The Collapse of Complex Societies
Very good: much better than Jared Diamond’s Collapse, and much more convincing than Spengler or Toynbee. It was also disturbing—the Ik amazed me in chapter 1, and the statistics in chapter 4 were extremely dismal and tie in far too well to Cowen’s The Great Stagnation and Murray’s Human Accomplishment. There are a great many datapoints suggesting that diminishing marginal returns to modern tech/science began sometime in the late 1800s/early 1900s…