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Title	:	Collapse of Complex Societies
Author	:	Joseph A. Tainter
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 262 pages
Published	:	March 29th 1990 by Cambridge University Press (first published May 27th 1988)
Categories	:	History. Nonfiction. Politics. Economics. Sociology. Science. Anthropology

Collapse of Complex Societies

Joseph A. Tainter

Paperback | Pages: 262 pages

Rating: 4.16 | 830 Users | 100 Reviews

Narration During Books Collapse of Complex Societies

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.

Itemize Books As Collapse of Complex Societies

Original Title:	The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)
ISBN:	052138673X (ISBN13: 9780521386739)
Edition Language:	English

Rating Containing Books Collapse of Complex Societies

Ratings: 4.16 From 830 Users | 100 Reviews

Article Containing Books Collapse of Complex Societies

Very good: much better than Jared Diamond's _Collapse_, and much more convincing than Spengler or Toynbee.It was also deeply disturbing - the Ik amazed me in chapter 1, and the statistics in chapter 4 were extremely dismal and tie in far too well to Cowen's _The Great Stagnation_ and Murray's _Human Accomplishment_. There are a great many datapoints suggesting that diminishing marginal returns to modern tech/science began sometime in the late 1800s/early 1900s...

Ok, done!Tainter's work is an opus. How could it be otherwise with a title like that? Yet, it lives up to the title: aiming and broadly succeeding to argue the causes for collapse. It's a little ponderous to read, because it is documented and reasoned like a thesis. This is a historical analysis, with applicability to our age that's noted only lightly along the way: it's not a political position paper, though it could be.Tainter says diminishing returns eventually trap civilization in a no-win

What do we talk about when we talk about the collapse of complex societies? Tainter performs a service to posterity, throwing out all the old rhetoric of moaners and naysayers, blindly reading their own bias into the tea leaves sitting atop the stinking garbage heap of history. Lets look at the data, he says. Lets be reasonable, he says. It is a very reasonable start and encouragingrefreshing even, to be able to sit back and disregard so many ridiculous reasons that complex things fall apart.

This is a short, dense, book about a difficult subject. Tainter does a good job with his argument, which I admit even I though I disagree with it in part. His argument boils down to a few key points:1. Major civilizations tend to experience an early period of rapid growth through the 'low hanging fruit' of available territory, resources, etc. When 2. This growth inevitably leads to specialization, stratification, and complexity which initially serves growth3. The civilization plateau's and the

With the global economy teetering on a shaky foundation and prepper-types everywhere heralding the end of global civilization as we know it, the nature and mechanism of the collapse of complex societies has rarely seemed as relevant as it does today.Tainter's opus is a work of the sort that I have missed in my post-graduate world: a meticulously-researched assessment of existing theories using a variety of primary and secondary sources culminating in the assertion of a paradigm of his own.His

This was a quite interesting book. He makes a convincing case of societal collapse occurring because marginal costs of maintaining the system become too high compared to benefits. Interestingly competition with others may tie states to a competition that avoids collapse (for the time being) since collapse is not possible if another organized state is there to take over. This is of course the situation we have today. Declining marginal benefits are still there and to sustain a complex system

First off, this is more like a long academic paper than a book. Tainter has a thesis whereby he attempts to explain the collapse of all complex societies (quite a tall order of business) and goes about this by establishing a lot of background information and existing theory review in the first part of the book.I am by no means an archeologist (professional or amateur) but was able to make my way through this part, picking most of what Tainter was trying to communicate. I'd say to give the early