“Whether one endorses a conflict or an integration model of society, or some synthesis of these, it is necessary to inquire into the benefits that a population derives from its investment in complexity. Although in the previous chapter serious questions were raised about the view that complex societies collapse as a result of overtaxing their populations, nevertheless the question of benefits relative to investment merits a close look. This is so under either a conflict model, in which complexity is seen a response to class competition and the needs of an elite to maintain privilege, or an integration model, in which complexity is viewed as a response to social needs. In either view, complexity is a solution to perceived problems, and its facility in resolving these problems is based in part on its ratio of benefits/investment. Where this ratio is unfavorable, complexity is not a very successful strategy. As with energy and organization, the benefits and costs of investment in complexity are opposite poles of an equation. Neither can be considered without the other, although regrettably they usually are.
It is the thesis of this chapter that return on investment in complexity varies, and that this variation follows a characteristic curve. More specifically, it is proposed that in many crucial spheres, continued investment in sociopolitical complexity reaches a point where the benefits for such investment begin to decline, at first gradually, then with accelerated force. Thus, not only must a population allocate greater and greater amounts of resources to maintaining an evolving society, but after a certain point higher amounts of this investment will yield smaller increments of return. Diminishing returns, it will be shown, are a recurrent aspect of sociopolitical evolution and of investment in complexity.
The principle of diminishing returns is one of the few phenomena of such regularity and predictability that economists are willing to call it a ‘law’. In manufacturing, diminishing returns set in when investment in the form of additional inputs causes a decline in the rate of productivity. While this is not exactly analogous to the processes that cause diminishing returns in sociopolitical evolution, some of this terminology developed by economists will nevertheless be helpful in the discussion that follows.
Two concepts commonly used by economists are useful here. These are average product and marginal product. The average product of an economic activity is simply the output per unit of input. The marginal product of any input is the increase in the total output resulting from the input. Similarly, the average cost is the cost per unit of input, while the marginal cost is the increase or decrease in total cost resulting from one more (or less) unit of output.
The law of diminishing returns refers to changes in average and marginal products and costs. Average product and average cost respond to, and ultimately follow, changes in marginal product and cost. Both are subject to this principle, which is also called the law of diminishing marginal productivity.
For present purposes one term will be emphasized. The discussion will most often refer to the concept ‘marginal return.’ This may be taken to mean the same thing as marginal product, that is, return per increased unit of investment. The word ‘return’ is preferred to ‘product’ to emphasize the concern with whatever benefits a population obtains from its investment in complexity.
The proposition introduced above may now be rephrased in the terminology that will be used throughout the remainder of this work. It is suggested that the increased costs of sociopolitical evolution frequently reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. This is to say that the benefit/investment ratio of sociopolitical complexity follows the marginal product curve. After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits.
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Information Processing
The processing of large quantities of information is an essential aspect of complex societies, and indeed the need for this processing is probably one of the reasons that such societies came into existence. Yet the costs of information processing, in many spheres, show a trend of declining marginal productivity.
Gregory Johnson has shown graphically that as the size of a social group the communication load increases even faster. Information processing increases in response until capacity is reached. After this point, information processing performance deteriorates, so that greater costs are allocated to processing that is less efficient and reliable. At this point information processing hierarchies may be expected to develop.
In the same vein, Moore has suggested that when the amount of information processed by a society is small, much can be collected at low cost. As the amount of
information spreads, however, the marginal cost of useful information grows rapidly,
in part because redundancy of information increases.
Complex societies engage in a large number of information-processing activities.
Among those for which data could be gathered that would be pertinent to the present problem are: research and development, education, and development/maintenance of
information channels. These are certainly not the only spheres of information
processing in complex societies, but they are essential ones.
…
At some point in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem solving strategy yields a declining marginal return. Let us examine this proposition more detail.
The hypothetical society discussed a few paragraphs above responds to stress by increasing complexity. In so doing it increases investment in agricultural and other resource production, in hierarchy, in information processing, in education and specialized training, in defense, and so forth. The cost-benefit curve for these investments increases at first favorably, for the easiest, most general, most accessible and least expensive solutions are attempted first. As these solutions are exhausted, however, continued stresses require further investments in complexity. The least costly solutions having been used, evolution now proceeds in a more expensive direction. The hierarchy expands in size, complexity, and specialization; resource production focuses increasingly on sources of supply that are more difficult to acquire and process; agricultural labor intensifies; information processing and training requirements become less generalized; and most likely, an increased military apparatus is seen as the solution to these problems.
