Diamond points out seven problems lying japan. The list includes finland, japan, germany, and others. It is great in a different way and certainly lacks the all encompassing panoramic of ggs.

Desirably, consulting 12 factors, they guide us to the right direction to get over the crises. Imagine performance measurement and reward allocation in a meritocracy. I'm not sure that he's totally successful in this, or that the framework is actually...  Read More

Diamond sees political polarization, an equivariant decline in political compromise, a decline in voting and social participation, increasing wealth and income inequality. Diamond sees declining socioeconomic mobility and rapidly increasing inequality...  Read More

All progress and all tools of civilization contain shades of opportunity and peril. Invasion and conquest is never a benign process. I am hopeful that reason and science will prevail.

This book, so far is “a snorer”. The entire structure of the book is a setup to lead to a major scolding. Sadder still is the book could have been cut to a third of it's length just by not presenting the same arguments/themes 3 times.

Last 25% is a liberal diatribe of the usual problems with the world. Dictatorship is pretty much a constant it is just timing. Partisan gridlock (fueled by the tea party) is only crises if you think that government has the solutions to the nation’s pr...  Read More

The book has a clear globalist perspective with less than complete or persuasive information to reach his conclusions. Apart from the chapter dedicated to finland, most of what he writes sounds like an aimless listing of generally consented facts with...  Read More

Upheaval is little more than a narrative of the author's impressions. There are no arguments or even a theoretical insight that wraps up the facts researched, instead they only end in prescriptive statements that are based on shallow * of surface know...  Read More

While describing our decline of social capital, he fails to identify postmodern philosophy that has helped spawn this coarseness. Diamond’s biggest omission is his failure to offer realistic suggestions for overcoming our inability to politically comp...  Read More