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Field Notes #3
On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever
A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021
What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together?
The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote--and the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 "the worst ... ever." Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media clich�. But when COVID-19 hit, journalist and professor of public policy Andrew Potter started to wonder: what if The End isn't one big event, but a long series of smaller ones?
In On Decline, Potter surveys the current problems and likely future of Western civilization (spoiler: it's not great). Economic stagnation and the slowing of scientific innovation. Falling birth rates and environmental degradation. The devastating effects of cultural nostalgia and the havoc wreaked by social media on public discourse. Most acutely, the various failures of Western governments in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the legacy of the Enlightenment and its virtues--reason, logic, science, evidence--has run its course, how and why has it happened? And where do we go from here?
What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together?
The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote--and the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 "the worst ... ever." Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media clich�. But when COVID-19 hit, journalist and professor of public policy Andrew Potter started to wonder: what if The End isn't one big event, but a long series of smaller ones?
In On Decline, Potter surveys the current problems and likely future of Western civilization (spoiler: it's not great). Economic stagnation and the slowing of scientific innovation. Falling birth rates and environmental degradation. The devastating effects of cultural nostalgia and the havoc wreaked by social media on public discourse. Most acutely, the various failures of Western governments in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the legacy of the Enlightenment and its virtues--reason, logic, science, evidence--has run its course, how and why has it happened? And where do we go from here?
123 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 17, 2021
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August 23, 2021
I don’t think there’s too much argument about western civilization being in decline. It has clearly lost its mojo, its direction, and its momentum. At best, it’s coasting right now. But Andrew Potter’s On Decline takes such shabby aim at the issues that the book itself becomes proof that western civilization is in decline. It is not comprehensive, innovative, insightful or even eloquent. Rather, it is narrow, superficial, ill-informed and incomplete.
Potter has written a long rant, divided into chapters by topic, but it is clearly all him, ranting. His method is to have read a book, decided it was important, and taken the author’s thoughts back into history and sweeping generalizations of Potter’s own imagination. It has little to do with reality. His conclusions seem baseless. His grasp of the difference between correlation and causation is gauzy, even as he criticizes others over it.
He enthusiastically cites Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now for all the wonderful charts proving how world trade had flatlined since the time of Jesus, and has rocketed in just the last hundred years. But Pinker’s charts are all bogus. No statistics on international trade balances go back to the time of Jesus. This is right from the Donald Trump handbook, where if you tell a lie often enough, it gets taken for truth. Potter is aiding the spread of Pinker’s nonsense. He takes up numerous Pinker points without having read any of the criticisms of them, and projects backward to show just how dynamic western civilization has been. For example, there’s Pinker’s claim that the poor in western countries today live better than kingsdid 500 years ago, because even the poorest have refrigerators and cell phones. And this proves, what exactly? Poverty is relative to the others around you. You can have a refrigerator in your shack, but you will still die early and miserably, often from all the horrible processed food consumed out of that refrigerator.
He attacks the nostalgia industry, claiming civilization has run so short of new ideas, it relies on the old, and has now actually run out of the old, too. It used to be there was a nostalgia fad, say 25 years later. But they have been accelerating to the point where we’re up to the present in nostalgia, he observes.
This has nothing whatever to do with lack of new ideas, and everything to do with capitalism. Looking for new holes to fill, entrepreneurs see how easily money can be made in nostalgia, and want to be the first to exploit another as yet unexploited era. If there’s a way to be nostalgic for 2020, someone will jump on it and not wait until 2050 to revive the music, clothing and hairstyles for fun and profit. Decline plays no role here.
In economic growth, citing works by Tyler Cowen only, Potter complains about stagnation, where growth has slowed and little additional progress is made on many fronts. Well, the American economy is red hot this year, but I don’t think anyone believes this means it has shaken the long term decline. An economy is not the cause of decline. Growth per se is not the end of the story. The boom/bust cycle is not desirable, no matter how much Potter complains about slow growth. He is clearly in the camp of bigger growth at all costs. There are plenty who would say that has been the problem, not the solution. But there’s no room for analyses in this rant.
He takes the time to get nitpicky over the selfishness, self-centeredness and the general lack of solidarity in western societies today. He claims this is a new development and evidence of our decline. I refer him to Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels instead of the book he cites. Swift accurately portrayed all those same weaknesses and far more, 300 years ago. This is not something that just came up since the 1960s, as Potter claims. Or he can read the brand new I’ll Forget It When I DIe!, which tells the story of an Arizona town deporting nearly 1200 men in animal boxcars, dumping them in the desert in another state. Anyone who disagreed with policy was booted out, and city border guards prevented them coming back, along with all suspicious visitors – like lawyers. And all because they wanted fair wages. This was a hundred years ago, in the brand new state of Arizona. Decline is always with us. It didn’t just begin after JFK was shot.
One observation of his from the 1960s, is spot on though. When JFK told the country he was giving it the goal of a man on the moon before the end of decade, it focused the nation. But “Sixty years after Kennedy’s speech to Congress, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to make the case that accomplishing hard tasks, solving hard problems, committing to collective action, is a particular ambition or ideal or expertise of democracy.” There is no question that democracy has gone stale for many people, but that is a function of not updating the constitution to fit our current situation, as the founders specified for Americans to do. It is a sign of stupidity, not decline.
His take on democracy is naïve and superficial: “The full speed of freedom is a clarion call from another era. Where democracy, technology, and progress were once aligned and facing full-on toward the future, today democracy is in retreat, technology is stagnating, progress is a dirty word. Politics is eating the world and we have become a culture obsessed with the past.”
