f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] The Collapse of Complex Societies [Author] Joseph A. Tainter [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 1990 [Review] 
Very good: much better than Jared Diamond’s Collapse, and much more convincing than Spengler or Toynbee. It was also deeply disturbing - the Ik amazed me in chapter 1, and the statistics in chapter 4 were extremely dismal and tie in far too well to Cowen’s The Great Stagnation and Murray’s Human Accomplishment. There are a great many datapoints suggesting that diminishing marginal returns to modern tech/science began sometime in the late 1800s/early 1900s…
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