The Sovereign Individual: The Coming Economic Revolution: How to Survive and Prosper in It

by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age is a 1997 non-fiction book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, two renowned investment advisors and authors of the bestseller The Great Reckoning. It forecasts the development of the 21st century; focusing on the rise of the internet & cyberspace, digital currency & digital economy, self-ownership and decentralization from the State. Rees-Mogg and Davidson's main thesis centers around self-ownership and the Individual's independence from the State, forecasting the end of the nations and nation-states.

They bring to light both currents of disaster and the potential for prosperity and renewal in the face of radical changes in human history as we move into the next century. The Sovereign Individual details strategies necessary for adapting financially to the next phase of Western civilization.

Few observers of the late twentieth century have their fingers so presciently on the pulse of the global political and economic realignment ushering in the new millennium as do James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. Their bold prediction of disaster on Wall Street in Blood in the Streets was borne out by Black Tuesday. In their ensuing bestsellar, The Great Reckoning, published just weeks before the coup attempt against Gorbachev, they analyzed the pending collapse of the Soviet Union and foretold the civil war in Yugoslavia and other events that have proved to be among the most searing developments of the past few years.

In The Sovereign Individual, Davidson and Rees-Mogg explore the greatest economic and political transition in centuries -- the shift from an industrial to an information-based society. This transition, which they have termed "the fourth stage of human society," will liberate individuals as never before, irrevocably altering the power of government. This outstanding book will replace false hopes and fictions with new understanding and clarified values.

The Sovereign Individual has been recommended by members of the cryptocurrency community such as Naval Ravikant and Brian Armstrong. On 22 December 2021, Bitcoin Magazine ran an opinion piece by Bob Simons calling the book's thesis a "prophecy".

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Business, Politics, Philosophy, History, Finance

672 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

James Dale Davidson is an American writer and private investor. He specializes in the domain of economics and finance. Davidson had a successful career as a financial advisor, and in the year 1969, he established the National Taxpayers Union. James Dale Davidson was an alumna of the Oxford University. He pursued an undergraduate degree in the institution. As of now, we aren’t aware of any additional details about his education.

Currently, Mr. Davidson holds the position of Co-Editor in the department of Strategic Investment at Banyan Hill Publishing. He retired from the world of investment in the year 2004, only to eventually return to the firm.

He has spent a significant part of his life discussing about an overreaching government. He is best known as an economist and financial predictor, who allegedly predicted every significant financial event since the last thirty years.

Reviews

[Chest · Rating 5 out of 5]

KEY TAKEAWAYS/ACTIONABLES:
- Positioning: Healthcare vs Technology; Skills + Connections
- Career: These is no "job", just tasks/skills you complete. If you can teach yourself how to SOLVE PROBLEMS, you are ahead of the game.
- Social/Political: PERSONALIZED, Democratized power.
- Psychological: Losing Ikigai -- prioritize your CREATIVE OUTLET!!!
- Political: Set up mat in multiple countries
ACTIONABLE: Hone in on two skillsets in depth. Capitalize on becoming the best. The Top 1% will take 99% of customers.

The Transition of the Year 2000: The Fourth Stage of Human Society
1. Hunting and gathering societies
2. Agricultural societies
3. Industrial societies
4. Informational societies
- In the information age, a job will be a task that you do, not a thing that you have.
- As more money moves online, governments won’t be able to track or control it anymore. They’ll lose their power over commerce and won’t be able to treat their citizens as a farmer milking cows.
- The greatest resentment will likely be centered among the middle class in rich countries, they will feel they have the most to lose. Anyone receiving handouts from the government will resent the sovereign individuals who don’t support them.
- With technology increasing, we’ll move closer and closer to Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse in Snow Crash, where we live as much online as offline and conduct ourselves according to the online laws and customs, working in the cybereconomy.

Megapolitical Transformations in Historic Perspective
- You can’t rely on conventional information sources to give you an objective warning about how the world is changing and why. You have to FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF!!!!!
- There are four key pieces to understanding megapolitcal changes:
1. LAND: Topography, the control and makeup of the land.
2. POWER: Climate, it’s change can precipitate major shifts in power. The 17th century was frought with social revolution.
3. HEALTHCARE: Microbes and disease can cause radical changes in power.
4. TECHNOLOGICAL: Technology plays the biggest and most impactful role in the new megapolitical changes though

East of Eden: The Agricultural Revolution and the Sophistication of Violence
- In the hunting gathering days, there was no reason to work more than the 10-15 hours a week you needed to do to secure food. Overkill was punished because the food would rot before it could be eaten, and decrease food available to you in the environment in the future.

The Last Days of Politics: Parallels Between the Decline of the Church and Nation-State
- Church vs Science compared to Government vs Science

The Life and Death of the Nation State
- The information age will require new mechanisms of representation and government to avoid chronic dysfunction and even social collapse. The past systems will break down as technology advances.

Megapolitics of the Information Age: The Triumph of Efficiency Over Power
- In the information age, if life becomes inoperable or undesirable in one location you’ll no longer be tied to it. You can simply leave and live elsewhere. A change in government could lead to companies fleeing overnight.
- Land resource: not limited by one place, portable
- Capital resource: lowered costs, lower barriers of entry and exit.
- Product cycle: obsolete faster, gains short-lived.
- Microprocessing: individualize work. low-skilled won't be able to contribute at all, builds resentment.
- One persons' contribution is exponential (even after death). Keep pushing boundaries, claiming frontiers, pulling away power from government.
- Power is democratized.

Transcending Locality: The Emergence of the Cyber Economy
1. Internet transactions
2. Long-distance (medical diagnosis, business, real estate)
3. Occurs outside jurisdiction
Trends: PERSONALIZED. Democratized.
Example: Used to be illegal to send fax. But those laws never last.

The End of Egalitarian Economics: The Revolution in Earnings Capacity in a World Without Jobs
- The minimum skill requirement increases for any meanignful contribution; therefore there will be more and more people at the bottom (99% to 99.9%)
- There's no "jobs", just skills/tasks to do. Example: movies (employed for the job, then go their separate ways).
- Abundant information. Knowledge is cheap. Skill is powerful (knowing how to use it).

