A Short History of Progress
Ratings6
Average rating3.2
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd over a cliff had made too much. Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century´s runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet. A Short History of Progress argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the inherent dangers, and, with luck, and wisdom, shape its outcome.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
A concise book that doesn't delve deeper into the subject but provides introductory material. However, it didn't offer anything new for me, leaving me somewhat disappointed.
3.5/5
‰ЫПWe have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don‰ЫЄt do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.‰Ыќ Yeehaw!
An excellent short history to the limits to the complexity of civilizations. Similar too, but tighter than, Jared Diamond's Collapse.
