Battelle Softball - End of the Regular Season

Well we finished off the regular season pretty strong. I had 12 hits in my last 14 at-bats and Aisling had 3 hits in our last two games. Despite floundering a bit in the middle of the season, we finished off the regular season by beating the league's only undefeated team by way of the mercy rule (winning by more than 10 runs after 5 innings).

Next comes the playoffs. It's a week-long double-elimination tournament the third week of August. Stay-tuned.

Six Perspectives on Collapse - Part 3: John Michael Greer's 'The Ecotechnic Future'

I've been a follower of John Michael Greer's writings for some time now. He maintains the blog 'The Archdruid Report', in which he's spent much of the past two years critiquing modern society, from the dual perspective of ecology and a compendium of modern and ancient history. In addition to being one of the prominent social critics of our time, John Michael Greer's online resume presents him as a 'futureologist.' He is the elected leader of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. while you might be tempted to think of the druids as that strange cult that built Stonehenge, their 'religion' is nothing very radical. It's a belief in the spirituality of nature and built around ecology and natural cycles. In addition to this odd role, Greer is a scholar of the occult, and has written books on magic, secret societies, and UFO's. Greer brings some of this discussion into his blog, but it always seems that the purpose of these diversions is to present rational explanations or to explain that what our culture has portrayed as something magical or mystical actually was actually very down-to-earth. Wizards, according to Greer, arose in the wake of the fall of Rome, and were really just renaissance men; engineers, ecologists and social scientists rolled into one. They were highly treasured by leaders in such dark times for their advisory role on very tough questions of the day. Superstitions, according to Greer, can be generally defined as bits of conventional wisdom that have been divorced from their original source of meaning.

'The Ecotechnic Future' presents a rather unique perspective on collapse. It begins with the assertion that human societies are ecologies. This is only really a contrarian viewpoint from the perspective of Western narratives of manifest destiny and of technology enabling us humans to rise above and to conquer nature. Greer's perspective, I would argue, however, is patently true. The fact that we have successfully managed different natural systems for our benefit in the past does not mean we are immune from the natural world or that we are not completely dependent upon natural earth systems for the maintenance of those same societies.

Greer discusses human ecologies in terms of archetypical natural ecologies that undergo periods of succession (or seres). In succession, a new ecological space is first taken up and overrun with an R-selected species. R-selected species grow very fast, use up resources very quickly, but are ultimately unsustainable. In his example of the formation of an old-growth forest, these would be the weeds and undergrowth that first fill an ecological void. As competition for resources becomes important, however, these R-selected species gradually get outcompeted by more energy-efficient K-selected species, like the tall trees, that grow very slowly, but eventually form a climax community that is long-lasting. The longevity does not imply permanency, however. Over time, changing environmental conditions may favor a new R-selected invasive species that would then take over, before the ecosystem transitioned to a new sere of entirely different K-selected species. This process typically occurs in nature on the time frame of centuries or millenia. Greer presents this same dynamic as driving the rise and fall of human ecologies. Writes Greer, "Modern industrial society is the exact equivalent of the first sere of pioneer weeds on a vacant lot - fast growing, resource hungry, inefficient, and at constant risk of replacement by a more efficient K-selected seres as the process of succession unfolds...As it exists today, modern society can best eb described as a scheme for turning resources into pollution as fast as possible. Resource depletion and pollution aren't accidental outcomes of industrialism. They are hardwired into the system: the faster resources turn into pollution , the more the industrial economy prospers, and vice versa. That forms the heart of our predicament. Peak oil is just one symptom of a wider crisis - the radical unsustainability of a severely R-selected human ecology - and trying to deal with the peak of worldwide petroleum production without dealing with the need to move to a broader sustainability will simply guarantee that other symptoms will take its place." This is Leibig's Law of the Minimum applied to industrial society. Oil is the limiting factor on the continued growth of our current society, but were we to be endowed with endless oil, another limiting factor would crop up close on its heels; fresh water, pollution, material shortages, etc. But as it is, oil is the key to understanding the unavoidable transition. Oil, as an energy form is unique and irreplacible. It exists in a concentrated and stable liquid form. It's energy density is tremendous. It can be transported very easily, and thermodynamically, speaking, all the work is already done. Relatively little energy has to be spent on converting the fuel into a useful form. Renewable fuels don't have many of these characteristics, and their much higher price tag reflects the fact that their use is not compatible with the profligate use of energy in today's industrial world. The high energy, water, and land costs, as well as the astronomically high costs of changing to new energy infrastuctures essentially dictate that they will not be used to run the same sort of society in which we currently inhabit (but may find important niches for critical uses of energy).

