Mayan and Chacoan regions had no powerful complex neighbors and so could collapse for centuries or millennia, as could the Western Roman Empire - but the Eastern Roman Empire, bordered as it was by the Parthian/Sassanid Empire, did not have the option of devolving into simpler, smaller entities. His paper Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies (1996) focuses on the energy cost of problem solving, and the energy-complexity relation in manmade systems. The 2018 study, "Toward a General Theory of Societal Collapse. A Biophysical Examination of Tainter's Model of the Diminishing Returns of Complexity", by Ugo Bardi, Sara Falsini, and Ilaria Perissi, introduced a socioeconomic system model in support of Tainter's diminishing returns mechanism. Works See also Societal collapse Collapsology State collapse Wicked problem References Further reading Kohr, Leopold: The Breakdown of Nations, 1957. External links Utah State University, Joseph Tainter official faculty page How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? New York Times Magazine, November 4, 2020. , read by Joseph Tainter, videos 1 of 7 Archaeology, History and Sustainability, audio commentary by Joseph Tainter Societal Complexity and Collapse, Omega Tau audio interview with Joseph Tainter recorded October 2015 1949 births 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers Historians of antiquity American anthropologists Energy economists Living people University of California, Berkeley alumni Northwestern University alumni University of New Mexico faculty Utah State University faculty American male non-fiction writers