《社会崩溃》一书探讨了复杂社会崩溃的根源，作者约瑟夫·坦特认为，社会崩溃是应对复杂性投资边际收益递减的结果。他指出，社会复杂性包括农业、燃料开采、科学研究、教育和社会政治等各个方面，随着社会复杂性的增加，获取价值的难度也随之增加，最终导致资源枯竭，社会崩溃。

👨‍💻 **复杂性投资边际收益递减**：作者认为，社会复杂性包括农业、燃料开采、科学研究、教育和社会政治等各个方面，随着社会复杂性的增加，获取价值的难度也随之增加，最终导致资源枯竭，社会崩溃。例如，在农业领域，最初的土地开垦很容易获得高产，但随着时间的推移，土地肥力下降，开垦成本增加，边际收益递减。

🏛️ **国家作为复杂性的体现**：国家是社会复杂性的主要体现和驱动者，它通过解决集体社会问题（例如修建大型灌溉系统）或控制生产者以获取剩余价值来维持自身的运转。然而，随着国家复杂性的增加，其成本也会相应增加，最终可能超过社会所能承受的范围。

📉 **崩溃的临界点**：当社会复杂性达到临界点时，任何新的压力都会导致社会崩溃。例如，当国家需要进一步提高复杂性以应对新挑战时，其所需要的资源可能超过了社会所能提供的，最终导致农民起义、共和国分离、国家解体。

💥 **崩溃的机制**：社会崩溃并非突然发生的，而是逐步累积的结果。当社会复杂性投资的边际收益递减到一定程度时，社会就会变得脆弱，任何外部压力都可能引发崩溃。

😔 **历史的警示**：通过分析历史上的社会崩溃案例，作者试图揭示社会复杂性与崩溃之间的关系，并警示人们要警惕社会复杂性的过度增长，避免陷入崩溃的陷阱。

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-collapse-of

 

[This is the thirteenth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]

Joseph Tainter’s explanation for why complex societies collapse in one sentence: the collapse of a society is a response to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.

Tainter uses ‘complexity’ pretty loosely. He’s referring to a broad set of things that include agriculture, fuel extraction, scientific research, education, and sociopolitical complexity. He notes that in any area that produces something good for a society, the lowest-hanging fruit is plucked first, and then value gets harder and harder to extract until there’s little room for improvement. States are the biggest manifestation and driver of social complexity (and I’ll talk mostly about states in the rest of the review) but he’s talking about the abstract property of a society – how large it is, how many specialized social roles it has, how many mechanisms for organizing or doing things.

In Tainter’s model, states exist to solve problems. You can think of them as either solving collective social problems, like getting big irrigation systems to work (‘integration theory’), working to placate / oppress the productive populace enough that the elite can keep extracting surplus from them (‘conflict theory’). Either way, states tend to increase in complexity in order to deal with new challenges. That increased complexity imposes greater costs per capita. When the system hits some critical point on the return curve (highest point the graph below), the next stressor makes the state try to unlock the next stage of complexity, which demands more resources than the population can bear. Peasants revolt, republics break away, and the state falls apart.