Greer goes on to present his own view of how the seres of human ecology will change in the near and off into the far distant future. The next sere, which we are currently moving into, according to Greer, is scarcity industrialism. It will be defined by a world still largely hanging on to its old methods of doing things, but gradually, the less productive or marginally economical uses of oil will disappear. We'll likely stop using oil to transport cheap goods around the world. People will drive smaller cars, and plane travel will revert to more of a luxury than a mainstream mode of transportation. Jobs will spring up closer to places of residence, and so forth. Worldwide decline in consumption will be forced to occur at the rate of an additional 4-5% each year, once the full force of oil decline sets in.

As oil becomes critically scarce, the world will be forced to transition to a sere that Greer calls A Salvage Society. In such a society, it won't make economic sense any longer to continue to produce new things and mine new metals. The existing, built infrastructure will then serve as a wonderful repository of raw materials and 'embodied energy' (or energy already spent on the mining, concentration, and production). Skyscrapers, for example, may become a source of salvage for new uses of metals - molded into other, more adaptive forms. Writes Greer, "In the ruins of th old Mayan city of Tikal, excavations have unearthed traces of the people who lived there after the Maya collapse. In this quiet afterword to the city's history, the palaces of the lords of Tikal became the homes of a little community of farmers and hunters who scratched out a living in the ruins of the city and made their cooking fires and their simple pottery in the midst of crumbing splendor. The same thing appears in dead civilizations around the globe. The logic behind it, though, has not often been recognized: when a civilization breaks down, the most efficient economies are most often those that use its legacies as raw material."

The ultimate end goal of these periods of sucession is, hopefully, a climax human ecosystem that Greer calls the 'ecotechnic society'. This society, Greer envisions as a completely sustainable society that uses key technical knowledge and skills to form a new sustainable society. But don't get too excited. This is envisioned to be far into the distant future, when we're all dead, and after many wrenching changes have be wrought. In the meantime, mankind will be driven economically through the other stages, and will have to go through the long processes of adapting its scale (depopulation), its cultures, and its knowledge base. Greer suggests that the best way to drive progress towards an ecotechnic future is to encourage human adaptations that follow the same process as evolution. "Some basic guidelines for adaptive approaches can be sketched out here. First, an adaptive response is scalable- it can be started and tested on a small scale, with modest resources, and scaled up from there if it proves successful. Second, an adaptive response is resilient-it remains useful under changing conditions, and can respond creatively to pressures. Third, an adaptive response is modular - it can be be separated into distinct elements, which can be replaced at different scales and technological levels. Finally, an adaptive response is open- it does not demand assent to any particular ideology or belief system, but rather works with many different ways of thought and life."

Greer identifies a problem solving approach which is most compatible with this form of organic adaptation, that he calls dissensus. Dissensus is the opposite of consensus. It is the idea that everyone should be allowed to have different ideas, implement them on their own, and let the cream rise to the top. It is counter to typical government solutions that seek consensus towards a particular solution and pursue that solution dogmatically, usually on large scales. The dissensus approach resembles commonly held notions of how private businesses should survive by creative innovation and risk. Some will survive long-term, and some will fail - that is the ideal nature of such a system. Greer's proposition then is not necessarily so novel, except that it runs counter to another commonly held ideal that is central to our culture: the worship of the archetypical tragic hero. The tragic hero in stories relies on grand plans ad ideologies, and put everything on the line for an ideal. The romanticism associated with the tragic hero underlies a lot of decisions that we collectively make as a society and is the basis for hope and grand dreams. But as Greer points out, the tragic hero always dies in the end. Greer offers the comic hero as an alternative. The comic hero muddles through life, making wrong turns, "stumbling cluelessly through situations with no grander agenda than coming out the other side with a whole skin...unlike tragic heroes, they do usually come out alive on the other side, and often bring the rest of the cast with them." Besides following a more organic approach towards problem solving, the comic hero approach is also better able to succeed because of the shifting landscapes in the future. As Greer puts it, "Those who try to plan an ecotechnic society today are in the position of a hapless engineer tasked in 1947 with drafting a plan to produce software for computers that did not exist yet."

Much of the rest of Greer's book is devoted to understanding how various aspects of out lives and societies fit into the context of the sea change ahead of us; dispelling myths, suggesting positive avenues to pursue, and suggesting which mores can be thrown out and which should be saved. This discussion is broken down into seven sections:

1. FOOD: Greer laments the fact that industrial agriculture treats soil as a barren infertile matrix, that is pumped with artificial, and unsustainable quantities of nutrients and despoiled with dangerous chemicals. The industrial approach is anathema to the natural ecosystem approach that is so central to Greer's druid beliefs. In the industrial food production model, nutrients are treated as a raw material that must be mined, and treated on the tail end as garbage to be disposed of. Sustainable food production on the other hand must close the nutrient cycle. The gist of his argument is that there are proven, safe and effective ways to turn plant waste and human and animal waste into valuable fertlilizers, restoring the nutrients lost from the agricultural process. They rely on composting and humanure techniques. I personally find the concept of humanure very intriguing. I've witnessed first-hand from the Cheapeake Bay Foundation's composting of human waste that once the composting process is complete, the remains smell very benign. Greer mentions that the harmful bacteria which make our wastes smell are destroyed in the heat given off by a proper compost pile.

