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Joseph A. Tainter's The Collapse Of Complex Societies is a bit academic but very good study of civilizational collapse. It has a lot of data, studies many different civilizations and examines all popular theories of civilizational collapse. It points to diminshing marginal returns on increasing complexity in civilizations as the mechanism of collapse.

It's far better than the trendy Jared Diamond writing. IMHO, Jared Diamond's collapse is a book written from end to beginning, much like Guns, Germs and Steel to simply reconfirm existing left of center ideas by torturing and cherry picking the data to ignore anything that doesn't reconfirm accepted and popular political narratives.




Really? I found _Collapse_ to be much more boring than I expected. One of the major reasons he claims that a society collapses is a lack of trading partners. Not very sexy at all, and not leftist.


I'd like to add honourary mentions for Jane Jacobs' last book, Dark Age Ahead and Thomas Homer-Dixon's book The Ingenuity Gap.

http://raisethehammer.org/blog/455/


> Not very sexy at all, and not leftist.

I can't make out whether that's meant as a compliment or a complaint. Would you elaborate on that description, please?


It's neither. The parent comment implied that Diamond's book was a leftist polemic on how the environment is important. I didn't think it was very leftist or very alarmist. That's all I meant. I was actually disappointed when Diamond mentioned neighboring nations as a reason for collapse...how utterly unsurprising and dull. He spent a lot of time talking about it, too.


I just read some of the reviews on Amazon and ended up adding Tainter's book to my reading list. This increasing complexity sounds eerily similar to our current situation.




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