What benefits derive from these adjustments? Barring the acquisition of new energy sources, most often through conquest, such increased costs are usually undertaken taken merely to maintain the status quo. Stress that is met by increased complexity might come from such sources as agricultural deterioration, population growth, external danger, internal unrest, and threats to foreign sources of important commodities. When complexity increases to counter such stress, it achieves success when the factors that threaten stability no longer do so. So if agricultural production drops below about 2000 calories per person per day, increased complexity, and attendant agricultural development, may restore it to that level. Where stability is threatened by internal or external sources, increased complexity will achieve success when the prior state of orderliness has been restored, or the frontiers defended. Where the supply of a commodity is threatened, increased complexity and military adventures may ultimately secure an even greater supply of the commodity, but just as often they may not.
Thus a growing sociocultural system ultimately reaches a point [such as B1, C1 on the curve in Fig. 19], whereafter investment in further complexity yields increased returns, but at a declining marginal rate. When this point is reached, a complex society enters the phase where it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse.
There are two general factors that combine to make a society vulnerable to collapse when investment in complexity begins to yield a declining marginal return. First, stress and perturbation are a constant feature of any complex society, always occurring somewhere in its territory. Such a society will have a developed and operating regulatory apparatus that is designed to deal with such things as localized agriculture-failures, border conflicts, and unrest. Since such continuous, localized stress can be expected to recur with regularity it can, to a degree, be anticipated and prepared for major, unexpected stress surges, however, will also occur given enough time, as such things as major climatic fluctuations and foreign incursions take place. To meet these major stresses the society must have some kind of net reserve. This can take the form of excess productive capacities in agriculture, energy, or minerals, or hoarded surpluses from past production. Stress surges of great magnitude cannot be accommodated without such a reserve.
Yet a society experiencing declining marginal returns is investing ever more heavily in a strategy that is yielding proportionately less. Excess productive capacity will at some point be used up, and accumulated surpluses allocated to current operating needs. There is, then, little or no surplus with which to counter major adversities. Unexpected stress surges must be dealt with out of the current operating budget, ten ineffectually, and always to the detriment of the system as a whole. Even if the stress is successfully met, the society is weakened in the process, and made even more vulnerable to the next crisis. Once a complex society develops the vulnerabilities of declining marginal returns, collapse may merely require sufficient passage of time to render probable the occurrence of an insurmountable calamity.
Secondly, declining marginal returns make complexity a less attractive problem-solving strategy. Where marginal returns decline, the advantages to complexity become ultimately no greater (for the society as a whole) than for less costly social forms. The marginal cost of evolution to a higher level of complexity, or of remaining at the present level, is high compared with the alternative of disintegration.
Under such conditions, the option to decompose (that is, to sever the ties that link localized groups to a regional entity) becomes attractive to certain components of a f complex society. As marginal returns deteriorate, tax rates rise with less and less return to the local level. Irrigation systems go untended, bridges and roads are not -kept up, and the frontier is not adequately defended. The population, meanwhile, must contribute ever more of a shrinking productive base to support whatever projects the hierarchy is still able to accomplish. Many of the social units that comprise a complex society perceive increased advantage to a strategy of independence, and begin to pursue their own immediate goals rather than the long-term goals of the hierarchy. Behavioral interdependence gives way to behavioral independence, requiring the hierarchy to allocate still more of a shrinking resource base to legitimization and/or control.