Greer suggests that the organic farming revolution represents a huge step in the right direction, and one of the few movements towards sustainability that is really gaining large-scale traction.

2. HOME - A shift needs to be made from designing homes for aesthetics and uniformity to letting form follow from function. Homes need to work with natural processes and the sun to provide the right thermal conditions with a minimum of external energy input. Homes need to be designed that are responsible for producing some of their own energy. There are cheap solutions for some of these things, as Greer points out, like straw-bale walls that are stable and weatherproof, and provide 3 times the thermal insulation of typical stud walls. The unfortunate predicament that we are in is that we will be more or less stuck with much of the housing stock we currently have, as the complete replacement of much of today's cities and suburbs would be prohibitively expensive, in energy terms.

Greer insists on the importance of home economics - learning to produce valuable things for consumption by th family within the home, rather than seeking to pay for externally-created goods with earned income outside the home. We, as a society, says Greer, need to learn how to be proficient in a wide range of different skills, or else we are liable to fall into the 'specialization trap.' To illustrate the dangers of becoming overly specialized, Greer gives an example from the fall of Rome: "The pottery works at La Graufesenque in southern Gaul, for instance, shipped exquisite products throughout the western empire and beyond it. Ceramics bearing the La Graufesenque stamp have been found in Denmark and Eastern Germany, hundreds of miles past Roman frontiers. Good pottery was so cheap and widely available that even rural farm families could afford elegant tableware, sturdy cooking pots and watertight roof tiles. All this ended when Rome fell. When archaeologists opened the grave of a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, the pottery they found told a stark tale of technological collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain, the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What's more, most of it had to be imported because the potter's wheel dropped entirely out of use in Britain - one of many technologies lost in a cascading collapse that took the island down to levels of impoverishment more extreme than anything since the subsistence crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before...Huge pottery factories like the one at La Graufesenque, which used specialist labor to turn out quality goods in volume, coud make a profit only by marketing their wares across much of a continent, using far-flung networks of transport and exchange to get products to consumers who wanted pottery and had denarii to spend...The political implosion of the Roman Empire thus turned an economic advantage into a fatal vulnerability. As transport and exchange networks came apart, the Roman economy went down with it, and that economy had relied on centralied production and specialized labor for so long that no one knew how to replace it with local resources."

So a practical solution that Greer proposes is to keep one family member employed in the home economy. When the home economy can be made productive enough, it can lessen or negate the burden caused by the lack of a second income stream. This feeds back into the dire need for better architecture. Making the home a productive place depends on having a properly sized kitchen and space for craftsmanship, room to garden, good lighting, etc.

3. WORK- Greer's views on the future of work mirror those of economist Jeff Rubin. The two factors (Economies of scale and cheap labor) that have driven globalization in the direction of fewer and fewer, larger and larger business manufacturing goods on the other side of the world will gradually be overcome by diseconomies of distance. Transport, (and I would add, especially overland transport) will become very expensive, which will spell a gradual end to cheap products made overseas. Declining fossil fuel availability will mean market-driven prioritization of what still makes sense to be made far away, and what, out of sheer necessity, must be made locally, with minimal energy inputs. An economy is a system that takes in energy, raw materials, and human labor and produces the necessities and luxuries of human existence. For much of human history, the energy input to the system existed primarily as inputs to the human labor component (i.e. food). The past 100 years has seen a sweeping change in the balance of inputs. technology, and especially cheap energy has facilitated the substitution of most of the human labor input with energy. A very many people in the past decades have worked at jobs that were purely superfluous positions designed to find additional ways in which to flounder the abundant energy at our disposal. As cheap energy becomes increasingly scarce, a balance will be restored between these three inputs. Not only will the manufacturing come home again, but labor, especially for tasks that aren't strictly necessary, or aren't done particularly efficiently by fossil-fuel powered machines will return to being performed by human labor. Here are the careers that Greer envisions will be in high demand during deindustrialization:

-local trades (he gives examples of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, soap an beer makers)

-engineering of low-tech transportation networks, like railroads and canals

- salvage trades (demolition, recycling, small appliance repair, etc)

- ecologists (those who understand how to use natural flows and cycles to perform many of the societal functions that fossil fuels use today. For example, replacing insecticides by natural methods of attracting the predators of unwanted pests, and creating swales for flood prevention)