While there is little doubt democracy is no longer ascendant, technology is hardly stagnant. Quite the opposite; it is moving so fast it has lost many of us. Rather than Tyler Cowen, Potter should have read Alvin Toffler. Technology is piling up innovation upon innovation, and poor humans have not been able to assimilate them all or leverage them for their best effect. The result is the average American checking their phone over 200 times a day, lost in a flood of apps and data. As Katrine Marçal put it in her new book Mother of Invention, the problem is that new technology is not being designed to adapt to people’s needs, but instead requires people to adapt to its requirements. Example: passwords a minimum of eight characters, with upper case, lowercase, numerals, letters and symbols all required, plus 3-5 security questions, two-factor identification, stored device cookies, and lockout for a typo. And different for every site. Life gets more complicated with every labor-saving device that hits the market. If anything, technology is not stagnating; it is leaving us in its dust.
Potter complains instead that washing machines are slower, smaller and less powerful than they were in the 1960s. Nonsense. But the book is chock full of these assumptions and baseless claims, all evidence of decline to him. You want to call him on every one, then (if you’re generous) you let it go, assuming he has an important point to make based on that thought. But you’d be wrong.
His attack on social media also breaks no new ground, except possibly for this color on the power of reasoning: “You can’t reason your way out of social media’s toxicity any more than you can reason your way out of a traffic jam or an arms race.” Good one. Vague enough to use all over the place.
Religion is on its way out, he says, which is a good thing, showing an appreciation for reason. His explanation for the rise of religion once again relies on one theory, that it was an effort by leaders to maintain a level of morality among tribal members as they became too numerous to deal with individually. That’s okay, but hardly the last word. Whole libraries analyze the rise of religions. And while Christianity might be in decline, you cannot say that of Islam. So what exactly is the point?
Let’s be clear. Civilizations have life cycles just like everything else. They build, flourish, decline and die. The entire cycle typically takes less than 500 years. There are whole shelves of books on the declines and falls of civilizations. There is little doubt western civilization has had better days. It will probably spend its last efforts trying desperately to undo its environmental excesses. The massive changes now underway will kill off numerous countries and give rise to new ones. That’s not as much decline as it is revolution.
Despite his claim that we are all overfocused on the past, On Decline is not about the future. It is a long, bizarre complaint that proclaims its own nostalgia for a simpler time when new technology was a godsend, when people helped each other for the common good and so on. Like all nostalgia, it was never true. On top of everything else, Potter has fallen into his own trap.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
Potter has written a long rant, divided into chapters by topic, but it is clearly all him, ranting. His method is to have read a book, decided it was important, and taken the author’s thoughts back into history and sweeping generalizations of Potter’s own imagination. It has little to do with reality. His conclusions seem baseless. His grasp of the difference between correlation and causation is gauzy, even as he criticizes others over it.
He enthusiastically cites Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now for all the wonderful charts proving how world trade had flatlined since the time of Jesus, and has rocketed in just the last hundred years. But Pinker’s charts are all bogus. No statistics on international trade balances go back to the time of Jesus. This is right from the Donald Trump handbook, where if you tell a lie often enough, it gets taken for truth. Potter is aiding the spread of Pinker’s nonsense. He takes up numerous Pinker points without having read any of the criticisms of them, and projects backward to show just how dynamic western civilization has been. For example, there’s Pinker’s claim that the poor in western countries today live better than kingsdid 500 years ago, because even the poorest have refrigerators and cell phones. And this proves, what exactly? Poverty is relative to the others around you. You can have a refrigerator in your shack, but you will still die early and miserably, often from all the horrible processed food consumed out of that refrigerator.
He attacks the nostalgia industry, claiming civilization has run so short of new ideas, it relies on the old, and has now actually run out of the old, too. It used to be there was a nostalgia fad, say 25 years later. But they have been accelerating to the point where we’re up to the present in nostalgia, he observes.
This has nothing whatever to do with lack of new ideas, and everything to do with capitalism. Looking for new holes to fill, entrepreneurs see how easily money can be made in nostalgia, and want to be the first to exploit another as yet unexploited era. If there’s a way to be nostalgic for 2020, someone will jump on it and not wait until 2050 to revive the music, clothing and hairstyles for fun and profit. Decline plays no role here.
In economic growth, citing works by Tyler Cowen only, Potter complains about stagnation, where growth has slowed and little additional progress is made on many fronts. Well, the American economy is red hot this year, but I don’t think anyone believes this means it has shaken the long term decline. An economy is not the cause of decline. Growth per se is not the end of the story. The boom/bust cycle is not desirable, no matter how much Potter complains about slow growth. He is clearly in the camp of bigger growth at all costs. There are plenty who would say that has been the problem, not the solution. But there’s no room for analyses in this rant.
He takes the time to get nitpicky over the selfishness, self-centeredness and the general lack of solidarity in western societies today. He claims this is a new development and evidence of our decline. I refer him to Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels instead of the book he cites. Swift accurately portrayed all those same weaknesses and far more, 300 years ago. This is not something that just came up since the 1960s, as Potter claims. Or he can read the brand new I’ll Forget It When I DIe!, which tells the story of an Arizona town deporting nearly 1200 men in animal boxcars, dumping them in the desert in another state. Anyone who disagreed with policy was booted out, and city border guards prevented them coming back, along with all suspicious visitors – like lawyers. And all because they wanted fair wages. This was a hundred years ago, in the brand new state of Arizona. Decline is always with us. It didn’t just begin after JFK was shot.
