Joseph Tainter is recognized for his interdisciplinary approach to the study of societal collapse. His work investigates how social complexity and energy expenditure impact the sustainability of civilizations, from ancient empires to contemporary systems. Tainter's analysis centers on the failure of problem-solving institutions and the point at which investments in complexity yield diminishing returns. His scholarship offers profound insights into the cyclical patterns of rise and fall that shape human history.
How did our thirst for energy, our technological prowess, and the end of easy oil conspire to make the Deepwater Horizon oil spill likely? This book explains what caused the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, from which it will take decades to recover.
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.