Thus, when the marginal cost of participating in a complex society becomes too high, productive units across the economic spectrum increase resistance (passive or active) to the demands of the hierarchy, or overtly attempt to break away. Both the lower ranking strata (the peasant producers of agricultural commodities) and upper ranking strata of wealthy merchants and nobility (who are often called upon to subsidize the costs of complexity) are vulnerable to such temptations. Effective political action on the part of peasantry can generally take place only when they are allied with other strata. This strategy is rarely employed, the usual course being recurrent peasant upheavals. Even still, peasantry can effectively weaken a hierarchy by other means when their marginal return for participating in a complex system is too low. A common strategy is the development of apathy to the well-being of the polity. In both the later Roman and Byzantine Empires the overtaxed peasantry offered little resistance to the foreign incursions that ultimately toppled these regimes
And so, societies faced with declining marginal returns for investment in complexity face a downward spiral from problems that seem insurmountable. Declining resources and rising marginal costs sap economic strength, so that services to the population cannot be sustained. As unrest grows among producers, increased resources from a dwindling supply must be allocated to legitimization and/or control. The economic sustaining base becomes weakened, and its members either actively or passively reduce their support for the polity. Reserve resources to meet unexpected stress surges are consumed for operating expenses. Ultimately, the society era disintegrates as localized entities break away, or is so weakened that it is toppled militarily, often with very little resistance. In either case, sociopolitical organization is reduced to the level that can be sustained by local resources.
…
Summary
Collapse is recurrent in human history; it is global in its occurrence; and it affects the spectrum of societies from simple foragers to great empires. Collapse is a matter of considerable importance to every member of a complex society, and seems to be of particular interest to many people today. Political decentralization has repercussions in economics, art, literature, and other cultural phenomena, but these are not its essence. Collapse is fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.
A complex society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated. Specialization decreases and there is less centralized control. The flow of information drops, people trade and interact less, and there is overall lower coordination among individuals and groups. Economic activity drops to a commensurate level, while the arts and literature experience such a quantitative decline that a dark age often ensues. Population levels tend to drop, and for those who are left the known world shrinks.
Complex societies, such as states, are not a discrete stage in cultural evolution. Each society represents a point along a continuum from least to most complex. Complex forms of human organization have emerged comparatively recently, and are an anomaly of history. Complexity and stratification are oddities when viewed from the full perspective of our history, and where present, must be constantly reinforced. Leaders, parties, and governments need constantly to establish and maintain legitimacy. This effort must have a genuine material basis, which means that some level of responsiveness to a support population is necessary. Maintenance of legitimacy or investment in coercion require constant mobilization of resources. This is an unrelenting cost that any complex society must bear.
Two major approaches to understanding the origin of the state are the conflict and integration schools. The former sees society as an arena of class conflict. The governing institutions of the state, in this view, arose out of economic stratification, from the need to protect the interests of propertied classes. Integration theory suggests, in contrast, that governing institutions (and other elements of complexity) emerged out of society-wide needs, in situations where it was necessary to centralize, coordinate, and direct disparate subgroups. Complexity, in this view, emerged as a process a| adaptation.
Both approaches have strong and weak points, and a synthesis of the two seems ultimately desirable. Integration theory is better able to account for distribution of the necessities of life, conflict theory for surpluses. There are definitely beneficial integrative advantages in the concentration of power and authority, but once established the political realm becomes an increasingly powerful influence. In both views, though the state is a problem-solving organization, emerging because of changed circumstances (differential economic success in the conflict view; management of society-wide stresses in integration theory). In both approaches legitimacy, and the resource mobilization this requires, are constant needs.
Even though collapse has been a little understood process, that is not for lack of trying. Collapse theorists have taken to heart the Maoist dictum to let a hundred schools of thought contend. While there is a nearly incomprehensible diversity opinions regarding collapse, these seem to boil down to a limited number of themes. These themes suffer from a number of logical failings, so that none by itself is adequate. Mystical explanations seem worst in this regard, being virtually without scientific merit. Economic explanations are logically superior. They identify characteristics of societies that make them liable to collapse, specify controlling mechanisms and indicate causal chains between controlling mechanism and observed outcome. Yet existing economic explanations offer no general approach that would allow the under standing of collapse as a global matter. Except for the mystical theme, no existing approach is necessarily incorrect. They are, as presently formulated, simply incomplete.
Four concepts lead to understanding collapse, the first three of which are use4 underpinnings of the fourth. These are:
- human societies are problem-solving organizations;
- sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
- increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and
- investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.
This process has been illustrated for recent history in such areas as agriculture and resource production, information processing, sociopolitical control and specialize: and overall economic productivity. In each of these spheres it has been shown that industrial societies are experiencing declining marginal returns for increased expenditures. The reasons for this are summarized below.