One observation of his from the 1960s, is spot on though. When JFK told the country he was giving it the goal of a man on the moon before the end of decade, it focused the nation. But “Sixty years after Kennedy’s speech to Congress, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to make the case that accomplishing hard tasks, solving hard problems, committing to collective action, is a particular ambition or ideal or expertise of democracy.” There is no question that democracy has gone stale for many people, but that is a function of not updating the constitution to fit our current situation, as the founders specified for Americans to do. It is a sign of stupidity, not decline.
His take on democracy is naïve and superficial: “The full speed of freedom is a clarion call from another era. Where democracy, technology, and progress were once aligned and facing full-on toward the future, today democracy is in retreat, technology is stagnating, progress is a dirty word. Politics is eating the world and we have become a culture obsessed with the past.”
While there is little doubt democracy is no longer ascendant, technology is hardly stagnant. Quite the opposite; it is moving so fast it has lost many of us. Rather than Tyler Cowen, Potter should have read Alvin Toffler. Technology is piling up innovation upon innovation, and poor humans have not been able to assimilate them all or leverage them for their best effect. The result is the average American checking their phone over 200 times a day, lost in a flood of apps and data. As Katrine Marçal put it in her new book Mother of Invention, the problem is that new technology is not being designed to adapt to people’s needs, but instead requires people to adapt to its requirements. Example: passwords a minimum of eight characters, with upper case, lowercase, numerals, letters and symbols all required, plus 3-5 security questions, two-factor identification, stored device cookies, and lockout for a typo. And different for every site. Life gets more complicated with every labor-saving device that hits the market. If anything, technology is not stagnating; it is leaving us in its dust.
Potter complains instead that washing machines are slower, smaller and less powerful than they were in the 1960s. Nonsense. But the book is chock full of these assumptions and baseless claims, all evidence of decline to him. You want to call him on every one, then (if you’re generous) you let it go, assuming he has an important point to make based on that thought. But you’d be wrong.
His attack on social media also breaks no new ground, except possibly for this color on the power of reasoning: “You can’t reason your way out of social media’s toxicity any more than you can reason your way out of a traffic jam or an arms race.” Good one. Vague enough to use all over the place.
Religion is on its way out, he says, which is a good thing, showing an appreciation for reason. His explanation for the rise of religion once again relies on one theory, that it was an effort by leaders to maintain a level of morality among tribal members as they became too numerous to deal with individually. That’s okay, but hardly the last word. Whole libraries analyze the rise of religions. And while Christianity might be in decline, you cannot say that of Islam. So what exactly is the point?
Let’s be clear. Civilizations have life cycles just like everything else. They build, flourish, decline and die. The entire cycle typically takes less than 500 years. There are whole shelves of books on the declines and falls of civilizations. There is little doubt western civilization has had better days. It will probably spend its last efforts trying desperately to undo its environmental excesses. The massive changes now underway will kill off numerous countries and give rise to new ones. That’s not as much decline as it is revolution.
Despite his claim that we are all overfocused on the past, On Decline is not about the future. It is a long, bizarre complaint that proclaims its own nostalgia for a simpler time when new technology was a godsend, when people helped each other for the common good and so on. Like all nostalgia, it was never true. On top of everything else, Potter has fallen into his own trap.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
June 19, 2022
If you've been reading more than Facebook or Twitter or instagram or tik tok nothing in this book should be a surprise. I would be interested in a follow up in a few years to include the economy and Russia/Ukraine. Neither should have been a surprise if you read more than social media.
January 14, 2022
I know the books in these series are meant to be short, so the authors cannot go into as great a depth as possible. However, the main problem with this book is a lack of going beyond what the author thinks the problem of decline is due to, to actually providing evidence that can be shown to stand up to refutation. When writing, one must think about what your political opponents would say and then ensure you cover those arguments. This book is not that. It ends up being half baked.
After a solid start I thought something was amiss when the author blithely agrees to the (false) sentiment that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin. On the contrary, abundant evidence, from the mouths of CEOs who have gone on record to say that whether or not the West has democracy is not a concern to them, to the fact that capitalism does very well in “communist” China, shows that capitalism and democracy are not really linked. Further arguments against government regulations (without acknowledging that many regulations are designed to keep us safe and corporations from running amok), against environmentalists (in his uncritical support for unregulated pipeline construction), and then acknowledgement that conservatives go after trans people without connecting why the left is concerned with language - it’s not about limiting debate, it’s about standing for decency on how we treat our fellow human beings. I could go on regarding these ideas.
In short: not poorly written, just poorly argued and I don’t agree.
After a solid start I thought something was amiss when the author blithely agrees to the (false) sentiment that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin. On the contrary, abundant evidence, from the mouths of CEOs who have gone on record to say that whether or not the West has democracy is not a concern to them, to the fact that capitalism does very well in “communist” China, shows that capitalism and democracy are not really linked. Further arguments against government regulations (without acknowledging that many regulations are designed to keep us safe and corporations from running amok), against environmentalists (in his uncritical support for unregulated pipeline construction), and then acknowledgement that conservatives go after trans people without connecting why the left is concerned with language - it’s not about limiting debate, it’s about standing for decency on how we treat our fellow human beings. I could go on regarding these ideas.
In short: not poorly written, just poorly argued and I don’t agree.
