Originally published on Goodreads.
Whilst this contains some very interesting examples, it rambles between topics and doesn’t do a good job at connecting the case studies to a consistent theme. The implied theme is that “things are getting worse” but the evidence base for this claim only hangs together loosely and there is no compelling conclusion.
As a result, it reads much more like a longing for a nostalgic past, with specific examples of things which are worse now. The problem is that it doesn’t then provide a case for why things will continue to get worse i.e. why is this a trend rather than just one off problem cases.
A approach for looking at the fundamental reasons why we’re facing potential future problems is to understand how we got to modern society in the first place e.g. by reading Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, and then by reading what is going wrong: The Great Degeneration.