Originally posted on Tuesday, July 30th, 2013
Writing last April in the UK’s Telegraph about “Gold, Currency Debasement, and the Fall of the Roman Empire,” journalist James Delingpole quotes from anthropologist Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies …
in which Tainter “argues that monetary collapse was one of the main reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire.” This column drew over 1,000 reader comments.
Tainter, as quoted therein:
“By debasing currency, increasing taxes and imposing stringent regulations on the lives of
individuals, the Empire was, for a time able to survive. It did so however by vastly increasing
its own costliness and in doing so decreased the marginal return it could offer its population.
These costs drained the peasantry so thoroughly that population could not recover from
outbreaks of plague, producing lands were abandoned and the ability of the state to support
itself deteriorated.”
Tainter’s overarching hypothesis about social complexity is summarized neatly in a Wikipedia entry:
According to Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. Social complexity can be recognized by numerous differentiated and specialised social and economic roles and many mechanisms through which they are coordinated, and by reliance on symbolic and abstract communication, and the existence of a class of information producers and analysts who are not involved in primary resource production. Such complexity requires a substantial “energy” subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
When a society confronts a “problem,” such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first (ch. 1) identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.
For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans “solved” this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (in concrete forms, as metals, grain, slaves, etc.). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory.
Intense, authoritarian efforts to maintain cohesion by Domitian and Constantine the Great only led to an ever greater strain on the population. The empire was split into two halves, of which the western soon fragmented into smaller units. The eastern half, being wealthier, was able to survive longer, and did not collapse but instead succumbed slowly and piecemeal, because unlike the western empire it had powerful neighbors able to take advantage of its weakness.
It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Arch[a]eological evidence from human bones indicates that average nutrition actually improved after the collapse in many parts of the former Roman Empire. Average individuals may have benefited because they no longer had to invest in the burdensome complexity of empire. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
Tainter’s scholarly analysis is remarkable, among other reasons, for its conjoining of monetary debasement, taxation, and hyperregulation as factors contributing to the potential collapse of a complex civilization. Today America confronts all three.
Collapse is by no means inevitable.
Nor is it impossible.
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