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How could any society fail to recognize that big problems are looming up, and why doesn’t the society take measures to alert disaster?  It was surprise  at this question that caused the archaeologist Joseph Tainter, in his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, to dismiss out of hand the possibility that complex societies could collapse as a result of depleting environmental resources.  Tainter considered it implausible that complex “societies [would] sit by and watch the encroaching weakness without taking corrective actions.”  But that is precisely what has often happened in the past, and what is happening under our eyes today.  Hence my chapter draws up a roadmap of group decision-making, starting with failure to perceive a problem in its initial stages, and ending with refusal to address the problem because of conflicts of interest and other reasons.
—Jared Diamond
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