Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsNot his best work.
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2022
Upheaval is one of those books you wish you would have read after the author's other books because it gives you the feeling that those other books weren't so hot despite their praise and accolades. Written like a series of overwrought blog posts, Upheaval sounds better as a premise than it ever does in its execution — especially when Jared Diamond stops looking back and attempts to look forward.
In some ways, Upheaval is really two books. One that attempts to reconcile the past by looking at Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, and Australia. The Upheaval of all but one stems mostly from World War II (in one way or another), automatically making the book a much narrower lens than one might expect and leaving a much better discussion open for ancient historians. We could have all gleaned so much more from Rome, Babylon, Aztecs, the United Kingdom, etc. had Diamond applied analysis to any number of countries.
More concerning is Diamond's personal bias, which tends to feel heavy as he assesses the various outcomes of the six countries chosen for act one. One of the most telling is his praise for Finland, which he loved living in, and its resolve to elevate educators and placate its neighbor Russia (a decision that Ukraine might not appreciate). Maybe so, but in cherry-picking his narrative, he doesn't tell you that Finland has outspent its ability to pay social security benefits, fails in preventing sexual assault against women, and continues to tighten immigration policy.
I won't even touch on all the problems in his analysis of Chile as there are too many to list, having just read a few books that took a deeper dive into that country than Diamond did. I'll suffice to say instead: Alas, no country is perfect, and all of them rather face one upheaval after the next, which leads us to book two.
Book two, while including a reassessment of Japan, is really dedicated to dismantling the United States by claiming it is in the midst of a crisis as defined by left-leaning policy (some of which may be right and some of which may not be right). His take on elections, inequality, education, climate change, etc. all lean in one direction, despite contradicting statements he praised earlier. In short, he often calls for a national or global referendum despite saying the United States' ability to test ideas at the state level before adopting them on the national scale is a strength (one we continually see weakened).
The biggest issue in American politics today is books like these, pretending to be neutral when in fact, they only serve to help polarize the public even more — giving people the false illusion that they are in the middle when they are not. Case in point, Diamond presents the idea that voter ID is somehow wrong while praising countries that don't require it (despite the fact that those countries track the identity of their citizens even more stringently). In doing so, we're always back the right and left argument that one side says Voter ID is necessary to prevent voter fraud, and the other side says three million of 330 million don't have IDs, so we shouldn't ask for them. Really? There is a more neutral solution, you know. If we can go door-to-door for a census, we can probably get three million IDs printed and delivered to people who are likely already accepting federal aid.
The same can be said for the so-called wealth inequality argument, which Diamond says will only be cured when more affluent people like himself feel less secure. Look, I get the argument of this point as framed by the right and the left. But why isn't anybody being more inventive in looking at this phenom in the United States? Maybe there comes a point when you have so many rich people that the super-rich just grows exponentially (a fact we all learned in grade school discussing compound interest) because money begets money. The more you have, the more it works for you. And sure, maybe that makes it less likely for the bottom 1 percent to reach the top 1 percent (although many of the richest billionaires are rags to riches stories), does it matter? Maybe climbing from the bottom 1 percent to the top 50 percent is good enough, especially in a country where the bottom 10 percent consumes as much as 32 times the amount that people in developing countries do. If anything, the real threat to economic mobility isn't what it is now but rather what people like Diamond want to enact, a system where experts flatten everybody out.
In sum, I generally don't like to provide a negative review, but my general disappointment in the book delivering on its promise drew it out. Sure, I'm happy I read it to see someone like Diamond's perspective. He gives the reader plenty to think about. Just remember that this isn't the work of merely a smart historian, Upheaval is surprisingly political.
