Excerpt [isbn 0521340926 edition]:
Any nation vulnerable to collapse will have to pursue one of three options: (1) absorption by a neighbor or some larger state...(3) payment by the support population of whatever costs are needed to continue complexity, however detrimental to the marginal return. [p.213]
Here indeed is a paradigm: a disastrous condition that all decry may force us to tolerate a situation of declining marginal returns long enough to achieve a temporary solution to it. [p.215]
Every time history repeats itself the price goes up. --Message on a popular sign [Epigraph to Chapter 6]
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. [p.194]
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. [p.198]
...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. [p.200]
One could also say that those who are solidly entrenched in the managerial, hierarchical paradigm may be "outcompeted" by those with flexibility to shift to a rhizomal way of living.
The biologist Garrett Hardin once pointed to a disarmingly simple lesson of systems analysis that has powerful implications: 'We can never do merely one thing.' [ source: Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientists ] His point was that good intentions are virtually irrelevant in determining the result of altering a large, complex system. With the feedback relationships inherent in such a system, one can almost never anticipate the full consequences of any alternative. [p.207]
Hence, the importance of keeping the process as natural/organic as possible.
Meadows and her colleagues note that to increase world food production by 34 percent from 1951-1966 required increases in expenditures on tractors of 63 percent, on nitrate fertilizers of 146 percent, and on pesticides of 300 percent. [p.212]
As Tainter notes, the next 34 percent will have even a lower return.
Tainter indicates that Xenophon Zolotas in Economic Growth and Declining Social Welfare predicts that the marginal return for its [US?] overall pattern of investment will be reached toward the year 2000. Sorokin indicated that it happened at the start of the 20th Century.
Levels of stress would indicate that we are already there. I read in the paper yesterday that 6 out of 10 people polled (Canadian, I believe) found living to be stressful. This may be one of the best gauges. In some respects, Sorokin may be right in that some observers would say that the US showed a move towards empire when it got involved with WW1. This involvement is likely a signal that marginal returns had peaked.