ENERGY- much of this section is devoted to dispelling myths about technology, energy, and progress. He discusses the innovation fallacy, common among economists that innovation can always trump resource limits. He notes that Nazi Germany had the most innovative technology on the planet, but one of the biggest factors in its defeat was a lack of oil. The Germans developed coal to liquids technology during the war to provide liquid fuel for the ongoing war. This technology actually had a negative net-energy, meaning it took more energy to mine, transport, and process the coal into liquid fuel than was avaiable in the fuel itself. The only value in this process was the form of the fuel. The airplanes required liquid fuel. The process, however, was enormously expensive in energy terms, and only made sense in a war economy. In a normal economy, the lesson is that technical feasibility is much less important in novel energy technologies than net energy is. Net energy is very strongly correlated with energy price, and for good reason. Many people advocate very strongly for nuclear energy, and forsee breeder reactors as the solution to our energy problems, and don't understand why we're not building more nuclear plants. The answer lies in its low net energy, and therefore, prohibitively high price. Next, Greer brings up the issue of infrastructure. Often new energy sources are touted that could take the place of petroleum. Such a transition runs into the paradox of produciton: "If energy prices are high because supplies are limited, the obvious solution is to increase the supply by producing more energy. At the same time, if this requires replacing one energy resource with another that cannot be produced, distributed, or consumed using the identical infrastructure, the immediate impact of such a replacement will be to raise energy prices, not lower them. The direct and indirect energy costs of building the new energy system become a source of additional demand that, intersecting with limited supply, drive prices up even further than they otherwise would rise." When energy prices are already so high that they are causing economic turmoil, this becomes quite the predicament, indeed. The only way out, is to invest first in large-scale conservation programs that can free up the required energy. The point of this whole discussion is that conservation will take a much more prominent role in the coming years than any large-scale switch to a new energy source will.

COMMUNITY - Like many other writers on peak oil, Greer stresses the need to reinvest ourselves in our communities - to develop local networks that have some reasonable level of division of labor. Greer has as much contempt for the idea that one's personal solution to peak oil should entail a flight to isolation as he does for the sprawling mega-cities of today's industrial world. Greer offers that a city of 20,000 to 200,000 people, situated in an agricultural area might provide the optimal backdrop for a post-peak world.

CULTURE - The main point to be made here is that culture IS memory. "An authentic culture roots into the collective experience of a community's past and from this source draws meaning for the present and tools for the future. Thus, culture is a constant negotiation between the living and the dead, as new conditions call for reinterpretation of past experience and redefine the meanings that are relevant and tools that are useful. When a society gives up on these negotiations and abandons the link with its past, what remains is not originality, but stasis, in which a persistent set of common assumptions and popular narratives are rediscovered and rehashed endlessly under a veneer of novelty. Even the most hackneyed notions can count on being described as new and innovative ideas unlike anything anyone has thought before...[An example] is the profusion of claims that everything will be all right if only the right people are given unchecked power. This sort of thinking has become unpleasantly common in some parts of the alternative scene...The arguments used to justify these schemes differ only in minor details from the ones used by defenders of aristocratic privelege in 19th century Europe...There is a way out of this paradox of unoriginal originality though its at least as paradoxical: the way to get genuinely new ideas is to deliberately learn and value the old ones." One of the main purposes of Greer's book is actually to promote actively passing on the valuable parts of our culture and the lessons of the past through the coming collapse of industrial society. He notes that during past collapses, it is often this kind of informaiton that is lost. We only have the knowledge of Greek philosophy because the texts of Greek scholars were transcribed and kept in monastic libraries. Otherwise, this knowledge would have never made it to the renaissance, and would not have provided the background for which the founders of our own country, like Thomas Jefferson, constructed the rules by which our society operates.

Housing Hunt in Portland

I'm on a mission in Portland to find a home for Nick and I for our first year here. Started a post last night, saved it, but can't find it this morning.

Last night it hit home that our top criterion are garage, garden and proximity to OHSU. Using these keywords, I found 4 new places to check out today.

http://portland.craigslist.org/mlt/apa/1859746411.html

http://portland.craigslist.org/mlt/apa/1857670303.html

http://portland.craigslist.org/mlt/apa/1857006520.html

http://portland.craigslist.org/mlt/apa/1858125927.html

I have appointments this afternoon at the two houses. The downside is that they are both $1095, (a score of -6.9 points) which is close to our budget cut-off of $1100.

Please let me know if you think they're worth it!

Ash =)

Great CNN video on urbanites switching to farming

I love the young guy in here who went to Yale, became an investment banker on Wall Street, and then ditched it all for Organic Farming -selling his wares at a farmer's market in Baltimore. He's much happier for the change - and in my opinion, the world is a better place for it.

Six Perspectives on Collapse - Part 2: Joseph Tainter's 'Collapse of Complex Societies'

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.