Nationalism, Reaction, and the New Luddites
- Reaction is strongest in high standards of living (developed country), The neo-luddites will attract most of their adherents from the bottom ⅔ of income earners, underachievers with credentials who face downward mobility
- As it becomes easier to live comfortably and earn a high income anywhere, the pull to choose where to live based on price savings will be more appealing.
- if you want to take full advantage of the freedom of mobility, you should STAKE OUT A WELCOME MAT in multiple places beyond the one you were born in.
- Education: First, it was controlled by the Church. Then, it was controlled by the state. Now, it will be controlled and improved by technology, and it will be PERSONALIZED and INDIVIDUALIZED based on the student.
- People will CHOOSE THEIR JURISDICTIONS the same way they today choose their insurance carriers or religions. Jurisdictions that fail to provide a suitable mix of services will face bankruptcy and liquidation, like an incompetent business.

The Twilight of Democracy
- The information age will be the age of the independent contractor, rewarded based on PERFORMANCE and COMPETENCE, instead of the “company man.”

Morality and Crime in the Natural Economy of the Information Age
- increasingly valuable to be able to discern SIGNAL FROM NOISE!!!!!!! and know what to pay attention to (see Robert Greene).
1. The information overload puts a premium on brevity, which leads to abbreviation, which leaves out what is unfamiliar, which leaves out important parts of understanding the information.
2. There’s an increased value in broad OVERVIEWS and lower value of individual facts.
3. The growing tribalization and marginalization of life will STUNT DISCOURSE AND CRITICAL THINKING. Many people will shy away from conclusions that make them uncomfortable, even if they’re obvious.

Devolution and the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns
- Losing a CREATIVE OUTLET!!! can lead to a nervous breakdown, we need an Ikigai, a reason to live.
- If you can teach yourself HOW TO SOLVE PROBLEMS, you have a bright career ahead of yourself. No matter where you live, you will find problems galore in need of solving. Those who would benefit from solutions of their problems will pay you handsomely to solve them.

[Nicholas Moryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really don't know how to review this book. It's like Kevin Kelly meets David Duke. It's at times insightful and horrifying: it vacillates between fascinating foresight into technology's impact on societies (some of which is playing out) and naked racism. (I'm updating my rating to 4 stars because while I don't necessarily agree with how the thesis of the book is articulated, specifically the political views of the authors, I think it's a *critical* book to read to understand the potential and real impact of technology on society. Certainly one of the top 5 books of the last 25 years. Just because it's odious doesn't mean it's not important.)

The authors clearly have an axe to grind: they think poor people deserve to be poor, that (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary) minorities of all stripes have equal opportunities as those available to straight white males to succeed, and that if it weren't for these damned kleptocratic democratic governments the John Galts amongst us would ascend to the realm of "Sovereign Individuals", i.e. people who rise above nations to be sovereign entities unto themselves (facilitated by technology, naturally), like some kind of Randian wet dream.

Now, the *idea* of technology empowering people to become incredibly creative, successful, productive, etc. makes total sense. Computers essentially give people superpowers, and you can see the returns on a massive scale in the rise of companies like Facebook and WhatsApp where the work of just a few people creates billions of dollars of value. (And those superpowers can be used for evil, too: the Gamergate doxxing hydra that morphed into 4chan's Trump troll army.)

But the authors' attitude about what this means for everyone else boils down to "fuck them, I got mine." It's like taking Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" maxim and taking it to its absolute extreme. Callous doesn't even *begin* to describe their worldview. Society only works inasmuch as there is a social contract; what's being posited here is the complete abnegation of that. What kind of future is that?

How many people choose the family they're born into and the circumstances they grow up in? Does anyone really think people would actually choose to be born into an abusive household, or to drug-addicted parents, or in a war zone they'll have to flee? The authors are totally incapable of imagining a world in which they were not born with the opportunities they had, or one in which luck hadn't gone their way. (Even with bountiful opportunities, chance still has an effect.) Either that or they deny the empirically real barriers that stand in the way of non-straight-white-males trying to succeed. (Ask MLK Jr. about how that went. Or, better yet, Michelle Alexander.) No, you can't blame everything on circumstances, but you can also admit that they have a material affect on outcomes--especially when those circumstances involve explicit efforts to legally disenfranchise and disempower people.

The optimist in me wants to understand how technology can be used to create a better world. Technology is an amoral force: it generally amplifies tendencies that already exist. The authors' view on the impact of technology is extraordinarily prescient, but the lens through which they apply that to society reinforces injustices perpetuated by people--behavior we can change if we choose to. That they see this as natural, rather than human-driven, is their moral failing.

To reduce it to a sentence, my main critique of the book is the authors see a neutral world where certain groups of people are inherently inferior and condemn them based on that, where in reality it's like they're bullies holding your wrist and smacking you with your own fist while saying "Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!"

Addressing the actual points the book makes (about technology empowering individuals): the thesis is very compelling and prescient! The breakdown of nation-states will depend on the arms race between individual/corporate technology and the rule of law. The rule of law (and/or nations, how law is currently administered) is technology, and it can adapt and be adapted. It facilitates economic growth by, amongst other things, setting the ground rules for how people, companies, etc. interact. The big question is when/whether other forms of organizing people that operate outside nation-state legal frameworks achieve escape velocity or are brought within the ambit of existing legal systems.

Basically: are existing powers (companies, governments) better served by maintaining the existing technology we use to structure society (nation-states and rule of law)--does that rising tide lift all boats rapidly enough--or will the sovereign individuals (and corporations, which are really just big sovereign individuals) break away from that to create spheres of power unconstrained by any one country. And will nation-states move quickly to constrain it and preserve the status quo, or are we embarked upon a brave new corporatist world? And in what ways might that be better (freeing people from ossified power structures that have ground them underfoot for generations) or worse (if it's just "meet the new boss, same as the old boss, but now entirely untethered from moral considerations, purely guided by profit--and if that means perpetuating injustice, so be it")?

If you work in technology, it's well worth considering the argument and applying that lens to what you see going on around you.

[Gaurav Mathur · Rating 3 out of 5]

Implementation details of Atlas Shrugged.

Might have given it more stars, but my expectations were too high after this book getting stellar recommendations from people whose opinions I value.

So basically,

Lot of parallels between Church and Nation States -Like the Church fell in 1500s, the Nation State is falling now. Printing press killed the church. Internet is killing the nation states. Church was first ideal, and then corrupt. Politics was once ideal, now corrupt. Chivalry died 500 years ago. Citizenship is dying now.