To the extent that information allows, rationally acting human populations first make use of sources of nutrition, energy, and raw materials that are easiest to acquire extract, process, and distribute. When such resources are no longer sufficient, exploitation shifts to ones that are costlier to acquire, extract, process, and distribute while yielding no higher returns.
Information processing costs tend to increase over time as a more complex society requires ever more specialized, highly trained personnel, who must be educated at greater cost. Since the benefits of specialized training are always in part attributable to the generalized training that must precede it, more technical instruction will automatically yield a declining marginal return. Research and development move from generalized knowledge that is widely applicable and obtained at little cost, to specialized topics that are more narrowly useful, are more difficult to resolve, and are resolved only at great cost. Modern medicine presents a clear example of this problem.
Sociopolitical organizations constantly encounter problems that require increased investment merely to preserve the status quo. This investment comes in such forms as increasing size of bureaucracies, increasing specialization of bureaucracies, cumulative organizational solutions, increasing costs of legitimizing activities, and increasing costs of internal control and external defense. All of these must be borne by levying greater costs on the support population, often to no increased advantage. As the number and costliness of organizational investments increases, the proportion of a society’s budget available for investment in future economic growth must decline.
Thus, while initial investment by a society in growing complexity may be a rational solution to perceived needs, that happy state of affairs cannot last. As the least costly extractive, economic, information-processing, and organizational solutions are progressively exhausted, any further need for increased complexity must be met by more costly responses. As the cost of organizational solutions grows, the point is reached at which continued investment in complexity does not give a proportionate yield, and the marginal return begins to decline. The added benefits per unit of investment start to drop. Ever greater increments of investment yield ever smaller increments of return.
A society that has reached this point cannot simply rest on its accomplishments, that is, attempt to maintain its marginal return at the status quo, without further deterioration. Complexity is a problem-solving strategy. The problems with which the universe can confront any society are, for practical purposes, infinite in number and endless in variety. As stresses necessarily arise, new organizational and economic solutions must be developed, typically at increasing cost and declining marginal return. The marginal return on investment in complexity accordingly deteriorates, at first gradually, then with accelerated force. At this point, a complex society reaches the phase where it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse.
Two general factors can make such a society liable to collapse. First, as the marginal return on investment in complexity declines, a society invests ever more heavily in a strategy that yields proportionately less. Excess productive capacity and accumulated surpluses may be allocated to current operating needs. When major stress surges (major adversities) arise there is little or no reserve with which they may be countered. Stress surges must be dealt with out of the current operating budget. This often proves ineffectual. Where it does not, the society may be economically weakened and made more vulnerable to the next crisis.
Once a complex society enters the stage of declining marginal returns, collapse becomes a mathematical likelihood, requiring little more than sufficient passage of time to make probable an insurmountable calamity. So if Rome had not been toppled by Germanic tribes, it would have been later by Arabs or Mongols or Turks. A calamity that proves disastrous to an older, established society might have been survivable when the marginal return on investment in complexity was growing. Rome, again an excellent example, was thus able to withstand major military disasters during the Hannibalic war (late third century B.C.), but was grievously weakened by losses that were comparatively less (in regard to the size and wealth of the Roman state at these respective times) at the Battle of Hadrianople in 378 A.D. Similarly, the disastrous barbarian invasions of the first decade of the fifth century were actually smaller that those defeated by Claudius and Probus in the late third century.
Secondly, declining marginal returns make complexity an overall less attractive strategy, so that parts of a society perceive increasing advantage to a policy of separation or disintegration. When the marginal cost of investment in complexity becomes noticeably too high, various segments increase passive or active resistance or overtly attempt to break away. The insurrections of the Bagaudae in late Roman Gaul are a case in point.
At some point along the declining portion of a marginal return curve, a society reaches a state where the benefits available for a level of investment are no higher than those available for some lower level. Complexity at such a point is decidedly disadvantageous, and the society is in serious danger of collapse from decomposition or external threat.