November 29, 2021
This is a decent rant that is often overblown but has some good points. Potter looks at environmental pollution, the slowing down of new technology and growth, population decline, Covid 19, and the failure of modern politics, especially in the West, to address any of these issues. The main point is that the West has taken its eye off the ball of what is really important for societal survival, and that this is not good news. More or less, I agree, but I think his rhetoric gets the best of him, and there is a bewildering lack of statistics to back up his points. He mentions “availability heuristics”, which is the human brain’s tendency to ignore long-term positive trends while picking isolated negative events to construct a narrative at odds with reality. I wonder if he does that some time.
Personally, I am fairly negative about the short to medium-term ability of humans to deal with climate change or plastic in the oceans. These require word-wide, systemic change and we don’t have the systems in place to deal with them. The fixes are possible, but expensive and will mean that people in the rich countries will have to tighten their belts and, in poorer countries, some people will die. The only thing we can say is that out-of-control climate change and even more plastic-clogged oceans will be worse. We are caught between a rock and a hard place and it is in the interests of everyone to pass the buck to others. So I agree with him.
On the other hand, is violence of terrorism or democracy more in danger now than 40 years ago? I remember the Weathermen, the Red Guards, the PLQ, the FLQ, the IRA and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
One of his points that needs to be taken seriously is the idea that growth is slowing down in the West because 1) most of the low-hanging fruits of the Industrial Revolution have been picked, and 2) excessive bureaucracy and interest group politics make it much more difficult to get anything done. As for the first point, I have read Yuval Harari and Ray Kurzweil and they would beg to differ. On the second, I heartily agree. I moved from Canada to South Korea in 1996. In the past 25 years, Seoul has gone from five subway lines to thirteen. And the Koreans built a high-speed railway network across the country. I live in a thirty-five story building, which is one of a complex of six, and there are similar complexes across the street and around the corner. We are surrounded by new parks, schools and a business district, all within walking distance. I look at Ottawa’s pitiful attempt to build an LRT system or the NIMBYism that prevents residential developments that are needed to bring down house prices in Canada, and I shake my head.
Another part of the book that was interesting to me was exactly why Canada’s Covid 19 response was so terrible. I will explain what he said and add my own observations from the perspective of being in South Korea for the whole thing. One of the things that he mentions in the book is how, after SARS, Canada had put together a pandemic task force, but it had been dismantled by the time Covid 19 came around. Advice from the WHO could not be trusted, but Canada trusted it. On the other hand, here in South Korea, a pandemic task force had been set up after MERS, and they had just finished a practice exercise when Covid 19 hit. They were on it. Then there are masks. In the West, people were not used to wearing masks, and the WHO originally said they weren’t necessary. In Asia, masks were already much more common. My students would wear a mask when they had a cold so they wouldn’t spread it around the classroom. And when Covid 19 hit, the Korean doctors told everyone to mask up, and they did. Masks were rationed until the supplies improved. Korean contact tracing just ignored privacy concerns in the interest of the common good, and it worked. Canada’s contact tracing was mostly voluntary and ineffectual and the results were disastrous. Fake news proliferated and confused the response of the public. In South Korea, we locked down, but not as tightly as in the West, and we had better results. The one bright spot in all this was how quickly vaccinations were developed, and that was actually the result of Operation Warp Speed in the USA, in which normal bureaucratic procedures were ignored. See the paragraph above. Let the researchers free.
We really are coming out of a period of American dominance and into an era of a rising Asia and more Great Power competition, which is inherently unstable. Remember, though, rich Asian societies like South Korea and Singapore are not problem-free places either. Sure, China seems to be fairly aggressive about its near Pacific Rim and Russia is an asymmetric, spoiler state. Just how stable either of these places is, is a difficult question to answer. I think that some of the kudos for democracy have been overblown. I agree more with Karl Popper that the main advantage of democracy is that it brings peaceful transitions of power. He says specifically that it does not guarantee better leadership, and if you want to compare Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping, I find it difficult to disagree. Peaceful transitions of power, however, is a very important point. The Roman Empire went through 90 emperors in 70 years at one point. Only two died peacefully. This was not good for it’s long-term survival. Cycling through mediocrities advised by bureaucracies is probably better than that. I might be persuaded that, because of free speech, it is easier to reform a democracy than an autocracy, too, but I’m not sure.
Potter talks about how declining birth rates are a symptom of collapse. I agree with him partly, but I think we need to put this into a larger context. South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world. When the younger generation goes on a baby strike, this obviously has long-term consequences for the viability of a society. Also, we need to ask ourselves how we have made a society in which people are too pessimistic to make more people. On the other hand, the world is at seven billion people now, and moving up to nine billion, and I’m not sure how many people we need. How are we going to cope with our environmental crises with even more people? Korea North and South has a population of about 73 million. During the Chosen Dynasty, scholars think the population was more like around 15 million. And the Chosen Dynasty was an advanced, early modern Asian state. Also, there were bears, tigers, leopards and wolves in Korea, unlike now. I don’t know what the population of Korea or the world should be. I’m just saying that the answer is not obvious.
Some of this reminds me of the Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Fail. Potter claims that people are engaging in a status competition based on unnecessary consumption that is in the worst interests of everyone. If we keep on the present course, we may become like the elite Easter Islanders who continued to make the big heads until all the trees were gone and their society collapsed so that it was considered a normal insult to say, “I picked your Mom out of my teeth.” However, in that book, there are examples of societies turning it around. For example, Middle Ages Japan enforced consumption curbs on the elite and reforested the country. It is possible for the West to turn itself around, but it will require making difficult reforms and ignoring the special pleading of interest groups and that will be difficult to do. It will require learning from the countries that are currently beating us, like South Korea and China and Taiwan.
