. Chance concatenation of events
This is somewhat of a minority view that argues that certain societies collapsed due to the simultaneous and random nature of various harmful events or processes. Tainter argues that all of history can be seen as a chance concatenation of events, and that concatenation of negative random factors happens far more frequently than collapse.
9. Economic factors
As I already mentioned, Tainter views these as the strongest explanatory themes- ones that break down collapse into discussions of changing cost/benefit ratios. He states that economic models identify a causal chain between the controlling mechanism and the observed outcome.
Tainter presents his 'declining marginal returns on investments in complexity' thesis by presenting empirical evidence of declining marginal returns in our own society as evidence that this a generalized process. He states that 'The law of deminishing returns is one of the few phenomena of such regularity and predictability that economists are willing to call it a law...Complexity is a solution to percieved problems, and its facility in resolving these problems is based in part on its ratio of benefits/investment. Where this ratio is unfavorable, complexity is not a very successful strategy." Among the evidence that Tainter presents are various marginal productivity curves for agriculture. Increasing investments on agricultural intensification (i.e. increased yeield per acre) lead to diminishing returns (in the from of crop yield/labor hour) on each additional unit of investment (labor hours/acre). He shows a steeply declining curve in the number of patents issued per scientist/engineer, suggesting that as the most easy to conceptualize and develop inventions are patnted, each new (and more tchnically challenging) patent requires an ever larger pool of scientists and engineers. In health, he shows a steeply declining curve of Life expectancy/national health expenditures, suggesting that historicaly increasing costs in health care have produced much smaller and smaller increases in life expectancy (and an update for today: it has been cited by many mainstream news outlets that today's children in the U.S. are actually expected to live shorter lives than their parents. ) So in this particular case, the marginal product according to this index is perhaps negative. In education, Tainter shows how an increasing fraction of GDP and increasing $/capita has gone towards education, which is directing its pupils towards higher and higher levels of specialization. Tainter presents a further graph demonstrating sharply declining degrees/dollar spent on education. Tainter says "General education, which occurs early in life, is of the most lasting, widespread value. It is also attained at the owest comparative cost. Later, mor specialized training is considerably costlier. Its benefits may apply only to narrow segments of the society, while its costs are spread throughout the system. It may institutionalize rigidity where flexibility is called for." This is the whole concept behind the idea of 'The knowledge burden,' and if I have time, I'd like to devote a post to that because it dovetails nicely with the discussion of declining marginal returns in education.
The controlling mechanism behind these processes is easily understandable. In a fixed domain, whether it is an agricutural field or the set of possible inventions or the development of energy production, there are two important tenets:
1. There is some theoretical limit to what can be produced or achieved. In other words, in the agricutural field, there is some maximum theoretical yeild of a given crop, based on the best possible seed variety, distributed in the right way, with the crop optimally encouraged to grow. Limits do exist, while costs in pursuit of those limits have no theoretical limit themselves.
2. Solutions are generally pursued in the order of the highest to the lowest cost/benefit ratio. This is inherent in energy production. The large, easy to access oil fields are the ones developed first, followed by progressively smaller and/or harder to access and process oil sources. Same for wind power. The wind sites with the best wind resource, closest to the areas of electrical demand will be the sites developed first. This at some point may leave more marginal wind sites, farther away from population centers, requiring increased supportive transmission infrastructure.
For most situations, there is a third factor, that can initially cause the marginal productivity curve to increase. This can be variously be thought of as technology or the learning curve. As societies become better or more efficient in their pursuit or development of complex solutions. They may come to use better tools on more appropriate scales. Eventually though, the countervailing forces of natural limits and increasingly expensive marginal solutions cause the marginal productivity curve to reach an apex and then decline. When this situation occurs in many spheres of economic activity, it means that the society has to allocate more and more of its productive resources (surplus) towards investment in solutions that will in the future provide less of that same surplus. The ensuing process of escalation is what is inherently responsible for ultimate collapse (at least according to Tainter, and I would argue that this is probably true in most cases of collapse; those that don't have obvious/catastrophic explanations. Surely, for example, this framework does not apply to the Aztecs who were overwhelmed by the conquistador invaders with their ironwork technology).
Tainter explores the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Classic Lowland Maya, and the Chacoan society under this framework. Below, I'll summarize how the fall of each civilization fits into the context of declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.