Democracy is like Communism. Only smarter. Gets more output from you, dear productive individual, by giving you freedom and *then* taxes the hell out of it. Democracy has worked since 1789, But now its time has come.

The rich and the productive are taxed and their spoils are taken away to be redistributed to the low-skilled classes. But now with cryptocurrencies which cannot be taxed and demonitised, your money will be safe from governments.

Nation states have had a monopoly on violence because gunpowder changed the logic of violence. Now, not so much.

The new elite (Sovereign Individuals) will become more powerful - they will have their own sovereignties. These will be the top 1% and 1% of 1%. Those who don't have their own sovereignties will shop among jurisdictions. Countries will be like companies - they will have to offer attractive policies to customers, else they will just move.

And since the authors are investment consultants (this book is 20 yr old, one of the authors is no more), they will help you in setting up investments in tax havens.

There are many criticisms of this book, the most strong being that it is not self-critical. For any hypothesis, disciplined thinking requires outlining with clarity how and when it can fail. But of course the authors did not cover those because they need to sell something.

Many of its concrete predictions have not come to pass. Some general ones are common understanding now, though (but may not have been in 1990s).

There is also the assumption that cultural change is super easy. The Globe-trotting elite can just adjust anywhere. Though it seems true, in the last chapter they do hint at the problems such life involves - mainly a sense of meaninglessness. The authors nail the main religion of these elite - 'agnostic humanism'. But they assert that every stable society needs a strong religion. They don't really solve the problem of what the new religion will be.

That said, the overall historical arc is mostly true, and some of the prophecies will come to pass. I just think that it could be shorter/much better. I will have another look at this, and maybe update this review.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prescient AF. Predicts everything from Bitcoin to Trump.

[Bert Bruins · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is seldom that I list or review a book that I couldn't be bothered to read in full, but I made an exception for this one. James Dale Davidson, a US investor, and (Lord) William Rees-Mogg (former editor of The Times and father of Jacob Rees-Mogg MP) wrote a series of books with predictions on world economics and politics in the late 1980s and 1990s. This is the third one of the series published in 1997. They got some things right and some things wrong (as predictions do), but their books are still relevant because the thinking behind them inform the libertarian Right, and to a large extent the ideology (even if they don't dare to say it out loud) of the current Conservative and Republican parties in the UK and the US respectively.
It is hard to make out in this book who contributed what. I'd like to think that a former editor of the The Times would be cleverer than this and attribute most of the writing to Davidson, but I can't be sure (UK news magazine Private Eye used to refer to the former as "Mystic Mogg" due to these books).
In some ways, and that is a qualified compliment, this book can be read as a modern "Voluntary Servitude" by Etienne de la Boetie, or as a philosophical work by Hobbes or Rousseau about the origins of society and the state. But those were people who lived in the 16th, 17th and 18th C respectively.
Here we have a meandering discourse about the oppressive, violent nature of modern government, fat bureaucrats and the efforts by modern-day heroes to fight and undermine this oppression. What's not to like?
However, it doesn't take long to realise that this book is one long excuse for very rich individuals to hide their taxes abroad and let the rest of the losers fight it out amongst themselves. If 18th C pirates could have written a defense of their rapacious practices it would have looked a bit like "The Sovereign Individual".
Davidson and Rees-Mogg are big on name-dropping, so even George Orwell gets an approving quote in this book for his fight against Big Brother, but just like in Orwell's novel 1984 "freedom is slavery", in this book tax evaders become freedom fighters, and law-abiding tax-paying citizens become the stupid ones.
Democracy will soon be outdated the authors predict, to be replaced by the choices of the very rich. The electorate is just a cabal that tries to get their hand on the wealth of the rich. But: "Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds". "The twentieth-century nation-state, with all its pretensions, will starve to death as its tax revenues decline."
To be fair, Davidson and Rees-Mogg do admit to not being sooth-sayers, to also having got things wrong in previous books, and are not racist or sizeist: In the near-future they imagine that anyone, of any colour or size can make it in the new cyber (read: tax-free) economy. So that's a huge fillip for any oversized, relationship-challenged spiv sitting in front of a computer screen moving money about.
I think the title is clever, the sovereign individual. It means being independent, it means being in control, and it is an old high value coin all at the same time.
But see who they included with a special mention in their list of "oppressed" high-value sovereign individuals? Mr Osama Bin Laden himself, indeed... To prove the point that governments will use violence to go after newly-liberated "Sovereign Individuals" they mention the poor "exiled Saudi millionaire, Osama Bin Laden" who "became the first person in history to have his satellite phone targeted for attack by cruise missiles". Bad, oppressive government! Remember this is 1997... I bet they regretted this paragraph later on (see p21).
Of course, whilst the authors applaud the ability of rich individuals to go global to avoid the clutches of national Inland Revenues, they are hell-bent against a global government, or global cooperation by nation states to go after them! That would be so unfair!
In short this is a book that likes to pretend it is a philosophical standard-bearer for oppression fighting individuals, but it is in fact a spiv's manifesto, an apologia for rich tax dodgers without empathy for the rest of their fellow citizens. If you think about opening up a shell company or a trust fund in a tax haven, but feel a little bit guilty, you could read this book and sleep a little bit better, after all you are really a freedom fighter....

[Taylor Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book two years ago during the 2016 election. At the time, it was getting coverage in the Twitterverse for being both a good explanation for the resurgence of nationalist and populist ideologies, as well as the book that predicted Bitcoin (in 1997!).

I re-read it more thoroughly and got a lot more out of it having thought more about bitcoin and cryptocurrency more broadly in the intervening two years.

The authors look at the logic of the information age and forecast how we will see society change over the coming decades.

To hard sell it: It’s a dense read and can come off as (read: is) a paean to libertarianism if that’s not your thing. Regardless, the authors got a lot right in terms of understanding the logic of the technology and it’s hard to think of a book that has more shaped my thinking about where the world is heading over the coming decades.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Update 6/29/24
This is a fantasy book about the disappearing nation state and a self-governing populace. These theories don’t hold up in the real world. People still are still bound by strong nation states and strong, coherent, competent leaders and leadership. That’s the key word—LEADERSHIP. We’ve seen the destruction that a total lack of leadership has caused over the last 3.5 years in America, like rambunctious kids on a school yard without any adult supervision around. Total disaster.