Evaluating this approach against three of the best known instances of collapse (the Western Roman Empire, the Southern Lowland Maya, and the Chacoans) yields positive results. The establishment of the Roman Empire produced an extraordinary return on investment, as the accumulated surpluses of the Mediterranean and adjacent lands were appropriated by the conquerors. Yet as the booty of new conquests ceased, Rome had to undertake administrative and garrisoning costs that lasted centuries. As the marginal return on investment in empire declined, major stress surges appeared that could scarcely be contained with yearly Imperial budgets. The Roman Empire made itself attractive to barbarian incursions merely by the fact of its existence. Dealing with stress surges required taxation and economic malfeasance so heavy that the productive capacity of the support population deteriorated. Weakening of the support base gave rise to further barbarian successes, so that very high investments in complexity yielded few benefits superior to collapse. In the later Empire the marginal return on investment in complexity was so low that the barbarian kingdoms began to seem preferable. In an economic sense they were, for Germanic kingdoms that followed Roman rule dealt successfully with stress surges of the kind that the late Empire had found overwhelming, and did so at lower cost.
The Maya of the southern Lowlands were a demographically stressed and territorially constrained people. The requirements of management of agricultural intensification, organization for predation and defense, support of the hierarchy, and monumental construction all imposed on the Maya a costly system that brought no commensurate increase in subsistence security per capita. The health and nutritional status of the population was low, and most likely due in part to the rising cost of supporting complexity, declined throughout the Classic period. Late Classic increases in social costs came at a time of deteriorating conditions, so that the marginal return on investment in complexity left the Maya ripe for collapse.
In the American Southwest, the population of the San Juan Basin invested in hierarchy and complexity to reduce (through centralized management) the cost of a regional system of energy averaging. For a time the marginal return on this investment was favorable, but as more communities were added the diversity and effectiveness of the economic system declined. This weakening coincided with a major construction program, so that as the return on investment in complexity declined, the cost of that investment grew.
For all three cases, then, focusing on the marginal return curve of investment in complexity has clarified the collapse process, and has allowed us to see why each society was vulnerable.
Five major topics remain to be addressed. These are: (1) further observations on collapse, and on the nature of the declining productivity of complexity; (2) application and extension of the concept; (3) imputations for the further study of some of the cases discussed in Chapter 1; (4) subsuming other explanatory themes under declining marginal returns; and (5) implications for contemporary times and for the future of industrial societies. As promised in the first chapter, the definition of collapse will be completed here.
Collapse and the declining productivity of complexity
We arrive in this section at one of the major implications of the study. Most of the writers whose work has been considered seem to approve of civilizations and complex societies. They see complexity as a desirable, even commendable, condition of human affairs. Civilization to them is the ultimate accomplishment of human society, far preferable to simpler, less differentiated forms of organization. An appreciation for the artistic, literary, and scientific accomplishment of civilizations clearly has much to do with this, as does the industrial world’s view of itself as the culmination of human history. Toynbee is perhaps most extreme in this regard, but he is by no means atypical. Spengler, in his abhorrence of civilization and its sequelae, represents a minority view, as does Rappaport.
With such emphasis on civil society as desirable, it is almost necessary that collapse be viewed as a catastrophe. An end to the artistic and literary features of civilization, and to the umbrella of service and protection that an administration provides, are seen as fearful events, truly paradise lost. The notion that collapse is a catastrophe is rampant, not only among the public, but also throughout the scholarly professions that study it. Archaeology is as clearly implicated in this as is any other field. As a profession we have tended disproportionately to investigate urban and administrative centers, where the richest archaeological remains are commonly found. When with collapse these centers are abandoned or reduced in scale, their loss is catastrophic for our data base, our museum collections, even for our ability to secure financial backing. (Dark ages are rarely as attractive to philanthropists or funding institutions.) Archaeologists, though, are not solely at fault. Classicists and historians who rely on literary sources are also biased against dark ages, for in such times their data base; largely disappear.
A less biased approach must be not only to study elites and their creations, but also to acquire information on the producing segments of complex societies that continue, if in reduced numbers, after collapse. Archaeology, of course, has great potential to provide such information.
Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity. The notion that collapse is uniformly a catastrophe is contradicted, moreover, by the present theory. To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an economizing process. It occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organizational investment to a more favorable level. To a population that is receiving little return on the cost of supporting complexity, the loss of that complexity brings economic, and perhaps administrative, gains. Again, one is reminded of the support sometimes given by the later Roman population to the invading barbarians, and of the success of the latter at deflecting further invasions of western Europe. The attitudes of the late Maya and Chacoan populations toward their administrators cannot be known, but can easily be imagined.
Societies collapse when stress requires some organizational change. In a situation where the marginal utility of still greater complexity would be too low, collapse is an economical alternative. Thus the Chacoans did not rise to the challenge of the final drought because the cost of doing so would have been too high relative to the benefits. Although the end of the Chacoan system meant the end of some benefits (as does the end of any complex system), it also brought an increase in the marginal return on organization. The Maya, similarly, appear to have reached the point where evolution toward larger polities would have brought little return for great effort. Since the status quo was so deleterious, collapse was the most logical adjustment.
One of the explanatory themes reviewed in Chapter 3 – the ‘failure to adapt’ model – may now have its full weakness revealed. Proponents of this view argue, in one form or another, that complex societies end because they fail to respond to changed circumstances. This notion is clearly obviated: under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response. Such societies have not failed tc adapt. In an economic sense they have adapted well – perhaps not as those who value civilizations would wish, but appropriately under the circumstances.
What may be a catastrophe to administrators (and later observers) need not be to the bulk of the population (as discussed, for example, by Pfeiffer). It may only be among those members of a society who have neither the opportunity nor the ability to produce primary food resources that the collapse of administrative hierarchies is a clear disaster. Among those less specialized, severing the ties that link local groups to a regional entity is often attractive. Collapse then is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.
One ambiguity in this view is the major loss of population that sometimes accompanies collapse. The Maya are a classic case in point. How advantageous can the Maya collapse have been if it resulted in major population loss? In fact, as the work of Sidrys and Berger shows, the relationship between Maya collapse and population loss is unclear. It is not certain that these phenomena were coeval (especially since the collapse took decades to overcome all centers), nor even that the Lowland population loss does not reflect emigration to peripheral areas. With these ambiguities unresolved, discussions of cause and effect are premature. In any event, nothing in the preceding paragraphs implies that human actions always achieve, in the long-term, a desirable outcome. Even if the Mayan collapse proved detrimental to the survival of large parts of the population in the long-run, this need not mean that in the short-term collapse was not an economizing process.
In fact, there are indications that leveling or actual decline of population may often precede collapse, even by several centuries. Such patterns have been discussed for both the Roman and Mayan cases. Recent research indicates a similar trend at the great Mississippian center of Cahokia. Population in this region apparently had peaked by ca. 1150 A.D., and declined until the final collapse 250 years later.
Must every complex society endure this process? Does investment in complexity always come to the point where the marginal return declines? Modern economic research would not yield a clear answer to that question. The argument made here is only that, where this process is operative and continues unchecked, a society will be thereby made vulnerable to collapse. Certainly it would seem that to the extent less costly organizational solutions are chosen before more expensive ones, the need to add organizational features must regularly yield a declining marginal return. Yet among societies with the necessary capital, technological springboard, and economic and demographic incentives, obtaining a new energy subsidy (through empire-building or by exploiting a new energy source), or economic development, can for a time either reverse a declining marginal curve, or at least provide the wealth to finance it. Renfrew makes precisely this point in regard to the evolution of complexity in Greece and the Aegean.
It must be admitted that this approach removes much of the mystery of collapse, and identifies it as a mundane economic matter. It is, as Finley would say,’…neither a dramatic nor a romantic way to look at…the great cataclysms of history. One could not make a film out of it’.
Further implications of declining marginal returns
It may seem from this work that archaeology is campaigning to displace economics as the ‘dismal science.’ Of course, the marginal product curve is nothing new. It was developed to characterize changing cost/benefit curves in resource extraction, and input/output ratios in the manufacturing sector. The idea of diminishing returns to economic activity is at least as old as the nineteenth-century classical economists: Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. It applies, as seen in Chapter 4, to subsistence agriculture, minerals and energy production, information processing, and to many features of sociopolitical organization. Wittfogel applied the concept of ‘administrative returns’ to the extension of government into economic affairs in ‘Oriental Despotisms.’ Lattimore accounted for the Chinese dynastic cycle in terms of increasing and declining returns. It seems that Kroeber’s observations on the ‘fulfillment’ of art styles may refer to a situation where innovation within a style becomes increasingly difficult to achieve, leading to repetition and rearrangement of earlier work, and ultimately to a new style in which innovation is more easily attained. The phenomenon is not at all limited to the human species. Animal predators seem to follow the principle of marginal returns in their selection of environmental patches in which to forage.
