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Late Bronze Age collapse
Joseph Tainter has pointed out in his valuable book, The Collapse of Complex Societies,
John Michael Greer • The Wealth of Nature: Economics as If Survival Mattered
According to Joseph Tainter, who literally wrote the book on the collapse of complex societies, “collapse is fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.”
Eric H. Cline • 1177 B.C.
Renfrew noted the general features of systems collapse, itemizing them as follows: (1) the collapse of the central administrative organization; (2) the disappearance of the traditional elite class; (3) a collapse of the centralized economy; and (4) a settlement shift and population decline. It might also take as much as a century for all aspects of
... See moreEric H. Cline • 1177 B.C.
outlines a theory that civilizations collapse because the productive capacities of a civilization fail “to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital.”5
Joi Ito • The Social Labs Revolution
In 1987, Mario Liverani, of the University of Rome, laid the blame for the Collapse upon the concentration of power and control in the palaces, so that when they collapsed, the extent of the disaster was magnified. As he wrote, “the particular concentration in the Palace of all the elements of organization, transformation, exchange, etc.—a concentr
... See moreEric H. Cline • 1177 B.C.
Pre-industrial China had reached a ‘high-level equilibrium’, a plateau of economic success. Its misfortune was that there was no incentive to climb any higher: the high-level equilibrium had become a trap.