Posted: 09/26/2005 | Author: Max Borders
Collapse: A Book Review
In Collapse, Jared Diamond asks: how could a society once so successful end up collapsing so utterly? One could ask a similar question about the thesis of Diamond’s latest work. Collapse floods the reader with as many anthropological anecdotes as it omits the deepest insights of economics and vital institutions. And that is a shame. The subtitle “How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” might have been better suited to the text of an institutional economist like the Nobel laureate Douglass North than to Diamond’s collection of post-Pulitzer assertions.
According to Diamond, one of the basic ideas behind why societies collapse is resource depletion and so-called “tragedies of the commons.” Resources are overused when a rational person, directed by self-interest, uses some resource in an area before the next guy. If he doesn’t, you can bet the next guy will. The “tragedy” comes when everyone employs the same strategy and a resource is subsequently wiped out.
It is therefore shameful that in a 525 page volume, Diamond devotes less than half of a single page to private property rights approaches to resource allocation and conservation issues. The idea is so simple as to be trivial: people have an incentive to protect and conserve resources that they own, because the expectation of future returns (or the preservation of amenities) depends on such conservation. Diamond skims over this fundamental axiom of economics—effectively ignoring an institution that has done more to generate wealth, conserve resources, and organize human society than perhaps any other human construct.
Instead, Diamond gives us a “five-point” thesis, a preexisting environmentalist dogma that lies somewhere between sanctimony and paranoia. Even Diamond admits in the prologue: “I naively thought the book would be about environmental damage.” But in the course of writing the book, apparently Diamond stumbled on local climate change, war, and the relative availability of trading partners as factors in the collapse of various civilizations. Of course, these exogenous forces are important to any explanation of a society’s rise or fall. But what about the vital indogenous factors that Diamond overlooks? Such a glaring oversight is like failing to address DNA in a 500 page treatise on human development. For that, we cannot let Diamond off the hook.
But before discussing Diamond’s fatal omissions, I should give him some praise for the fascinating anthropology he relates, even if it does little to support his normative thesis. Take for example Diamond’s tale of the Easter Islanders who, in times of plenty, erected great carved monoliths (ahu and moai) only later to fade into twilight of cannibalism, cave-dwelling and social torpor.
Consider also Diamond’s description of the Anasazi society with its burst of complexity and subsequent inability to adapt to the fragile climes of the American Southwest:
All of these alternative [agricultural] solutions face a similar overarching risk: that a series of good years, with adequate rainfall or with sufficiently shallow groundwater tables, may result in population growth, resulting in turn in society becoming increasingly complex and interdependent and no longer locally self sufficient. Such a society then cannot cope with, and rebuild itself after, a series of bad years that a less populous, less interdependent, more self-sufficient society had previously been able to cope with.
If we could only strip the book of all its green-ideological lessons and implicit moralizing, we would have a book that is valuable simply as a work of popular anthropology. But sex sells. And alarmism is still sexy, even when it masquerades as social science.
While Diamond does put forth the idea that – in some sense – collapse results from a society’s inability to adapt, he doesn’t tell us what the vital elements of adaption are. Nor does he suggest any meaningful parallels between, say, ecosystems and societies, where both share the properties of complex adaptive systems (a point I will return to in a moment). Instead, Diamond seems to be prescribing the same old environmentalist nostra, i.e.: we need to adopt government policies to conserve resources and protect ecosystems.
Diamond writes: “We don’t need new technologies to solve our problems; while new technologies can make some contribution, for the most part we ‘just’ need the political will to apply solutions already available.”
He continues: “Another basis for hope is the increasing diffusion of environmental thinking among the public around the world. While such thinking has been with us for a long time, its spread has accelerated, especially since the 1962 publication of Silent Spring.”
Such is where Collapse is virtually devoid of value. Take, for example, Diamond’s treatment of Julian Simon’s work, found in a Chapter aptly titled “One-liner Objections.” At first, Diamond tries to establish himself as a voice of moderation between ueber-capitalist Simon and zero-population growth radicals like Paul Ehrlich. Diamond attempts such legerdemain by cherry-picking a couple of the more flippant statements found in Simon’s entire body of work and, at the same time, giving Ehrlich what for. But instead of casting himself as the voice of reason, he reveals a shocking ignorance of Simon’s most profound insights—especially those found in The Ultimate Resource.
“There is an overabundance of [anti-environmentalist] errors…, e.g. overly optimistic predictions the the Green Revolution would already have solved the World’s hunger problems…” writes Diamond. And yet Diamond seems blissfully unaware of the fact that the very same global NGOs he praises, the quasi-government bodies like the EU, and the corrupt governments under the duress of foreign aid, all block the importation of biotech products to the world’s most impoverished countries. We should wonder why Diamond refuses to acknowledge that the world’s hungriest people live in countries with thoroughly corrupt governments, backwards economic systems, and a want of vital institutions. The Green Revolution could have solved world hunger before Borlaug turned 75, had the world’s poorest nations had either the institutions or the infrastructure for even basic development. We can only conclude that Diamond is uncharitable about these realities either because he is hostile to them or ignorant of them.
Before closing, I would like tentatively to offer a couple of alternative sketches in the factors of collapse—for societies past, present, and future.
The first, as promised, is found in contemporary studies of complex adaptive systems (CAS). CAS is the study both of complexity and of adaptation. Most organized societies are complex systems. But a truly complex system is decentralized, in that the actors or “nodes” that make up that society are arranged more like an interconnected network than a hierarchy. Indeed, the more complex a society becomes, the more networked and decentralized it must become in order to survive. That is why Switzerland or the US persists and the Soviet Union collapsed.
CAS theory would have predicted such a collapse, since the Soviet Union’s hierarchically arranged system became unsustainable, both in terms of its ability to cope with increasing information, as well as in the absence of pricing signals that characterize most successful Western economies. Diamond devotes a single parenthetical to the Soviet Union and any mention of centralized versus decentralized societies is conspicuously absent in his work.
The second, related idea for one to consider in the collapse of any society is the notion of healthy institutions. Institutions are the economic “rules of the game” in society. According to Douglass North:
Evolution [of a society] is a consistent story of incremental change induced by the private gains to be realized by productivity-raising organizational and institutional changes. … Note that the institutional evolution entail[s] not only voluntary organizations that expanded trade and made exchange more productive, but also the development of the state to take over protection and enforcement or property rights as impersonal exchange made contract enforcement increasingly costly for voluntary organizations which lacked effective coercive power. Another essential part of the institutional evolution entails a shackling of the arbitrary behavior of the state over economic activity.
In other words, institutions will have key ingredients that lower transaction costs for members of a society. Property rights, the rule of law, and some form of third party arbitration system would be vital to any society as it moves into the future. A story of a society’s collapse without the story of institutional change is scarcely a story worth reading. While we can see that resource depletion and environmental damage can be a by-product of institutional problems, they cannot provide the bedrock for any theory of collapse.
Max Borders is an adjunct scholar for the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) E-Team.