And which countries are getting stronger and more nationalistic by the minute—with greater respect on the world stage? Those countries are Singapore, Japan, etc.

The political scientist who Lee Kaun Yew of Singapore subscribed to, Joseph Nye, predicted a rise of the East against the West on the global scale. Or more of a “return” as he calls it. His book the Future Of Power talks about it in depth, and is on my to-read list.

Nye is a much stronger thinker than the two authors of this Silicon Valley tech dystopia book. Just look at San Francisco—where people poop publicly and shoot drugs into their arms on the streets—to see the effects of the theories presented in this book, as a cautionary tale.

Original Review 2019
Kudos to the publisher for finally making this available as an audiobook. I couldn’t imagine a title more suited to this format. The new 2020 preface by Peter Thiel is short but good. This book is a real eye-opener (or “red pill” if you prefer). The authors would be easily dismissed as crazed conspiracy theorists or fear-mongers, if it weren’t for the fact that so many of their predictions have come true since the last two decades that the book was published.

They managed to predict (with alarming accuracy) everything from Bitcoin, e-commerce/Amazon, video chat, the widening effects of globalization, the gig economy (brought on by the microprocessing revolution), the ballooning U.S. college loan debt bubble, to the surprise mainstream popularity of Jordan Peterson and Trump.

Explains the history and evolution of human power balance, conflict, and war – all the way from the caveman days until the present day Information Age. It then proceeds to forecast where societies are likely to be headed in the future, and does it in an OCD-level of detail. It’s worth noting that the "MTV generation" as described by the book has since been replaced by the "social media generation,” which has had exponentially greater cultural influence worldwide.

I haven’t read Sapiens or Homo Deus, but I imagine both were heavily inspired by this book. Yuval Harari just recently gave an insightful talk at Davos: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/0...

[Manu · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books is The Moral Animal. It does a great job of explaining the connection between the mental organs and behaviour, and does justice to the explanatory line on its cover - "why we are the way we are". I liked it a lot because it did a great job of helping me understand the reasons behind my mindset, relationships and interactions with the world at large. While that book helped me understand myself, this one helped me understand the world much better.
Considering that it was published in 1997, this is as much a prediction machine as it is a brilliant book. It took at least till the middle of the last decade for even the internet to manifest itself in the form we are now familiar with. Therefore, accurately predicting the rise of e-commerce and cryptocurrency (referred to as cyber currency) is a feat in itself. The projections are not just in the field of business but cover social, economical, societal, political and even moral aspects as well. For instance, the rise of nationalism, filter bubbles, the twist in increasing income disparity (from between nations to within nations) because of lack of access are all themes that are being played out now.
But as with the other book I mentioned, the admiration for this one too is largely because of the way the 'why' has been thought through and explained. From quickly using timeframes of 500 years to show shifts (and reasons) from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to industrial eras, to drawing parallels between the destruction of the Church's monopoly and the future of the nation state, the book shows patterns and cycles and more importantly, the common forces that have been shaping the world. In the current shift, it explains how the very factors that drove both geopolitics and business in the industrial age will now work against them in the information age. The title refers to the rise of the individual and his/her sovereignty in the scheme of things as monopolies capitulate and he/she becomes less citizen and more consumer of even things like taxation!
I really liked the flow of the book and the largely sequential narrative that drives home the point of why the events and themes that the authors predict are likely to happen. The articulation is top notch and yet, very accessible. In the end, it even gives a bit of a how-to guide in case one believes in the conclusions.
A fantastic read if one is even remotely interested in the system of the world.
P.S. I must admit to a little bias since the book validates one of my favourite hypotheses - the fall of the nation state and its trappings like patriotism!

[Fellow · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this boook after almost 25 years i'm suprised not by how many things they got wrong (quite a lot) or how many of them were completely trivial (Y2K bug!) but how many they got so right. I've reached for it because Peter Thiel said that it influenced him greatly when he was working on paypal. After reading it i see that it influenced him to do many things in crypto, longjevity, taxes and structuring his affairs in a certain way as well.

Awesome book. Very meta and libertarian.

[Thiago Marzagão · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book's most important prediction hasn't materialized. In the end the state found a way to tax online businesses, so the big transition to a stateless society hasn't happened. The authors make a big deal of encryption. And yet we still pay taxes in 2021, even though our online purchases and online banking are all based on encrypted communication. Bummer.

Reading this 1997 book in 2021, it's tempting to think that blockchain will change things - that *now* the internet will finally be decentralized, economic activity will be untaxable, and the state will collapse. Maybe this book wasn't wrong, just early? But that's like being a marxist who sees every financial crisis as *the* ultimate crisis of capitalism. The state has adapted to disruptive technologies before - even to encryption -, it might very well adapt to blockchain and to quantum computing and to whatever comes next.

Other predictions have materialized though. The part about "cybercash" is essentially about Bitcoin - except that it predates Bitcoin by eleven years. The authors talk about how "cybercash" will make it harder for states to tax through inflation, and it is precisely in countries that have seen inflation rise in the 2010s, like Argentina and Venezuela, that Bitcoin has been most popular.

It's also hard not to think of Estonia's e-residency program, created in 2014, when the authors predict small nations competing for citizens, and that such competition wouldn't necessarily involve immigration. And it's impossible not to think about Amazon Turk and Upwork when the authors talk about technology will accelerate the transition from jobs to project-specific work - a post-Coasean economy.

Also, the authors anticipate the hordes of humanities majors and journalists with no no marketable skills who have turned against technology and capitalism:

“The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, underachievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility.”

Relatedly, the authors correctly predict the multiplication of self-declared (and more or less officially recognized) "oppressed" categories. And they offer a neat theory about it: "We see the growth of victimization as mainly an attempt to buy social peace by not only widening membership in the meritocracy as [Christopher] Lash argues, but also by reconstituting the rationalizations for income redistribution."

Fake news and echo chambers are also there: "you'll even be able to order a nightly news report that simulates the news you would like to hear. [...] You'll see any story you wish, true or false, unfold on your television/computer".

