Posted by 
By Thomas Schmidt~Lew Rockwell
It is passing strange. Several months ago, it was not possible to obtain an obscure academic text originally published in 1988 from the New York Public Library without a wait of several weeks. That the citizens of the city that in the late 1990s called itself the “capital of the world†should in late 2007 be so interested in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse Of Complex Societies that a borrower couldn’t even extend the loan on a book by a week indicated that there was an undercurrent of understanding: civilization, in its broad sense and the narrower one of living in cities, was imperiled and hanging in the balance.
Tainter sought to analyze the process of societal collapse years before Jared Diamond arrived at the territory, and wanted to do so in an anthropological sense. So he sought a common element in the collapse of three advanced civilizations, with a large urban population supported by an agricultural hinterland (the same sort of urban model that Jane Jacobs earlier used in Cities and the Wealth of Nations). The common key, he decided, was excess centralization, and he examined it in each of the societies.
Most LRC readers will not be familiar with his two North American examples, including the Chacoan people near the four corners region in the US’ Southwest. Tainter’s first example, however, is the most familiar example, decried by Gibbon and those who still believe in the myth of the Renaissance: the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West.
Before examining the long period of collapse, Tainter first spells out his thesis: that a society will centralize and urbanize to the extent that the marginal profits from centralization outweigh the marginal costs. He does not cover in detail the Roman conquests in the East, but these regions were certainly profitable for the Romans to conquer, as seen at the very least by their economic viability in supporting the Byzantine Empire for 1000 years after Rome fell.
