Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGood overall argument, but thin and pessimistic
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2017
I came to this book with high expectations after reading Average is Over, but as others have said, this one covers a lot of ground and doesn't have the depth of argument or authority. I would have preferred a book that focused on complacency in the economy and tackled the big question now: will the new wave of technology (AI, 3D printing, internet-of-things, extreme mobility) end our decline in productivity growth, in business investment, and in competition? It could have still had a chapter on how these technologies might have wide social ramifications, as a kind of updating of Average is Over.
That said, the book is a useful collection of a lot of interesting trends, especially on declining mobility. And the overall argument is very important -- speaking as someone in the business world where there's still too much talk about the supposed extreme dynamism of the internet age.
I also found the book unnecessarily pessimistic. It's almost as though the author thinks complacency is bad in itself, so he wants to scare us into thinking terrible things are on the horizon. Most of the book is about good news -- we're complacent for a reason -- but the book keeps trying to suggest a dark side. Surely there is a dark side to all these developments (and the opioid etc crisis is a real problem), but we've handled far worse and still achieved a society that's amazingly better than what we had in previous centuries on just about every dimension. The very end of the book briefly takes up Stephen Pinker's Better Angels book, but doesn't take that powerful argument for social progress seriously. There's also no mention of Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms, which makes a similar if less obvious argument about economics.
The book almost bizarrely suggests that the current violence in the Middle East and Ukraine is strong evidence of cyclicality in world affairs, not progress -- and cites the ancient Greek view that true progress is an illusion. I think what the book really means is that progress is often a matter of two steps forward and one step back, and we might be in for an extended period of stepping back.
Finally, the book has almost nothing to say about how we might be developing new kinds of restlessness that might be more positive, less disruptive than the restlessness it predicts. It doesn't look at how people have been exploring all sorts of new dimensions in culture and religion -- all of which makes sense simply on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Affluence really does change how we deal with the world.