It's also great to be reminded of how absurd it is to consider "fair" that "different persons should pay wildly different amounts for the services of government". Why should someone with an income of US$ 2X pay twice as much tax than someone with an income of US$ X? If anything policing wealthier neighborhoods is *cheaper* than policing poorer neighborhoods. In fact the lower your income the more likely you will use up *more* state resources, so you should pay more taxes, not less.

Finally, every now and then it's good to be reminded that our faith in democracy is no less ludicrous than a medieval peasant's faith in the Church. The authors do a good job drawing parallels between the religious myths of 1000 years ago and the civic myths of today. The state is nothing more than the stationary bandit of Mancur Olson's "Power and Prosperity" - but the mythology around the state is strong and it's easy to forget that we're all serfs.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the one hand their predictions are beyond incredible - it was 1997 and they were quite accurately calling the kind of populism that led to Trump as well as the app based gig economy that was not even imagined at the time ("future" predictions include decentralized finance and cybermoney) - on the other for a couple of men who're able to see so well into the future they definitely want to take a lot of the past with them. I'm torn on rating this - it's a brilliant picture of not only what tech was going to do (and has done) since 1997 but their projections for the future are right now happening in front of our eyes with web3. Then their worldview...it's some sort of elitist Randian libertarian mess that takes the humanity out of people and treats everyone as nodes. You know how it is - social factors, discrimination, racism, complexities of gender issues, these are all concocted categories as is history really. None of it matters to the present - particularly NOT when you're referring to justice. That's simply a money grab. No no, everything can be reduced to the market, and the market is god, the market decides all. That's fantastic when the market's rigged in your direction isn't it? My position would be that those social elements do actually matter (funny that) and not acknowledging them corrupts any sort of "fairness" you hope to obtain from your cold clinical vision of the "market".

There's no denying the changes they're talking about will happen - they are right now. And this might shock but some of their ideas are actually attractive if you ARE dealing simply with nodes. Which is more and more how governance will begin to look. One way or another our identity in the digital world will matter to a greater degree. In that sphere, we are all nodes and we won't be face to face with anything that could bias us in a particular direction (race, gender, age, etc) Yet there's a settling of accounts to be had - they allude to much of it here from the perspective of those with the most to lose.

This is a challenging read as it's brilliant but cold, lacking of empathy and clinical yet highly accurate. So take the positive and leave whatever is negative. The gift here is some serious insight as to what the next decade or two might hold - so take that along with their disregard for social issues as a perfect picture of the challenges facing us in a world that will change faster than many of us can fathom.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Equal parts history and prophecy, The Sovereign Individual is one of the most engaging books I’ve ever read. The reader doesn’t need to agree with all of the conclusions in order to get a lot out of it. This is a thinking person’s book and only those that want to be challenged will enjoy it - similar to Antifragile or Reality Transurfing. The authors predicted a rise in nationalism (the type leading to Brexit and Trump) before the new millennium—in 1997–writing, “Politicians willing to cater to the insecurities of those whose relative talents fall well down on Ammon’s turnip will come noisily to the fore in almost every country.” They also foresaw cryptocurrencies, writing “As cybercommerce begins, it will inevitably lead to cybermoney [which] will consist of encrypted sequences of multihundred-digit prime numbers...It will also be divisible into the tiniest fraction of value. It will be tradable at a keystroke in a multitrillion-dollar wholesale market without borders.” Mind you this was written a decade before Satoshi’s paper which was a decade before bitcoin’s prevalence. Ultimately, the authors believe these forces will lead the winners of the Information Age to form “devolved microstates hosting Sovereign Individuals” similar to the ones fictionalized in Malka Older’s Infomocracy (which I now want to re-read). The authors conclude by advocating for “traditional liberal education”: “If you teach yourself how to solve problems...you will find problems in need of solving [and] those who would benefit from solutions of their problems will pay you handsomely to effect them.”

In the authors own words: “The argument of this book is that the increased capacity of individuals to protect their transactions and their assets from predatory taxation implies a decline in the redistribution of resources, along with less centralized social control, less regulation and regimentation, and, ultimately, devolution of territory.”

[Denis Vasilev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Манифест и исследование процесса денационализации человека. Гениально для книги 1997 года. Понятно что пальцем в небо, но описан вирус, призванный остановить свободное передвижение людей по миру, опасное для поддержания мифов национальных государств. Описано также и возможное движение за виктимизацию все более широких групп населения. Многое из описанного Харари есть во вполне четком изложении здесь. Из минусов - можно смело убирать все, касающееся текущей политической повестки - Клинтон, Коль и тп. Истрические экскурсы интересны, но призваны доказать в основном точку зрения авторов. Недостаток критических взглядов и логики. Рекомендую всем интересующимся вопросами будущего мироустройства, без этой книги понимание не будет полным. Читал по рекомендации Равиканта

[ScienceOfSuccess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unexpected gem. A lot of interesting information, things that make you think. All well put together, I will reread it for sure because this was quite a big one.

[Kurt · Rating 2 out of 5]

A jumbled mess of a book. It's written by two financial advisors posing as armchair historians. The book is loosely strung together by short paragraphs, each with their own title. The only parts worth reading are the sections on cybermoney.

They actually advocate moving your money to offshore tax havens in Bermuda and give you the name of the service to contact. Lots of cringey Bible references and quotes.

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall, I was quite disappointed with this book.

The book, written in the late 90s, added a new preface with the new edition. The book boldly predicts the demise of the nation-state, and that the elites will flock to smaller, no tax havens. Their prime example: Hong Kong. Obviously the aggressive nation-state of China devoured any semblance of the independence and unique role for Hong Kong in the upcoming future. So just with the preface, this book seemed to potent some unrealistic notions…


Methodology: the authors repeatedly cite Marxist (materialist) interpretation of history, (citing historians such as Eric Hobsbawm) and Benedict Anderson, who wrote extensively about nationalism. They seem keen on noting different technological/larbor market shifts throughout history (standard Marxist lens), yet they somehow seem to ignore their purportedly wonderful conclusion: that 99%+ of the population will be economically unproductive as they are tied to the land/nation and won’t be as mobile as the emerging intellectual elites. Generally, a Marxist lens would tip you off that that is not a good result. The authors’ conclusion is basically to say, “sucks to be you, 99%ers, I’m going to fly off to my tax haven and use encrypted bank funds and just leave.” They really have a fetish with the notion that your funds will be encrypted, so they will have the freedom of movement and can relocate as they choose. I kept thinking of my “superior” cryptographic knowledge over the authors: a $5 wrench works pretty well. If you have those teeming masses and they grab you, I don’t care what encryption you have, a threat to wack you with a wrench is a pretty good decryption method. They seemed blissfuly ignorant of the danger of multitudes of angry and displaced people. As for citing Benedict Anderson, the authors talk about the rise of the nation-state and how it was extremely beneficial for the leaders at that time (early modern period), yet they completely ignored why the masses so enthusiastically embraced the concept of nationalism. They only seem to be concerned with the opinion of a very small sliver of society, and simply ignore what the rest of society will probably do to that tiny sliver if/when things get bad.

