Why Societies, Civilizations & Empires Fall?

Return to The Complexity Wall

• Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? - Luke Kemp As part of my research at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge (2-18-19)
• no single accepted theory for why collapses happen, historians, anthropologists and others have proposed various explanations, including:
  • CLIMATIC CHANGE:
  • ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION:
  • INEQUALITY AND OLIGARCHY:
  • COMPLEXITY: - a measure of complexity
  • EXTERNAL SHOCKS:
  • RANDOMNESS/BAD LUCK:

• Tainter writes "Societies are problem-solving collectives that grow in complexity in order to overcome new issues. However, the returns from complexity eventually reach a point of diminishing returns."
• Measures of Complexity
  • Another measure of increasing complexity is called Energy Return on Investment (EROI). This refers to the ratio between the amount of energy produced by a resource relative to the energy needed to obtain it. Like complexity, EROI appears to have a point of diminishing returns. In his book The Upside of Down, the political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon observed that environmental degradation throughout the Roman Empire led to falling EROI from their staple energy source: crops of wheat and alfalfa. The empire fell alongside their EROI. Tainter also blames it as a chief culprit of collapse, including for the Mayan.
  • Social Complexity