Thoughts on the documentary:
1. His name is Tainter. 5/5 on
2. His ability as an educator/lecturer: extremely dry and monotonous style and informationally dense, too dense at points, for the audience to appreciate. He should spend more time guiding the material instead of making huge inductive leaps from his data. 2/5 on
3. His thesis: all civilizations are in a flux of decline or an increase in terms of productivity and complexity. The goal should be a state of stasis, since ever increasing growth is an impossibility.
All complexity gains are factored at a cost of energy. All Capitol, at the end of the day is energy. People, ideas, research and development, morality, society, all at the end of the day boil down to energy costs. Either a civilization HAS the resources to continue to specialize and adapt and commit to R&D, or they do not.
Energy is all.
2/5 on Certainly, energy is a HUGE factor in the fall of a civilization, but his evolutionary scientific framework is so rigid and small as to preclude ANY other important factors (anthropology, religion, culture, visionaries, morality, ethics, etc.) as to make his analysis pretty useless in my humble opinion.
4. His argument:
Fails, ultimately, I'm afraid. "Civilizations need energy to thrive" is a nice bullet point (that took him too long to arrive at) but by completely disregarding human nature, he avoids ANY solutions (he argues there are no EASY solutions, then offers none). And by disregarding human nature and focusing only on energy costs as the sole contributor to rises and falls of civilization, he's effectively dumbing down and oversimplifying very complex social mechanisms ingrained in humans for millennia.
Example of arriving at the wrong conclusion from the data: he compares the number of bombers created at the height of WW2 to the number of bombers created at the end of the Cold War as proof that increasing advances in technology MUST lead to decreases in productivity AT increased resource costs, which misses the point that a) we didn't NEED a massive fleet in 1988 to match a bomber fleet of 1948 and b) I'm sure a 1988 bomber is worth many many 1948 bombers.
Example of him excluding morality to ONLY discuss energy costs of civilizations. (Man, this guy is a textbook social Darwinist) "the Roman Emperors acted ethically. " in his defense that their only goal should have been to sustain their civilization as that was the purpose.
This guy is a pragmatist. He eschews idealism and disregards ethics all to discuss energy exchanges. And in so doing, in my opinion, completely misses the point of why civilizations may or may not be worth saving in the first place, if at all.
I have a few more quotes by him, but that's enough.
His Q&A was hilarious. Defensive much?
And the last question was great. The FBI should get a file started on the guy who asked the last question.