This is not just the fault of greedy elites - some of it is just human nature and long-term history working itself out. People easily become too narcissistic to cooperate for the common good. It requires a strong government to force them. And history shows that successful civilizations produce softer people who don’t want to change what they think is working very well. They might rather die than change their minds. Covid 19 is a good reminder of that.
I have two examples that I was thinking of to add to this book. The first is the difference between revolutionary change and evolutionary change. Revolutionary change is the Wright Brothers or the jet engine. Evolutionary change is, when I first flew across the Pacific Ocean in 1996 in a 747 it took twice as much fuel per person as it does now when we use a Dreamliner. Still, that is progress. Now here’s an example of efficient bureaucracy. I went to the Driver’s License Testing Centre in Seoul this morning because I needed an International Driver’s License. To do that, I needed to get pictures taken there. As well, the clerk discovered my address on my main driver’s license was out of date and so I had to get my driver’s license updated. Charge for everything: pictures, address change and International Driver’s License, about $30 Canadian. And the clerk was helpful. And it took about 25 minutes. Now go to Service Ontario and try the same thing and tell me what happens.
This book made me think. It made me think of problems and solutions and it made me think that he sometimes exaggerates. “Canada is a country where it is impossible to get anything done.” That should rather read, “Canada is a country where it is too difficult to get projects that are in the national interest done in timely and economic manner.” This is a decent, short look at what ails us. It is not a waste of time.
David Bowie 2016 R.I.P. If you read the book, you will know what I mean.
Personally, I am fairly negative about the short to medium-term ability of humans to deal with climate change or plastic in the oceans. These require word-wide, systemic change and we don’t have the systems in place to deal with them. The fixes are possible, but expensive and will mean that people in the rich countries will have to tighten their belts and, in poorer countries, some people will die. The only thing we can say is that out-of-control climate change and even more plastic-clogged oceans will be worse. We are caught between a rock and a hard place and it is in the interests of everyone to pass the buck to others. So I agree with him.
On the other hand, is violence of terrorism or democracy more in danger now than 40 years ago? I remember the Weathermen, the Red Guards, the PLQ, the FLQ, the IRA and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
One of his points that needs to be taken seriously is the idea that growth is slowing down in the West because 1) most of the low-hanging fruits of the Industrial Revolution have been picked, and 2) excessive bureaucracy and interest group politics make it much more difficult to get anything done. As for the first point, I have read Yuval Harari and Ray Kurzweil and they would beg to differ. On the second, I heartily agree. I moved from Canada to South Korea in 1996. In the past 25 years, Seoul has gone from five subway lines to thirteen. And the Koreans built a high-speed railway network across the country. I live in a thirty-five story building, which is one of a complex of six, and there are similar complexes across the street and around the corner. We are surrounded by new parks, schools and a business district, all within walking distance. I look at Ottawa’s pitiful attempt to build an LRT system or the NIMBYism that prevents residential developments that are needed to bring down house prices in Canada, and I shake my head.
Another part of the book that was interesting to me was exactly why Canada’s Covid 19 response was so terrible. I will explain what he said and add my own observations from the perspective of being in South Korea for the whole thing. One of the things that he mentions in the book is how, after SARS, Canada had put together a pandemic task force, but it had been dismantled by the time Covid 19 came around. Advice from the WHO could not be trusted, but Canada trusted it. On the other hand, here in South Korea, a pandemic task force had been set up after MERS, and they had just finished a practice exercise when Covid 19 hit. They were on it. Then there are masks. In the West, people were not used to wearing masks, and the WHO originally said they weren’t necessary. In Asia, masks were already much more common. My students would wear a mask when they had a cold so they wouldn’t spread it around the classroom. And when Covid 19 hit, the Korean doctors told everyone to mask up, and they did. Masks were rationed until the supplies improved. Korean contact tracing just ignored privacy concerns in the interest of the common good, and it worked. Canada’s contact tracing was mostly voluntary and ineffectual and the results were disastrous. Fake news proliferated and confused the response of the public. In South Korea, we locked down, but not as tightly as in the West, and we had better results. The one bright spot in all this was how quickly vaccinations were developed, and that was actually the result of Operation Warp Speed in the USA, in which normal bureaucratic procedures were ignored. See the paragraph above. Let the researchers free.
We really are coming out of a period of American dominance and into an era of a rising Asia and more Great Power competition, which is inherently unstable. Remember, though, rich Asian societies like South Korea and Singapore are not problem-free places either. Sure, China seems to be fairly aggressive about its near Pacific Rim and Russia is an asymmetric, spoiler state. Just how stable either of these places is, is a difficult question to answer. I think that some of the kudos for democracy have been overblown. I agree more with Karl Popper that the main advantage of democracy is that it brings peaceful transitions of power. He says specifically that it does not guarantee better leadership, and if you want to compare Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping, I find it difficult to disagree. Peaceful transitions of power, however, is a very important point. The Roman Empire went through 90 emperors in 70 years at one point. Only two died peacefully. This was not good for it’s long-term survival. Cycling through mediocrities advised by bureaucracies is probably better than that. I might be persuaded that, because of free speech, it is easier to reform a democracy than an autocracy, too, but I’m not sure.