It displayed an astonishingly bad appreciation of human nature (both on an individual and societal basis), and I basically had to hate-read it to finish the book.

[Sheldon · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may be the worst book I have ever read. From the beginning, I thought that there was a good chance that many of the predictions of the book would not have aged well. But from the outsized expectation that Y2K would disrupt global systems (it didnt) to a surge of expatriation from high tax countries, this book assumes that the information age will inspire some kind of radical individualism that seems unfounded by much of human history. However, it is the subtle racism that makes this book a regretful experience for me.

"Groups that feel aggrieved over past discrimination are unlikely to quickly relinquish their apparently valuable status as victims simply because their claims on society become less justified or harder to enforce. They will continue to press their claims until evidence in the local environment leaves no doubt that they will no longer be rewarded.

The growth of sociopathic behavior among Afro-Americans and Afro-Canadians tells you that. It says that there is little balance between black anger and a realistic appraisal of the extent to which black problems are self-inflicted consequences of antisocial behavior. Black anger has risen even as black lifestyles have grown more dysfunctional."

As if this kind of insulting generalization was not bad enough, when you conclude your book with an ad for your consulting firm, it kind of weakens the credibility of your broader analysis. While, I could not find much in this book of value, I do think the book inadvertently demonstrates the thinking of the uber-rich, who increasingly become disassociated with society. This book offers a thinly veiled intellectual justification for that dissociation while feeding the myth that their success is completely independent of the societal structures that support them. That this book is still cited by more contemporary thinkers is evidence of the zombie-like character of terrible ideas.

[Snorre Lothar von Gohren Edwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It starts rough in talking about Y2K bug and what might happen. We are in 2021, that is old shit. So one feels this is a really old book. After the chapter(s) about Y2K they start talking about the future which can be very interessting and its fun to hear what they have been able to talk about in 1999.

Its fun to hear how much they are potentially missing on. Speech to text was something they really thought would boom. But that was a swing and miss for now. It is coming slowly, but taking some time to really take off.

They did talk a lot about governments and digital economy. That globalization is happening and governments will lose some of its power. This is partly happening with crypto and SSI, but not to the extent being told in this book, yet.

There is a lot of interesting thought experiments they are coming with during the book which is why I kept with it, but it does feel outdated to listen to visionary thoughts that is 20 years old.

I would love a similar book, published this year, or last year.

So if anyone has any good and similar books for today, let me know.

PS: I do wish I had read this book in 2000, and that i believed much of it. Then it would have been much easier to get into cryptocurrency in early 2008

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Sovereign Individual is incredibly prescient for a book written in 1997. Had I read this book in its year of publication, I probably would have dismissed it as an alarmist-elitist rant. But reading it after two decades since its publication, I am quite surprised how accurate many of its prediction are. The authors rightly predicted the role of cyber economy, crypto-currencies, income disparity, automation of low skilled jobs, rise of nationalism & extreme right-wing groups across the globe, rise of neo-luddites and the role of silicon valley entrepreneurs. Although many other events predicted in the book haven't happened yet, I am inclined to agree with most of their views. The main thesis of the book is that, in the twenty-first century, citizens will be more of a customer to governments and governments will act more as a service provider than a political institution. A thought provoking read. Highly recommended

[Terry Vogelaar · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a terrible book, describing a dystopian future in which individuals become sovereign like countries are. They become exempt from taxation because they are no longer citizens of a particular country. Good for them, I guess? Except that all others remain tax-payers in the collapsing nation states. In other words: there will be an elite upper-class that ignore any rules or obligations, while the rest of the population can starve for all they care. It creates a caste system with untouchable overlords and servants. It generally boils down to: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Truly dystopian! Yet the book seems to promote the idea as an opportunity – not a warning.

The book starts with the Y2K-bug. As it is written before the year 2000, the writers feared the disruption such a bug could bring. To me, this clearly illustrates how the writers are fascinated by technology without understanding the mere basics of it. Here's the deal. Back in the day, the assumption was that computers stored dates without explicitly mentioning the century. And these systems would crash when going from 31-12-99 to 01-01-00. But here's the thing: computers would need at least 6 bytes to store a date like that. In reality, computer systems simply count the days since January 1st, 1970 in a "double" (a numeric storage unit using only use 2 bytes, meaning: it can count up to 65536 which might become a problem in the year 2149). Programmers rather accepted the pay check for pretending to fix the non-existing problem, than to explain to their incompetent bosses/clients that there never was a Y2K-problem to fix. This techno-horniness without true technical understanding continues throughout the book. It uses a ridiculous amount of words to disguise their cluelessness.

We are introduced to the idea of becoming clients of a country, and only paying tax for what we as clients think their services are worth. And since the richest people are, according to the authors, the highest contributors to taxation, they have the right to set the rules. Dumb dumb dumb. When they choose to pay less, they no longer contribute the most, and immediately lose that privilege.

The sad truth is that tax evasion already is a widespread problem that gives multinationals an unfair disadvantage over their smaller competitors. This impedes progress as capitalism relies on a level playing field. If smaller competitors can't compete with the non-tax-paying market-leaders, innovation simply stops. If we all pay our fair share, we all pay a bit less. That's why I believe the UN should set taxation laws, explicitly aiming at closing the loopholes and taxation differences between countries. We all dislike paying tax, but if there's one thing worse, it is knowing that some get away with paying nothing.