For the Roman Empire, Tainter implicates declining marginal returns on investment in empire as the main controlling factor in its decline. Rome illustrates a very classic empire, using military force to expand the borders of its empire. Territorial expansion for an empire bears the economic cost of military investment, but yields the spoils of plunder, slaves to perform free labor (either physical slaves, or in today's empire, debt slaves), and annual taxes/tributes from the conquered peoples. According to Tainter, " Under this kind of payoff, Rome's conquests were economically self-perpetuating. The initial series of victories, undertaken as a mater of self-preservation, began increasingly to provide the economic base for further conquests. By the last two centuries, B.C., Rome's victories may have become nearly costless, as conquered nations footed the bill for further expansion." This was the initial phase of increasing marginal return on investment.
The mechanism for collapse is the following: initally, Rome sought to conquer the most economically advantageous civilizations - those that were nearby, and relatively indefensible. The fact that they were indefensible meant that the investment in military strength on the part of Rome could be relatively minimal in the pursuit of the conquest. The fact that they were nearby meant that fewer continuing costs had to be paid in continued coercion and legitimization in order to maintain the status of the conquered state as a Roman tribute colony. It also meant that the surplus and tribute, paid primarily in agricultural output (agriculture was 90% of the Roman economy) didn't have to be transported as far. Food transport costs greatly reduced the net benefit to Rome of the surplus of distant colonies. Tainter writes "A wagon load of wheat,for example, would double in value with a land journey of only 480 kilometers, a camel load in 600 kilometers. Land transport was so costly and inefficient that it was often impossible to relieve inland famines; local surpluses could not be economically carted to areas of shortage." Progressively, the territorial expansionary policy incurred higher military costs, at lesser and lesser benefit, and at progressively higher costs of maintaining the resulting empire.
The symptoms were clear, at least in retrospect: "Military costs strained finances. Septimus Severus increased pay of troops to 400 denarii per year. His sucessor, Caracalla, raised it to 600, while by the end of the Severan dynasty it stood at 750...The expenses of government were steadily increasing out of proportion to any increase in reciepts and the State was moving steadily in the direction of bankruptcy... [In a 50 year period during the height of the empire], there were at least 27 recognized Emporors, at least twice that many usurpers who were killed , and at one time thirty claimants to the throne." An increasingly insolvent empire needed increasing amounts of money to maintain its troops and pay for activities that promoted legitimization of the empire (or in other words suppression of discontent) including, among other things, the "dole", which is essentially a universal monetary handout to the populace. (The term "bread and circuses" is also a reference to legitimization activities of Rome) It had to pay for these increasing costs with fewer and fewer surpluses, beyond the point of insolvency. Its only way to do this (using gold and silver currency, with limit rates of extraction) was to debase the currency - reformulating the coins as a mixture of the gold and silver with more abundant base metals (in the end debasing the gold and silver down to 5%). The result of continued massive debasement to essentially cover up insolvency was hyperinflation. "in Egypt (which at the time was subsumed by the Roman Empire), from which the best documentation has survived, a measure of wheat that in the first century A.D. sold for six drachmae, had increased to 200 drachmae in 276 A.D., 9000 in 314, 78,000 in 324, and to more than 2,000,000 drachmae in 334 A.D." During periods of high returns on investment in complexity, the empire was able to manage crises, but as the costs to maintain the empire rose precipitously, it was increasingly powerless against stress surges. Plagues of diseases and barbarian incursions racked the empire. "The tax burden was such that peasant proprietors could acumulate no reserves, so if barbarians raided, or drought or locusts diminished the crop, they either borrowed or starved." This led to widespread abandonment of otherwise productive farmland, further exaccerbating problems related to lack of surpluses. At the end of the empire, the taxes and the government's administration were so oppressive to the population that in many places, the invading barbarians were hailed as saviors, rather than as invaders, and the Western empire rapidly reduced in size and extent. In the end, only the Eastern empire remained, and at much reduced levels of complexity.
The discussion of the Mayan and Chacoan collapse are somewhat shorter. They are similar to one another in their contributing factors, although at different scales. Both the Chacoan and Mayan societies existed in regions of high geographical redundancy, meaning that each region does not have very much diversity in soil, temperatures, rainfall, terrain, or ecosystem types.
In the Chacoan society of New Mexico, the redundancy applied to the vast center of the San Juan Basin. Along the circumference of the basin, sharp terrain features and elevation differences provided geographic diversity. In the Mayan region (Yucutan), however, the geogaphic redundancy extended across the region.