That familiar explanation of collapse – the peasant revolt (see Chapter 3) – deserves comment here. It seems insufficient to suggest that peasants revolt due to an unfair level of taxation, for cases can be presented (e.g., the Maya) where a peasantry endured exacting demands for centuries. What seems more likely to be pertinent is the marginal return on such support, and more particularly, any pattern of significant decline in this return. Peasant political action would be substantially more intelligible in this light. In modern peasant revolts, of course, other factors are involved, such as an intelligentsia adhering to an international ideology who are able to make peasantry aware of their marginal status. In any event, mere taxation level is an insufficient explanation of peasant action in this area. Some concept of cost/benefit ratios is required. Gordon Childe had some pertinent observations on the matter:
…the instability of these [early] empires discloses a contradiction within them; the persistence with which the subject peoples revolted is a measure of their gratitude for the benefits [of empires], and perhaps the latter’s value too. Presumably the benefits were more than outweighed by disabilities. In reality an empire of the Sargon type probably did directly destroy more wealth than it indirectly created.
Among his many astute observations, Polybius suggested that the triumph of Rome over Carthage was due to the fact that the former was increasing in power and the latter declining when they came into conflict. In a somewhat similar vein, Elman Service applied his ‘Law of Evolutionary Potential’ to suggest that older, established states become fossilized, unable to adopt innovations, and are thus outcompeted by newer, if smaller, peripheral peoples. It would be worthwhile for historians to investigate the marginal return on organizational investment that such competitors experience. An older, established state is likely to be investing in so many cumulative organizational features that its marginal return on these investments has begun to decline, leaving lower and lower reserves with which to contain stress surges. It is then understandable that such a nation is outcompeted by less complex peoples, who invest in little but warfare and experience a favorable return on that investment. Polybius’ views on Rome and Carthage, seen thus, might be extended to Rome’s conquest of so many older, established states and confederations about the eastern Mediterranean.
The question that logically comes next is why the pattern seen in later Roman history has not subsequently been repeated. Why has there been no sociopolitical collapse in Europe since the fall of the Western Empire? This question can be fully answered only by a major treatise, but it is profitable at this point to sketch some factors worth investigating.
There are significant differences in the evolutionary histories of societies that have emerged as isolated, dominant states, and those that have developed as interacting sets of what Renfrew has called ‘peer polities’ and B. Price has labeled ‘clusters’. Renfrew’s term is appropriately descriptive. Peer polities are those like the Mycenaean states, the later small city-states of the Aegean and the Cyclades, or the centers of the Maya Lowlands, that interact on an approximately equal level. As Renfrew and Price make clear, the evolution of such clusters of peer polities is conditioned not by some dominant neighbor, but more usually by their own mutual interaction, which may include both exchange and conflict.
In competitive, or potentially competitive, peer polity situations the option to collapse to a lower level of complexity is an invitation to be dominated by some other member of the cluster. To the extent that such domination is to be avoided, investment in organizational complexity must be maintained at a level comparable to one’s competitors, even if marginal returns become unfavorable. Complexity must be maintained regardless of cost. Such a situation seems to have characterized the Maya, whose individual states developed as peer polities for centuries, and then collapsed within a few decades of each other.
The post-Roman states of Europe have experienced an analogous situation, especially since the demise of the Carolingian Empire. European history of the past 1500 years is quintessentially one of peer polities interacting and competing, endlessly jockeying for advantage, and striving to either expand at a neighbor’s expense or avoid having the neighbor do likewise. Collapse is simply not possible in such a situation unless all members of the cluster collapse at once. Barring this, any failure of a single polity will simply lead to expansion of another, so that no loss of complexity results. The costs of such a competitive system, as among the Maya, must be met by each polity, however unfavorable the marginal return. As Renfrew pointed out for the Cyclades, ‘The specific state is legitimised in the eyes of its citizens by the existence of other states which patently do function along comparable lines‘.