Potter talks about how declining birth rates are a symptom of collapse. I agree with him partly, but I think we need to put this into a larger context. South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world. When the younger generation goes on a baby strike, this obviously has long-term consequences for the viability of a society. Also, we need to ask ourselves how we have made a society in which people are too pessimistic to make more people. On the other hand, the world is at seven billion people now, and moving up to nine billion, and I’m not sure how many people we need. How are we going to cope with our environmental crises with even more people? Korea North and South has a population of about 73 million. During the Chosen Dynasty, scholars think the population was more like around 15 million. And the Chosen Dynasty was an advanced, early modern Asian state. Also, there were bears, tigers, leopards and wolves in Korea, unlike now. I don’t know what the population of Korea or the world should be. I’m just saying that the answer is not obvious.
Some of this reminds me of the Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Fail. Potter claims that people are engaging in a status competition based on unnecessary consumption that is in the worst interests of everyone. If we keep on the present course, we may become like the elite Easter Islanders who continued to make the big heads until all the trees were gone and their society collapsed so that it was considered a normal insult to say, “I picked your Mom out of my teeth.” However, in that book, there are examples of societies turning it around. For example, Middle Ages Japan enforced consumption curbs on the elite and reforested the country. It is possible for the West to turn itself around, but it will require making difficult reforms and ignoring the special pleading of interest groups and that will be difficult to do. It will require learning from the countries that are currently beating us, like South Korea and China and Taiwan.
This is not just the fault of greedy elites - some of it is just human nature and long-term history working itself out. People easily become too narcissistic to cooperate for the common good. It requires a strong government to force them. And history shows that successful civilizations produce softer people who don’t want to change what they think is working very well. They might rather die than change their minds. Covid 19 is a good reminder of that.
I have two examples that I was thinking of to add to this book. The first is the difference between revolutionary change and evolutionary change. Revolutionary change is the Wright Brothers or the jet engine. Evolutionary change is, when I first flew across the Pacific Ocean in 1996 in a 747 it took twice as much fuel per person as it does now when we use a Dreamliner. Still, that is progress. Now here’s an example of efficient bureaucracy. I went to the Driver’s License Testing Centre in Seoul this morning because I needed an International Driver’s License. To do that, I needed to get pictures taken there. As well, the clerk discovered my address on my main driver’s license was out of date and so I had to get my driver’s license updated. Charge for everything: pictures, address change and International Driver’s License, about $30 Canadian. And the clerk was helpful. And it took about 25 minutes. Now go to Service Ontario and try the same thing and tell me what happens.
This book made me think. It made me think of problems and solutions and it made me think that he sometimes exaggerates. “Canada is a country where it is impossible to get anything done.” That should rather read, “Canada is a country where it is too difficult to get projects that are in the national interest done in timely and economic manner.” This is a decent, short look at what ails us. It is not a waste of time.
David Bowie 2016 R.I.P. If you read the book, you will know what I mean.
December 8, 2021
This is it?
Was expecting a lot from this book, but received a smattering of observations and some research. Read CIVILIZED TO DEATH as a better take on the decline of humanity.
Was expecting a lot from this book, but received a smattering of observations and some research. Read CIVILIZED TO DEATH as a better take on the decline of humanity.
February 7, 2022
I’m going to give this pocket sized polemic 3.5⭐️. Whilst I don’t agree with everything the author states I do feel like our species and particularly our civilizations institutions are showing signs of fatigue. Brought to their knees by social media, disinformation and the ongoing pressure of authoritarian regimes that threaten to eclipse our creaky and fragile democracy. Later on top of that environmental, economic and demographic stress and we got problems. This underlying thesis takes on new urgency and poignancy with the events in our nations capital. Do we possess the cultural and political will to secure and bulwark ourselves.
July 22, 2024
This a topical and well-articulated primer about some of the elements of our time (as well as decades past) that have culminated in our current tumultuous economic, social, and political period. It’s very short but for me, this was an effective way of tackling it. Sometimes I get lost in an in-depth historical analysis, but I appreciated how focused Potter is. I highly recommend this to anyone who is looking for a framework for considering how we got to such a seemingly hopeless time. 4.5 stars.
September 22, 2021
Judging from the title, I didn't expect that this would be an optimist book, and I was correct. However, many interesting points are raised indicating that humans have reached the end of "progress", and for many reasons, are trending in the opposite direction.
January 21, 2022
Andrew Potter has perfectly articulated some of the most crucial observations of today's society in this book. To be able to make these potentially sensitive observations and yet remain politically neutral at the end of it all is quite an accomplishment.
The crux of his book is in the idea that humanity has reached the end of its useful progress - like a curve touching its asymptote - and that the ongoing/upcoming stagnation will ultimately lead to a gradual, but steady, decline in human civilization and the quality of life. I would have simply discarded the book if the author had called for some kind of an apocalyptic event. Instead, he argues for the contrary - one where society's current conditions lead to an inevitable decline - but that there is no single/major event that precipitates the end of civilization as we know it.
I probably bookmarked/highlighted more than half of this book just because the arguments were so clearly presented and articulated. I expect to quote these highlighted passages in a lot of settings going forward.
This is a book that is decidedly on the opposite end of books by authors such as Steven Pinker (a.k.a 'BS Vendor' per Nassim Taleb) who argue for some kind of a utopian future in human society by comparing it to cherry picked stats from history. ON DECLINE acknowledges the society for what and where it IS - not on what and where it SHOULD or CAN BE.
