Similar Theories
Arnold J. Toynbee in A Study of History (1934–1961) also studied the collapse of civilizations. Diamond agrees with Toynbee that "civilizations die from suicide, not by murder" when they fail to meet the challenges of their times. However, where Toynbee argues that the root cause of collapse is the decay of a society's "creative minority" into "a position of inherited privilege which it has ceased to merit", Diamond ascribes more weight to conscious minimization of environmental factors.
From a different perspective, U.S. historian Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) argues that complex societies are the exception, rather than the norm, arise from special circumstances, and are a problem solving response. However those special circumstances are subject to diminishing returns, as those problem solving responses that were earlier successful, are no longer successful due to diminishing returns. Accordingly, in his view, the collapse of complex societies can be explained by economic principles. "First, as the marginal return on the investment in complexity declines, a society invests ever more heavily in a strategy that yields proportionally less...Secondly, declining marginal returns make complexity an overall less attractive strategy, so that parts of a society perceive increasing advantage to a policy of separation or disintegration". Tainter identifies 11 themes in the explanation of collapses (p 42). Discussing resource depletion (Diamonds paradigm) and citing historical examples Tainter contends that the problem is not resource depletion per se, but rather states "the major factor in understanding these episodes is not that a resource was depleted, but that the respective societies responded in different ways". Essentially, Tainter discredits resource depletion (Diamonds thesis) by reference to theoretical problems and to empirical evidence.
The Canadian author Ronald Wright penned a similar but shorter book-length essay A Short History of Progress in 2004. Wright surveys fewer societies in less detail than Diamond, but begins much earlier in human prehistory with the worldwide slaughter of megafauna whenever and wherever humans migrated to new lands in the Stone Age, including Neanderthal man. His conclusions did not share the "cautious optimism" of Diamond.
In 1966 American historian Carroll Quigley explored sociocultural evolution and posited economic and political theories for collapse.
Read more about this topic: Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed
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