Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter (4 of 7)

http://localfuture.org The collapse of complex societies of the past can inform the present on the risks of collapse. Dr. Joseph Tainter, author of the book The Collapse of Complex societies, and featured in Leonardo Dicaprio's film The Eleventh Hour, details the factors that led to the collapse of past civilizations including the Roman Empire.

This is part 4 of 7 of a keynote talk delivered to the 2010 International Conference on Sustainability: Energy, Economy, and Environment organized by Local Future nonprofit and directed by Aaron Wissner.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• collapse
• energy
• future
• local
• localfuture
• local future
• sustainability
• conference
• aaron
• wissner
• economy
• environment
• peak oil
• peakoil
• peak
• oil
• permaculture
• joseph tainter
• joseph
• tainter
• complex
• crisis
• economic

[pietrosperoni]

It is nonsense to measure innovation by number of patents by inventor. You need to measure by efficiency. Who cares if it is the whole society working together to innovate something, what is important is the effect of it. Or number of innovation per year (that produce an increase in productivity of x).

[TheOrgulloblanco]

@tokotokotoko3 whats kurzweil saying?

[tokotokotoko3]

Complete opposite of what Kurzweil is saying... would love to see them battle it out.

[skydome29]

look at astronomy though, you can throw money at it and get results due to to its vastness.

[lordmetroid]

Money thrown at a project does not equal productivity. Specially if one works for the government which all his examples are showing.

[Photog60]

I think that research follows a bell curve in every field but also increases the number of fields. As an example, I believe a new car can be designed faster today than it could be in 1970 yet it is more complex. This is because of increased computing power which actually increases productivity.

Many inventions by engineers in companies are not patented because of cost. At Dell, they selected to patent only one in about 20 submitted patents so this can be misleading.

[EruditeCanadian]

@Photog60

What you're saying is true, but one way to look at it is: HD LCD is "better" than black and white, but the effect on society is very small. Say it cost $1 billion to develop HD. How much has HD improved society? Really, probably not at all.

When you compare that to, say, the steam engine, farm tractor, mechanized loom etc, you had small investments realize huge real gains in productivity and increases in standard of living.

What do you think? Very interesting topic.

[Photog60]

The cost of innovation such as more money, better instruments and more brain power should not be based on this alone. It should include the savings that the innovation produces. A higher performance uP (microprocessor) requires more inputs but produces more outputs (better computers). Which is better, the first B&W TV which had a small CRT screen or today's large screen HD color TV? The latter required much more innovation but produced much better results.

[TheCarydal]

This was awesome.

[mrzack888]

If you reverse the graph, you go from highly innovative to less innovative. There is massive growth potential in using natural healing techniques for improving and maintaining health. It's cheap, inexpensive, non patentable, and easy to learn. natural news functional medicine is the future.