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK if you want some sense of optimism on where human civilization is going. DEFINITELY READ THIS BOOK if you are open to listening to some hard truths about what is wrong with society, why there is simply no solution in sight, and how the decline is inevitable.
The crux of his book is in the idea that humanity has reached the end of its useful progress - like a curve touching its asymptote - and that the ongoing/upcoming stagnation will ultimately lead to a gradual, but steady, decline in human civilization and the quality of life. I would have simply discarded the book if the author had called for some kind of an apocalyptic event. Instead, he argues for the contrary - one where society's current conditions lead to an inevitable decline - but that there is no single/major event that precipitates the end of civilization as we know it.
I probably bookmarked/highlighted more than half of this book just because the arguments were so clearly presented and articulated. I expect to quote these highlighted passages in a lot of settings going forward.
This is a book that is decidedly on the opposite end of books by authors such as Steven Pinker (a.k.a 'BS Vendor' per Nassim Taleb) who argue for some kind of a utopian future in human society by comparing it to cherry picked stats from history. ON DECLINE acknowledges the society for what and where it IS - not on what and where it SHOULD or CAN BE.
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK if you want some sense of optimism on where human civilization is going. DEFINITELY READ THIS BOOK if you are open to listening to some hard truths about what is wrong with society, why there is simply no solution in sight, and how the decline is inevitable.
October 3, 2021
If you wanted to give an edgy first year student an essay to read to prime them about (some) perils of contemporary society, this is a good start. While none of the ideas are especially new (e.g. casino-ization of our social media and physical infrastructure; failures of reason, etc.) they are well applied to our contemporary moment. Andrew Potters humorous style, and blend of cultural observation and easily accessed academic ideas, makes for a good read.
Read
October 19, 2021Some really interesting and provocative ideas in this book. Although I enjoyed how short it was because it was easy to get through and digest; I wish there was more. I was left wanting the ideas to be expanding more than what I was given. I'm interested in this author now and looking at the entirety of this book series.
February 15, 2023
Uniquely Dumb. I've never read a book so incorrect in its facts and flawed in it's reasoning, while being coherently written.
I can’t help but think the people who liked this were trying to justify their own political bias. Like 90% of what this guy says is historical nonsense, and carefully cherry-picking facts to not contradict himself. Most of the book reads like a post hawk justification to prove we're in decline. His keystone point, that we are in a time of economic stagnation since the 1980s/2000s/2008, is provable false. In one chapter, he talks about how humanity has stagnated and can’t invent anything new because we got all the low-hanging fruit. Completely disregard computers the internet and AI, where is my fly car. Next chapter, the government is bad and gets in the way of progress. Next chapter, Covid proves we can’t do anything right. What about the amazing turn around of the RNA vaccines? What about the quick actions of the government to support vaccine development, and speed deployment? Literally contradicts the first half of the book. What does he focus on, the great responses of South Korea, Taiwan (both government that a generation ago were right wing dictatorships), and Israel because they could force border lockdowns and privacy violations due to their centralized control (which he just argued was a bad in the previous chapter) and ability to stamp down freedom. Also, Cold War with China is a good thing because it’ll make democracy better (unlike the last Cold War)
He says obviously disprovable stuff all the time. We’re in a time of uniquely maladaptive magical thinking Salem witch trials, inquisition, or human and economic sacrifices for the gods, nah. Bad twitter takes are the real threat. Demographic decline is going to destroy society. But we can make like Japan and just have robots for companions and to do work. WTF, that’s a 90s stereotype. Japan is trouble because it doesn’t let young people for other countries in to balance demographics, but Canada does, so we don’t have the demographic decline. Ignore that. We’re in global terminal population decline because of the last 20 years of declining birth rates. Safe to assume that trend will continue until societal collapse. In fact, safe to assume everything is unique to this time. Ignore the Romans, who lamented the decline of their society from the 2nd generation on wards. We are the first generation to feel a sense of decline. It’s a unique feeling to starting at 2016, cause of social media and trump. The end.
Things I liked:
His reasoning is so unmoored from reality, that all his points were uniquely his. I can’t tell if he’s right wing or left wing. A broken clock is correct twice a day, and had some interesting observations about social media.
I can’t help but think the people who liked this were trying to justify their own political bias. Like 90% of what this guy says is historical nonsense, and carefully cherry-picking facts to not contradict himself. Most of the book reads like a post hawk justification to prove we're in decline. His keystone point, that we are in a time of economic stagnation since the 1980s/2000s/2008, is provable false. In one chapter, he talks about how humanity has stagnated and can’t invent anything new because we got all the low-hanging fruit. Completely disregard computers the internet and AI, where is my fly car. Next chapter, the government is bad and gets in the way of progress. Next chapter, Covid proves we can’t do anything right. What about the amazing turn around of the RNA vaccines? What about the quick actions of the government to support vaccine development, and speed deployment? Literally contradicts the first half of the book. What does he focus on, the great responses of South Korea, Taiwan (both government that a generation ago were right wing dictatorships), and Israel because they could force border lockdowns and privacy violations due to their centralized control (which he just argued was a bad in the previous chapter) and ability to stamp down freedom. Also, Cold War with China is a good thing because it’ll make democracy better (unlike the last Cold War)
He says obviously disprovable stuff all the time. We’re in a time of uniquely maladaptive magical thinking Salem witch trials, inquisition, or human and economic sacrifices for the gods, nah. Bad twitter takes are the real threat. Demographic decline is going to destroy society. But we can make like Japan and just have robots for companions and to do work. WTF, that’s a 90s stereotype. Japan is trouble because it doesn’t let young people for other countries in to balance demographics, but Canada does, so we don’t have the demographic decline. Ignore that. We’re in global terminal population decline because of the last 20 years of declining birth rates. Safe to assume that trend will continue until societal collapse. In fact, safe to assume everything is unique to this time. Ignore the Romans, who lamented the decline of their society from the 2nd generation on wards. We are the first generation to feel a sense of decline. It’s a unique feeling to starting at 2016, cause of social media and trump. The end.