The consequence of geographic redundancy is that rainfall, temperatures, and thus agricultural output tend to be nearly identical across the redundant area. The Mayans engaged in an 'energy averaging' system, whereby cities with agricultural surpluses would trade food for luxury items and other necessary goods. In some seasons one city would have a surplus, and in other years, it would have a deficit, and other cities would have a surplus (despite the redundancy). This surplus was not a matter of having more favorable weather or terrain, but simply having enough available land to produce more food than the city needed. What changed this situation was population growth. Tainter notes "As a population impinges on the capacity of its food production system, fluctuations in productivity become increasingly consequntial [in geographically redundant areas]." So there was a declining marginal productivity of each new member of the labor force, as arable land became fixed (constrained), and intensification of agricultural production on already productive land has declining marginal returns. What really kicked collapse into overdrive, however, was that the Mayan cities sought to relieve food shortages in uniformly lean agricultural years by raiding other Mayan cities. The result was investment in another form of complexity - monumental construction. The famous Mayan pyramids and temples were essentially built as deterrants to raiders. Paintings on the temples depicted the brutal torture of prisoners. The temples thus gave a stark visual impression of a formidable city with a strong and cruel defense. A sort of arms race ensued. Temples and pyramids started poping up, and as time passed, they became bigger and bigger and bigger. Thus, more and more had to be expended on temple construction, just to keep up with neighboring cities. This increasing cost came with the same benefit in terms of deterence (thus a declining marginal return). Eventually, the cost became too much to bear (as the labor to construct the buildings came at a cost of even more food for the laborers), and collapse proceeded rapidly. Tainter notes "Even as construction ceased at the major centers, many small sites began to erect monuments for the first time. Between 830 and 909 AD, 65 percent of monuments were erected at minor sites. More than 40% of the centers that erected monuments at this time did so for the first time. Often, this was the only monument such sites dedicated before they, too, were swept up in the collapse."
As I mentioned before, the Chacoan society had the same problems with geographical redundancy, but had the advantages of diversity on the periphery. In the Chacoan case, declining marginal returns set in because initially, new sites would pop up on the periphery, increasing diversity, but as this ring became fully populated with settlements, new sites were limited to the redundant interior of the basin. Thus each new city decreased the overall diversity of the region. This region had much more year-to-year and long-cyclical variation in rainfall and temperatures, and thus was more vulnerable than the Maya to redundancy.
Tainter's framework for understanding collapse offers an economic perspective that is really useful in 'seeing the forest from the trees.' It provides a very concrete economic lens through which to view various components of economic growth. Rather than seeing growth and advancing technology as a uniformly wealth-producing feature of a society, it is much more useful to dig deeper into cost-benefit ratios of growth and to recognize patterns of declining marginal returns. In this light, I'd like to post the following graph, which in this context, I believe, has serious consequences for the solvency of our monetary system which can be seen in this context as approaching collapse (and whether a broader collapse would follow requires further discussion. I'll conclude this series of posts with a more complete analysis of our present day society.)
One of the key concepts of the book is that the return on investment does not have to be negative to precipitate collapse. As an engineer, I often see net-energy analysis that proports (implicitly or expliciti that because a form of energy production yields more energy than it takes to produce, it is a viable alternative to, oil, say. The reality is that civilization functions on surpluses, and increasingly complex civilizations need larger and larger surpluses. So even with positive returns on investment, if the return is declining, it can reduce surpluses sufficiently to hamstring many of the essential functions of a complex society. If enough of the economy is experiencing declining marginal returns, not enough of the economy is compensating with increasing marginal returns, and the society is not resilient enough to change its behaviors or become more efficient at utilizing its surpluses, then collapse of some form is imminent.
One final point that Tainter makes in his own conclusion is that the notion that collapse is necessarily a bad or undesirable thing is a notion that has its roots in our cultural narratives of an upward arrow of progress, and of technological and developmental progress being natural and universally desirable outcomes. In reality, argues Tainter, collapse is an economizing process. What he means is that by going through the process of collapse, the society is adapting to pursue increasing marginal returns again. It can only do this by breaking itself up socioeconomically; with smaller entities of the society untethering themselves from overextended empires, bloated bureaucracies, and the deleterious effects of overpopulation. This is not to say that the collapse is in any way peaceful or pleasant for those involved, but it is the economic solution of last resort that restore economic functionality to a population.
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