Peasant political action in such a situation is most logically aimed at reformation rather than decomposition. Where the failure of a polity would simply mean for peasants domination by some other, equivalent regime, withdrawal and apathy are meaningless. The political course followed by European peasants and other disaffected classes, under these constraints, was to increase participation, to expand then-share of the decision-making process, and to secure thereby a more favorable return on organizational investment. A point worth noting for Marxists, in this regard, is that class conflict led to political evolution only when the less costly option – collapse -was removed.
While this brief discussion cannot fully explain these elements of European political history, the points made here are worth further investigation. Most likely it is no coincidence that forms of participatory government emerged in both the ancient world (Greece, Republican Rome) and the recent one under situations of peer polity competition.
The Warring States period of China, following the collapse of the Western Chou, offers an interesting contrast. Here a situation of peer polity competition (the Warring States), prior to the unification by the Ch’in, led to the development (by such thinkers as Confucius and Mo Tzu) of an ideology of good government and protection of the populace. Good rulers were thought to receive the Mandate of Heaven, and continued to enjoy this Mandate so long as they governed well. Cessation of good government, or a series of catastrophes, were signs that a dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven. A new dynasty would soon emerge that claimed the Mandate had devolved on it. In ancient China, then, peer polity competition evolved with an ideology of protecting the populace, rather than leading to participatory government. Perhaps participatory government was simply not possible in ancient societies that were so much larger, demographically and territorially, than the Greek city-states.
At this point we arrive at the first step toward understanding the difference between societies that slowly disintegrate and those that rapidly collapse. The Byzantine and Ottoman empires are classic examples of the former. Both gradually lost power and territory to competitors. There was in this process no collapse – no sudden loss of complexity – for each episode of weakness by these empires was simply met by expansion of their neighbors. Herein lies an important principle of collapse (and the final installment in its definition). Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum. Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration. Where such a competitor does exist there can be no collapse, for the competitor will expand territorially to administer the population left leaderless. Collapse is not the same thing as change of regime. Where peer polities interact collapse will affect all equally, if and when it occurs, provided that no outside competitor is powerful enough to absorb all.
Here, then, is the reason why the Mayan and Mycenaean centers collapsed simultaneously. No mysterious invaders captured each of these polities in an improbable series of fairy-tale victories. As the Mayan and Mycenaean petty states became respectively locked into competitive spirals, each had to make ever greater investments in military strength and organizational complexity. As the marginal return on these investments declined, no polity had the option to simply withdraw from the spiral, for this would have led to absorption by a neighbor. Collapse for such clusters of peer polities must be essentially simultaneous, as together they reach the point of economic exhaustion. Since in both cases no outside dominant power (in the Mesoamerican Highlands or the eastern Mediterranean) was both close enough and strong enough to take advantage of this exhaustion, collapse proceeded without external interference and lasted for centuries. (Later Greek city-states, by contrast, were confronted with powerful neighbors who would take advantage of a political vacuum, and so lacked the option of collapse.)
Here too is the final reason why, as raised in Chapter 5, the Eastern Roman Empire could not collapse as did that of the West. Disintegration of the Byzantine state would have simply resulted in the expansion of its peer – the Sassanian Empire (as, throughout its history, Byzantine weakness always led to expansion of its rivals). There was no possibility in the eastern Mediterranean for a drop to lower complexity commensurate to what happened in the power vacuum of western Europe in the fifth century A.D.
The occurrence of declining marginal returns, then, need not always lead to collapse: it will do so only where there is a power vacuum. In other cases it is more likely to be a source of political and military weakness, leading to slow disintegration and/or change of regime. Lewis’ observations on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and R. McAdams’ on replacement of the Sassanian by the Islamic regime in Persia, both illustrate this process. Toynbee’s account of the role of the Romano-Bulgarian War (977-1019 A.D.) in the Byzantine loss at the Battle of Manzikert (1071) shows clearly that the Byzantine conquest of the Bulgars was achieved at very high cost, for low return, and weakened the Byzantine state.”