The book also predicts that every nation state with multiple official languages will fall first. It sees English as the de-facto language of the internet, which happens to be the native tongue of the authors. To me, this implies that the writers don’t have equality on their mind. It poses a severe disadvantage for everyone who doesn’t speak English, and disproportionately benefits native speakers. It ignores the simple fact that English became the most dominant language because of colonialism and power abuse. Don't get me wrong: I love the English language. But I hate the inequality it creates, and the colonialism that made it so dominant.

The book has the false assumption that those who pay the least, get the most, and those who pay the most, get the least. It only sees government spending as social security and benefits for the poor. This is incorrect. Higher incomes tend to use the infrastructure much more often. Rich people buy more, they drive more, etc. Especially flying seems to be directly correlated to wealth. And especially flying is exempt from many taxation laws.

The authors also claim that the witch trials might not have been completely unjustified, clearly illustrating how patriarchal and ill informed they are about the past, present and future. Out of desperation those women might have “cursed” gullible people, who paid to lift the curse and end the bad luck they encountered. So while they might have been innocent of witchcraft, they likely were guilty of extortion. Well, if extortion is a high enough crime to be burned alive, I’ve got bad news for those who wish to become sovereign individuals, because they in fact try to extort the nation they don’t want to pay tax to.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors have a tendency to belabor the point and over-explain even the simplest concepts. As a result, this is an incredibly dry read that would have benefited from a more empowered editor. That said, there is no denying just how prescient The Sovereign Individual is. It is 2020 as I write this, some 24 years after publication, and many predictions that no doubt sounded absurd in 1996 have come true: the gig economy, telework, social media filter bubbles, smart contracts, and even cryptocurrency. The most profound predictions of the book have yet to materialize, but seem ever more plausible.

The premise of The Sovereign Individual is that increasing technology-enabled disruptions to the economy will ultimately weaken the power of the state vis-a-vis its citizens, enabling individuals to (eventually) lead sovereign, post-national lives. The defanged state will no longer be able to charge what it wishes (in taxes) to a captive citizenry; instead, it will compete with other states to provide services at the lowest possible cost (otherwise workers and companies will simply conduct business in a competing jurisdiction). This "fourth stage" of human civilization, brought about by the Information Revolution, will lead to the decline of the nation-state, just as the advent of the printing press and the Gunpowder Revolution contributed to the decline of the Catholic Church as a state power.

While many of the technological disruptions predicted by The Sovereign Individual have materialized, their ultimate collective impact on the nation-state remains to be seen. As Peter Thiel notes in the preface, the rise of China was one significant oversight on the part of the authors. The Chinese Communist Party's use of mass surveillance, internet censorship, and social credit scores demonstrates that technology can also be used to empower the state at the expense of the individual. In fact, this nationalist, authoritarian model is on the rise globally (e.g. Turkey). To their credit, the authors do predict that nationalism — and the skepticism of globalization, immigration, and free trade that it entails — will rise in the interim. These repressive uses of technology are, no doubt, a direct response to the threat technology poses to the nation-state. Perhaps they are the death throes of a dying model. Time will tell.

All things considered, this is a work of incredible foresight, one that has many lessons — and words of warning — that are still worth heeding today.

[Dagmar Urb · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most difficult book I've read in a long time. But my low rating comes from the fact that while I got some new ideas from this book (like nation states might come to an end), I don't agree with the main thesis that nation states are mainly there to protect people from violence.

I believe that all people, both rich and poor, benefit if the general population around them is educated and healthy. This paves way to a more secure society, where people can take care of themselves, gather property that is safe, which in turn fuels the economy, where both owners and consumers of businesses benefit. On top of that, the book did not touch the point that nation states fund culture that would otherwise perish. While not economically viable, culture enriches the lives of such sovereign individuals beyond the price tag that we might attach to it. So in this sense I don't agree that all high net wort ppl should escape to tax havens and fend for themselves.

It was interesting to read sth 25 years old and full of sharp points. But as my rating shows, I don't recommend this book.

[Martin Ridgway · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you want to know what the anti-democratic super-rich think of the rest of us, read this. The son of the second author is using this as a playbook as we speak?

[Sebastian · Rating 3 out of 5]

4/2020:
Timely for sure and recommended reading for those who haven't in a time of COVID. But I searched for a coherent framework for a second time and still didn't find it. "Literary gumbo," indeed.

1/2018:
In a sprawling tangle of arguments, Davidson and Rees-Mogg construct a view of why nation states came into existence, why they are failing (1997), and the world and systems of human organization that will replace them.

The essence of the argument is something like this:
(A) Starting with the emergence of gunpowder weapons, there came tremendous advantages to scale in a group of humans' ability to enact violence and protect against it. Your number of persons with guns had better exceed the number of persons with guns in your enemy's army, otherwise all of your farms are as good as plundered. Hence the rise of the nation-state and associated national myths in the 18th and 19th centuries. And in a couple of good examples they point out just how absurd some of these consolidations and agglomerations were e.g. langues d'oil and Occitan speakers smushed into a single "French" state. (My own addition - even contemporaries seemed to have this realization, see Metternich on Italy: "The word 'Italy' is a geographical expression, a description which is useful shorthand, but has none of the political significance the efforts of the revolutionary ideologues try to put on it")

(B) In our Information Age, highly empowered individuals and small groups displace the value of nation-states' scaled armies. No number of aircraft carriers could have saved us from 9/11 (again, the book was written in '97, this is my own gloss). A group of hackers or even a single hacker could be far more deadly or destructive than any standing army. The authors claim on several occasions that Microsoft could be more dangerous than 90% of nation states.

(C) Nation states and their ability to organize large standing armies are thus no longer providing a valuable, irreplaceable service to their constituents. And the ramifications are manifold. Highly-talented individuals will seek ways of escaping the state or effectively become mobile "shoppers" between states in order to escape extortive taxation that doesn't return a useful thing to the payer. They'll accumulate wealth in cryptocurrencies outside the reach of government and immune from inflation. Masses of unskilled humans dependent upon state welfare will lose benefits as the state withers. Inequality will grow and there will probably be violence that comes with it. Humans will at long last be free. Fin.

