Learning log 7 - Looking back to look forward.

For this learning log I read two articles: (1) “ Sustainability of Complex Societies” by J. A. Tainter and, “Confronting Economic Profit With Hierarchy Theory” by Allen et. al.

Basically, both are touching the issue of “return on effort” but in different levels. While the second is more in a theoretical and conceptual level (though with some practical examples to support it), the first one focuses on placing the issue in a practical level so to explain the idea that history is important to sustainability. As the second one was more about explanations it did not raise me many questions, while the other, which is more reflective, did raise questions, and is on these questions that I want to focus now.

They present the idea that all societies follow the same evolutional pattern, which has the diminishing return of effort track. He states that we have to look back in history and to the collapse of ancient societies in order to understand in which point in time our society is. And about the lowering return on effort, he puts it as a bad issue.

But as the basic problems are solved, it is likely that we will always search for more challenging issues, therefore more complex, thus demanding higher effort. For this reason, I believe that if we try to avoid solving issues which demands high effort and brings low return compared with the effort level, our society would became stuck in many issues, many small problems that whit time would become enormous.

He states that complexity and therefore low return on effort is what brings a society to collapse and, as I mentioned before, he presents that, buy looking back into history we can understand in which level of complexity we are. So it is a way to predict the collapse day?

As Rita Mae Brown said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." Therefore, if the same model have been used in al societies and they all collapse, oposite to what Tainter suggested, I think we should look back into history to see how we can create a new model of society which can cope with always more complex issues, at the same time that it is adaptive in order to keep evolution and avoid collapse.