vlada888
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2015–2023
1:33:25 · 207K views · Aug 6, 2012
Joseph Tainter lectures at a 2010 sustainability conference on why complex societies such as Rome collapse. His thesis is that rising complexity brings diminishing returns until societies cannot afford to maintain it.
Recommended as the best exposition of Tainter's theory, and used to explain slowing innovation, centralization and collapse risk.
10 comments from Hacker News
The best way to think about this is the classic Buckminster Fuller quote "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Spend some time watching Tainter's speech on complexity and collapse: this video . Particularly the adult conversations we need to have at the end of the talk. Also try Kate Raworth's explanation of the 'three horizons' framework: [LINK]
> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [LINK] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith [LINK] Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett [LINK] Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter this video Revealing the Naked Emperor – Paris, 2° & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [LINK]
The author's position seems to be that the very notion of civilizational collapse is flawed because people often come up with reductionist, poorly supported ways of explaining it. The unspoken implication here is that whoever brings up a threat of collapse in a political argument hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Stephen Bannon referencing Gibbons work comes to mind, and, come think of it, that's probably what prompted the author to write this piece. Denying a historical phenomenon for political gain is as bad as selectively citing a two century old book to justify xenophobia. It is revealing that the author mentions Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies", and then dismisses it's meticulous definition of collapse as "jargon". Before coming up with this definition Tainter spent a whole chapter describing many, many examples of social collapse including the ones mentioned in the article. The definition arises from these examples and absolutely covers the collapse of Rome, Bronze Age and others. As for how we define and study the social collapse without arbitrarily designating some cultures as superior to others - a good example would be collapse of ecosystems. In this case you can have a sensible definition of complexity and energy intake and the collapse would be a sharp decline in both. There is a whole framework for similar studies in social collapse - see this talk. this video
This is incorrect, societies have collapsed regularly throughout history. A collapse doesn't have to be a total destruction of the society, it's most often a fast transition to a lower level of social complexity. One of my favorite books (and a book referenced by the link above) is "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph A Tainter, he gives a great study on the nature of collapse with lots of examples (note, some of the examples are a little dated and dubious like the Ik). He also gave a few presentations on this: this video
This video [1] has a great explanation and exploration of why innovation seems to be slowing down. He uses data coming from the patent system over a period of 100 years. The video touches on much of what is in this study and does a great job of explaining it. [1] this video