An overview of Joseph Tainter's theory of diminishing marginal return on complexity and the trigger for civilization collapse once the costs of complexity surpass the benefits. As for our position on the timeline, I addressed this in detail a 2014 post that concluded my review of Tainter's book, noting that we had passed into the realm of negative return on complexity.
VIDEO: "Every Great Civilization Collapsed the Same Way. Here’s Where We Are in the Timeline"
The Archivist's Journal (7 min.)
Way into the negative.
ReplyDeleteNot necessarily. Tainter doesn't say that civilizations have to collapse technologically, but that they might just break up into more manageable pieces that allow them to jettison the complexity that has built up over time.
Delete