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Joseph Anthony Tainter (born December 8, 1949) is an American anthropology and historian.
Tainter has written and edited many articles and monographs. His best-known work, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), examines the collapse of Maya and Chacoan civilizations,He brought together a multidisciplinary group to examine the Chaco culture in Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest (Santa Fe Institute Proceedings 24), edited with Bonnie Bagley Tainter, 1998. and of the Western Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics and Complex systems.
Tainter argues that sustainability or collapse of societies follow from the success or failure of problem-solving institutions and that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their energy subsidies reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. He recognizes collapse when a society involuntarily sheds a significant portion of its complexity.With Tadeusz Patzek, he is author of Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma, published in 2011.
Joseph Tainter is married to Bonnie Bagley and they have one child, Emmet Bagley Tainter.
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 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 (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Roman 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. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
However, Tainter is not entirely apocalyptic: "When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential at least temporarily to raise marginal productivity". Thus, barring continual conquest of your neighbors (which is always subject to diminishing returns), innovation that increases productivity is – in the long run – the only way out of the dilemma of declining marginal returns on added investments in complexity.
And, in his final chapters, Tainter discusses why modern societies may not be able to choose to collapse: because surrounding them are other complex societies which will in some way absorb a collapsed region or prevent a general collapse; the Mayan and Chacoan regions had no powerful complex neighbors and so could collapse for centuries or millennia, as could the Western Roman Empire - but the Byzantine Empire, bordered as it was by the Parthian Empire/Sassanid Empire Empire, did not have the option of devolving into simpler, smaller entities.
Tainter's concept of diminishing marginal returns on complexity, when applied to contemporary societies, has been termed Peak complexity. This term was coined by analogy to concepts such as Peak oil. It implies that "all societies and civilizations have natural limits to complexity and diversity" beyond which they are vulnerable to collapse.
He later went on to work with others on a specific element of this process: the diminishing marginal returns on innovation.His paper Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (1996) focuses on the energy cost of problem solving, and the energy-complexity relation in manmade systems.
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