stylistic:style_transfer, quality:correction
The Collapse of Complex Societies

Joseph Tainter (the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies) argued that as complex societies try to deal with the problems that they face, they tend to become more and more complex. This complexity exists under the purview of mechanisms that coordinate numerous differentiated and specialized social and economic roles by which complex societies are recognized. To deal with the problems that it faces, a society resorts to creating bureaucratic layers, infrastructure, and changes of social class that are relevant in addressing the problems. Tainter gives the Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture as examples of collapsed complex societies. In the case of the Roman Empire, for example, reduced agricultural output was experienced coupled with growing population and dropping in the availability of per-capita energy, and to deal with these issues the Empire responded by capturing the neighboring empires where there were energy surpluses and other supplies like metal, grains, and human labor. This did not solve the problem in the long run because the Roman Empire expanded more and bigger challenges such as escalating costs related to communications, army, and civil governments and also crop failure became massive. Now, these challenges could no longer be dealt with by the same method of conquering more neighboring territories because that would make the problems even bigger. Efforts by Domitian and Constantine the Great to maintain cohesion within the empire through authoritarian means failed because it only strained the population more and eventually led to the breaking of the empire into two territories, east and west splits, and overtime, the west broke further into smaller units. The eastern split, though did not get fragmented immediately because it was able to capture some weak neighboring territories, would later and slowly crumble. The crumbling of the West Roman Empire was catastrophic and which Tainter argues that was the preference of the majority of everyone involved. The collapsing of West Roman Empire is a case where it is demonstrated that “complexity of the society” could no longer be sustained as would be established by Tainter's "Diminishing Return of Complexity". This gained the support of Ugo Bardi, Sara Falsini, and Ilaria Perissi's study "Toward a General Theory of Societal Collapse. A Biophysical Examination of Tainter’s Model of the Diminishing Returns of Complexity" which related Tainter's model of collapsing of complex societies to a model they called socioeconomic system model. Further support of Tainter's Model of the "Diminishing Returns of Complexity" could be ascribed Curtis (2012)’s "population-resources framework". In the framework, the collapsing of societies in the pre-industrial was related to societies' "failure to combat the destabilizing effects of demographic pressure on an (often) finite pool of resources, which put the future sustainability of settlements in danger" (pg. 18).