There are a lot of compelling arguments in The Sovereign Individual that the above doesn't encapsulate. The book really does not stick to a clearly rendered line of reasoning and a form to match it - it's literary gumbo. And beyond that I think that (perhaps unfortunately) some of the best bits are in these edge arguments - e.g. that the internet will facilitate highly individualized news feeds; fake news; the rise of cryptocurrencies; digital nomadry - which proved to be highly prescient. There is definitely some kernel of truth here.

But I think that the deductive approach employed here also fails to miss some things that would be obvious if we rendered real scenarios on top of abstractions:
- We still manufacture a lot of physical things in this world and I'm not sure that such a huge proportion of economic activity will necessarily exist in cyberspace.
- I don't think that people are quite so mercenary and are so willing to move around from geography to geography on whims.
- Not sure how motivated highly-skilled individuals will be to achieve tax savings at the expense of dismantling e.g. Medicaid.

It's ultimately thought-provoking, and I don't regret reading this. The fundamental point - that the nation state has less purchase on the individual than ever before - is probably right.

[Nikhil Thota · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg (we'll call them D&RM) is just a year younger than I am — it was first published in 1997. D&RM display an eerie clairvoyance in their previous book The Great Reckoning, which analyzed the pending collapse of the Soviet Union and was published mere weeks before an attempted coup against Gorbachev. The Sovereign Individual analyzes the transition to the Information Age and predicts the following trends with a comparable eeriness: (1) the advent of decentralized, cryptographically secure currencies, (2) an acceleration of nationalist & populist ideologies fanned by the flames of (3) working-class citizens losing employment due to automation, and many, many more.

The crux of these predictions is the idea that the Information Revolution will transform us from citizens to customers of governments. What does that really mean — aren't we both customers and citizens of our governments? The reality is that that it's more of a spectrum with individuals veering further towards the customer end as they realize that they are putting more into the system than they are getting out of it.

Since the advent of society itself, organizing bodies have existed to preserve some sort of order by capturing a monopoly on violence. This basically means that as a citizen, you pay the government taxes and they protect you from harm. At least, that's the idea. In today's world, this relationship is deteriorating as a small but growing class of the informational elite, as D&RM call them, no longer see the value in this rather parasocial exchange. In many western countries, this group is generating the majority of the wealth and is being forced to subsidize a bloated bureaucracy and the corresponding welfare state.

All of this is to say that as the centrifugal forces of technology & autonomy (increasing) and violence (decreasing) play out, the role of the state will become more and more questionable. Only time will tell if the nation-state will fall D&RM predict, or if it will metastasize into a new shape unlike anything we've ever seen.

D&RM generally fail to provide any answers for the negative externalities of the changes they predict. Mostly, they tell the few that are cut out to be Sovereign Individuals to avoid taxes like the plague and to embrace self-reliance, technology, and learning as a way of life. That's all fine and dandy, but what about the societal loss of community and higher purpose from the death of religion, citizenship, and conventional corporations?

The Sovereign Individual has deeply influenced many thinkers that I respect, and I can see why. I don't agree with a some of the values presented in this book, nor do I jive with the 'elites will inherit the earth' mentality. However, I nonetheless read intently and took notes as if I was peering into an alien broadcast from another galaxy. I highly recommend this for a worldview-shattering read that will stretch your understanding of what a society actually is.

[Evan Deaubl · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made it through two chapters before I just had to write it off. The language was needlessly complicated, making it a slog to read through, and the tone of the book came off as condescending. It had the effect of souring my opinion of their ideas, to which I was initially sympathetic before I started reading.

The premise seems to be that with the advent of powerful computers and global networks, that we'll be able to throw the yokes of the "nanny state" (their term) off our necks. This forgets the fact that many of the corporations that build these computers and run these networks are systems as big and complex as small nations themselves. You seem to be trading one master for another (or several), but the authors don't seem to be worried about that.

As far as its prescience, it's a mixed bag. There was the occasional hard prediction that they got right, but about as many that they got wrong. They also devoted pages to the impending Y2K "crisis" that ended up being almost nothing.

I have a feeling there have been other books written in the 20 years since that do a better job covering these ideas.

[John Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of the time I read books that have interesting perspectives but little to pragmatic advise. Every so often I read a book that has amazing insight and strategy about details but very little comprehension of larger trends. "The Sovereign Individual" has both a grand perspective and detailed steps to take in order to profit from the transition that our world is going through.

Written in 1997 this work examines how information technology will reshape the world over the coming decades. It makes many bold predictions about the death of the nation-state and the change in economics to come. If so many of its predictions were not proven over the last decade, I would dismiss the other predictions as the work of deluded minds. History, however, has verified much of Davidson's insights. If you want to read a challenging work, read this one. If you want to have a different understanding of how the world works, then read this book. If you want a better way to approach investing and economics, read this book. You will not be disappointed.

[Julio Alonso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesante y desconcertante a la vez. Por una parte el concepto de superación del estado nación es interesante, por otra es un análisis ultraliberal que basa todo el contrato social en si los servicios recibidos del estado justifican el precio en impuestos oagado por los mayores contribuyentes. Ok no es un buen deal y el estado no gasta eficientemente y es a menudo corrupto, ¿pero que pasa con todo el resto de la población, especialmente los que no son contribuyentes netos? ¿Cómo se independizan ellos del estado?

El hecho de que se escribiera originalmente hace 20 años te deja a veces con la duda de si las cosas en las que patina son porque verlo entonces era difícil o porque simplemente no funcionan.

Buen ejemplo de eso que dice Recuenco de no comprarle todo el pescado a nadie.

[Paul Rosemeyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

The main thing I got out of this is that if you are not already a millionaire, or a "superstar", then you're pretty much f*cked.

Much of the arguments presented seem sound. The disparity between the rich and poor will increase greatly and at a faster rate. The rich will leave high tax sovereign states in favor of low cost alternatives. This will leave the poor to finance government which the poor simply can not do so nation states will fail.

All in all, a very bleak read which may explain why it took me two and a half years to finish reading.

[Alex Fogel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Authors were born on third base but think they’ve hit a triple. They have some really interesting and scary predictions that don’t seem entirely unfounded, and they provide coherent reasoning, but the predictions, like the reasoning, are bring the perspective of the top 1%. They have a blind veneration of wealthy entrepreneurs with no acknowledgement of the employers or consumers who make weaker generation possible. They are disgustingly racist and ableist and demonstrate no interest in living in an equitable world. Selfish pieces of sh**.