Basically a recapitulation of Joseph Tainter's theory that, barring other events like war and climate change, empires inevitably suffer from bureaucratic bloat trying to manage themselves, and each new level of bureaucracy added entropically yields diminishing returns. Eventually the returns sink to near zero and the empire in question topples under its own weight.

To avoid this fate, Ophuls says, a society must keep things simple. People must provide for their own needs, grow their own food, ideally make their own clothes and other goods. The runaway bureaucracy can thus be nipped in the bud. Such simplicity was pretty much the state of affairs for the first few decades of the American republic. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, things got very complex, the government grew by leaps and bounds, and... well, you know the rest.

I found Ophuls's exposition well done but at times dry and lacking in brio. ( )

A quick look a this books shows an interesting analysis on the part of the author, Willim Ophuls. But it suffers from a lack of detail on the civilizations that have already declined. The book needs to be longer with timelines and a review of their various histories in a systematic way. Ophuls indicaytes six ways that civiliztions decline: ecological exhaustion, exponential growth, expedited entropy, excessive complexity, moral decay, and practical failure, but we need arrange the various civiliztions, even minor ones into these categories, so we get a feel for the possible realit that Ophus is exploring. ( )