Why do Societies Collapse? Diminishing Returns are a key Factor, a new Study Says
In 1988, Joseph Tainter published a fundamental study on the collapse of societies, proposing the existence of a common cause, diminishing returns, for the fact that all past empires and civilizations had eventually collapsed. Recently, myself and my coworkers Sara Falsini and Ilaria Perissi performed a system dynamics study that confirms Tainter’s ideas and goes deeper into the origins of the diminishing returns of civilizations. It was published now on “Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality“
Why do civilizations collapse? It is a question that has been haunting the nebulous entity we call “The West” from the time when Edward Gibbon published his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in 1776. The underlying question in Gibbon’s massive study was ‘are we heading for the same destiny as the Romans?’ A question that generations of historians have tried to answer, so far without arriving to answer on which everyone would agree.
There are, literally, hundreds of “explanations” for the decline and fall of empires, and the same confusion reigns for the fall of the past civilizations rising to glory and then biting the dust, becoming little more than ruins and footnotes in history books. Is there a single cause for these collapses? Or is collapse the result of many small effects that, somehow, gang up together to push the great beast down the Seneca Cliff?
One of the most fascinating interpretations of the collapse of civilization is Joseph Tainter’s idea that it is due to “diminishing returns.” It is a well-known concept in economics that Tainter adapts to the historical cycle of civilizations, focusing on the control structures designed to keep together the whole system, the bureaucracy for instance. Tainter attributes these diminishing returns to an intrinsic property of control structures to become less efficient as they become larger. Below, you can see a rather well-known graph taken for Tainter’s book “The Collapse of Complex societies.” (1988)
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