The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press 1988
Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of civilisations collapsing and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He develops a theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies – societies collapse when they hit a point of rapidly declining marginal returns on their investments in problem-solving capacity – evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses.
