Recent reading
Jan. 27th, 2018 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaThe Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
For my fannish bookclub; we all liked this one. I thought it was a bit slow at first, but it won me over. You don't get close to the characters, which is usually a drawback for me, but it has great setting and mood with all the descriptions of the circus. The plot is slow but it's there, and I found the ending satisfying. I kind of wanted all the circus workers to unionize though, so they'd get properly paid for all that night work. *g*
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
Wow. This is an impressive and thought-provoking book, recommended! The thesis is that the reason complex societies collapse is because investment in complexity has a decreasing marginal return. Take medicine, for example: the cheap inventions of vaccines, penicillin, and other low-hanging fruit prolonged human life quite a lot, but now we're spending a lot of money on incremental improvements. Or take the ancient Roman military: in the beginning it paid off really a lot because they conquered new countries and took their treasure, and Romans didn't even have to pay taxes, and in the end they could barely hold together the empire even with a much larger military, and there were crushing taxes on the peasants. In that situation collapse is actually a good solution and made life better for the majority of people (of course, collapse in a situation where the majority of people can't grow their own food would lead to a lot of people dying...). The author doesn't necessarily see complex societies as better, just as problem-solving responses that sometimes get driven past the point of where the cost is too high for what you get out of it. If there's a weakness in his argument, it might be that he doesn't show why it's not possible to back down the complexity curve. Or rather, he does show in many cases why there are mechanisms that continue to drive complexity, but in general I don't see why it shouldn't be possible.
One of his points is that where several complex societies are neighbors, it's not really possible for one of them to collapse, because they're driven on by competition. Or if one of them does try to collapse, another will move in and there will just be a regime change. This is the situation in which we are now. He thinks we'll either continue to pay the higher and higher costs of complexity (this apparently happened with neighboring groups among the ancient Maya for 1000 years), or we'll all collapse at once.
Another interesting suggestion is that participatory democracy developed in situations of competing complex societies, like in ancient Greece or in industrializing Europe. In the Roman empire, the peasants could withdraw support and let it all fall and get a better deal, but that's not possible where collapse would just lead to a takeover by a neighbor state. Instead the working classes forced a better deal out of their own complexifying state. Hmm.
For my fannish bookclub; we all liked this one. I thought it was a bit slow at first, but it won me over. You don't get close to the characters, which is usually a drawback for me, but it has great setting and mood with all the descriptions of the circus. The plot is slow but it's there, and I found the ending satisfying. I kind of wanted all the circus workers to unionize though, so they'd get properly paid for all that night work. *g*
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
Wow. This is an impressive and thought-provoking book, recommended! The thesis is that the reason complex societies collapse is because investment in complexity has a decreasing marginal return. Take medicine, for example: the cheap inventions of vaccines, penicillin, and other low-hanging fruit prolonged human life quite a lot, but now we're spending a lot of money on incremental improvements. Or take the ancient Roman military: in the beginning it paid off really a lot because they conquered new countries and took their treasure, and Romans didn't even have to pay taxes, and in the end they could barely hold together the empire even with a much larger military, and there were crushing taxes on the peasants. In that situation collapse is actually a good solution and made life better for the majority of people (of course, collapse in a situation where the majority of people can't grow their own food would lead to a lot of people dying...). The author doesn't necessarily see complex societies as better, just as problem-solving responses that sometimes get driven past the point of where the cost is too high for what you get out of it. If there's a weakness in his argument, it might be that he doesn't show why it's not possible to back down the complexity curve. Or rather, he does show in many cases why there are mechanisms that continue to drive complexity, but in general I don't see why it shouldn't be possible.
One of his points is that where several complex societies are neighbors, it's not really possible for one of them to collapse, because they're driven on by competition. Or if one of them does try to collapse, another will move in and there will just be a regime change. This is the situation in which we are now. He thinks we'll either continue to pay the higher and higher costs of complexity (this apparently happened with neighboring groups among the ancient Maya for 1000 years), or we'll all collapse at once.
Another interesting suggestion is that participatory democracy developed in situations of competing complex societies, like in ancient Greece or in industrializing Europe. In the Roman empire, the peasants could withdraw support and let it all fall and get a better deal, but that's not possible where collapse would just lead to a takeover by a neighbor state. Instead the working classes forced a better deal out of their own complexifying state. Hmm.
Tainter sounds v intriguing!
Date: 2018-01-27 10:43 pm (UTC)Re: Tainter sounds v intriguing!
Date: 2018-01-27 10:51 pm (UTC)Hmm, I guess the Soviet Union did kind of collapse? But of course it didn't collapse "all the way down" and capitalism/oligarchy stepped in to take over.
ETA: Spontaneous question: want to Skype tomorrow? : ) I'll just be home all day, so any (reasonable) time would work for me.
Re: Tainter sounds v intriguing!
Date: 2018-01-27 11:21 pm (UTC)I'm highly available between 10 and noon (6p - 8p *your time*) Sunday!
Will call!
Re: Tainter sounds v intriguing!
Date: 2018-01-27 11:31 pm (UTC)Re: Tainter sounds v intriguing!
Date: 2018-01-28 10:45 am (UTC)Re: Tainter sounds v intriguing!
Date: 2018-01-28 10:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-01-28 06:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-01-28 07:40 pm (UTC)