Joseph Tainter
Autor de The Collapse of Complex Societies
Sobre El Autor
Obras de Joseph Tainter
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Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1949-12-08
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
Miembros
Reseñas
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 7
- También por
- 1
- Miembros
- 656
- Popularidad
- #38,461
- Valoración
- 4.1
- Reseñas
- 9
- ISBNs
- 14
- Idiomas
- 4
It's a believable idea. But it's hard for me to grasp the reasons for the inevitability of diminishing marginal returns.
Tainter explains that people grasp for the lower hanging fruit first so what's left after that is harder to get fruit - so you move from high marginal return to lower marginal return. But as a general metaphor for all kinds of processes it's hard to swallow.
- Oil companies develop easier to get oil wells first.
- Education provides general knowledge first which has a higher marginal return than specialized knowledge because it can be applied to more situations.
- Scientists discover easier knowledge first.
- Socio-political structure of a society is less complex first.
I can sense that there is truth to these examples. Over time those processes do seem to become more complicated and brittle. But i also feel like there could be counter examples. What about the notion of critical mass or breakthroughs? Like when you move from coal to oil, isn't there a big spike in marginal utility? I don't know. Perhaps Tainter accounts for such local spikes and talks more about the big picture where the trend is for diminishing.
Besides this complication with diminishing returns I learned a lot from this book. A glimpse into how and why societies are born and collapse.… (más)