Things I liked:
His reasoning is so unmoored from reality, that all his points were uniquely his. I can’t tell if he’s right wing or left wing. A broken clock is correct twice a day, and had some interesting observations about social media.
October 23, 2022
An interesting and dense read, trying to get at just why we humans seem to shoot ourselves in the foot, collectively. Maladaptive beliefs and behaviours, and a persistent inability to resolve the "collective action problem" (getting things done for the good of all).
I found the On Politics section off - comparing the supposed power of "cancel culture" to the growth of overtly hateful far-right politics (& actions) is a false equivalency.
There has always been shaming and social censure for actions, it's just new to those who were previously comfortably insulated from it due to their status.
Too see unpleasant critique as being equal to threats of violence seems to flatten vast differences in power & harm.
Also the idea that status-signalling is only about competition, as opposed to a need to feel affiliated & connected (group safety), could be opened up a bit.
But otherwise there's lots of interesting stuff here - the slow/fast thinking ideas (system 1 & system 2), casino-ification of social media, that the recent lost "stability" is the historical aberration, and that we're just as religious as ever but with different "gods"...I'll chew on these ideas for a while.
I found the On Politics section off - comparing the supposed power of "cancel culture" to the growth of overtly hateful far-right politics (& actions) is a false equivalency.
There has always been shaming and social censure for actions, it's just new to those who were previously comfortably insulated from it due to their status.
Too see unpleasant critique as being equal to threats of violence seems to flatten vast differences in power & harm.
Also the idea that status-signalling is only about competition, as opposed to a need to feel affiliated & connected (group safety), could be opened up a bit.
But otherwise there's lots of interesting stuff here - the slow/fast thinking ideas (system 1 & system 2), casino-ification of social media, that the recent lost "stability" is the historical aberration, and that we're just as religious as ever but with different "gods"...I'll chew on these ideas for a while.
October 9, 2023
Doomerism, but this time for intellectuals™️. Honestly, this book isn’t even bad it’s just that it’s so conclusion driven, with the conclusion being that (Western) civilization is in decline, that it’s difficult to take it seriously. The irony is that Potter warns against the dangers of nostalgic populism in politics (aka fascism) yet he himself indulges in his own nostalgia with regards to a time when society wasn’t in decline. The thing is, if you look back at any point in civilization, there is always someone talking about how society is in decline. This is not to say that there haven’t been collapses or true declines in history but it is important to put things into perspective. Just remember that news media cares more about getting clicks and views (which is easier when you report about bad shit) than about actually representing the world as it is. Is the world in trouble ? Possibly. But we have been in trouble before and we have felt hopeless before and we have complained of societal decline before and yet here we are. 3/5.
January 23, 2022
On Decline is a primer that dissects the dysfunctional social and political environment of our times. The title is not uplifting but not without hope. Andrew Potter discusses ever-polarizing politics and tribalism, stagnating technological development, the Covid-19 pandemic and the overarching prescience of climate change. Potter argues that our impulsive cognitive responses, referred as system 1, or the Lizard Brain, has overcome system 2, referred to as our reasoning faculties. As a result, identity politics and tribalism are the means by which society organizes itself. This segmentation impairs cooperative efforts and the logical reasoning required to undertake large projects in complex societies. The text is well organized, and Potter is not shy about criticizing the full political spectrum. The book's brevity is its primary shortcoming, as solutions to these issues are sparse. That said, this title is a good starting point for those wondering what went wrong.
December 24, 2021
Some parts of this book were excellent (such as the COVID-19 chapter), other parts were just OK. An interesting look at why things always seem to be in decline, even if I did not agree with everything the author wrote.
September 3, 2022
I don't read political books (typically - if at all) - what drew me to gabbing this:
- It's short
- Broken into essays
This book introduced me to a new concept/phrase: Swiss Cheese Paradox
My thoughts on this book: It's a Swiss Cheese book - Lots of holes
- It's short
- Broken into essays
This book introduced me to a new concept/phrase: Swiss Cheese Paradox
My thoughts on this book: It's a Swiss Cheese book - Lots of holes
January 21, 2025
I read this around Trump’s inauguration and it helped me to better understand the condition which led to his landslide election. A valuable read and resource to better navigate a world in decline, rife with tribalism, nationalism, fascism and all the other unsavoury isms.
December 30, 2021
An argument that is presented precisely and with balance.
December 7, 2022
Yes, it was Bowie's death, as you would expect which has led to and continues human decline.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 24, 2022
This guy sure hates hipsters!
March 15, 2025
David bowie was the first domino that will cause the apocalypse
May 20, 2025
Really good stuff from Potter at a critical time of cultural evaluation following the pandemic
Read
September 26, 2021A bit repetitive in places but overall an enjoyable and thoughtful long essay on why/how/whether the world is getting worse and why/how/whether humans are failing at logic, liberalism, and life in general.
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