Even Though I Haven’t Read It
There is growing buzz about Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which came out this weekend. From what I’ve read by reliable sources, I’m not inclined to purchase it.
But I may be persuaded to read certain portions of it. Tyler Cowen describes the first 80% of the book as the characteristically insightful historical analysis that has made Diamond famous, wherein he:
examines how several past societies — including the Mayans and Easter Island — met their doom. In every studied case deforestation and soil erosion played important roles. This part of the book could have been published on a stand-alone basis with the title How Poor and Backward Societies Suffer From Deforestation and Ill-Defined Property Rights.
We get a hint of this in Diamond’s recent NYT op-ed.
But we also get a glimpse of the less insightful second part of the book. Diamond attempts to extrapolate from history a cautionary tale of current environmental woes. I’m afraid this is a path I’m not going to follow Diamond down.
And not because I think environmental problems are insignificant. I do, but perhaps not in ways Diamond does. As Cafe Hayek accurately teases out, Diamond has stepped into a much larger fued without really acknowledging a substantial opposition. In other words, his thesis is a bit shallow, at least for me. (It might make, on the other hand, a nice introduction to one discourse, as Cowen puts it, “not much above what you would find in a good magazine article.”)
The feud is between two camps. Diamond falls into the neo-Malthusians, carping about overpopulation and resource exhaustion. I tend toward the Cornucopians, championed quite well by Julian Simon and, more recently, Bjorn Lomborg. As I learned in graduate school, there really is no empirical way to say who’s right or wrong; only time will tell. Each side can make a compelling argument for their predictions, but reason alone can only get one so far. My expectations for adding to this debate are high, and I don’t think Collapse can meet them.
And so when I read from Matthew Yglesias that this second half of the book would be, “the more bloggable portion,” I had to wince. No doubt Diamond’s inferior exposition, lacking accuracy and circumspection, will proliferate through common discourse.
3 Responses to “Even Though I Haven’t Read It”
Diamond, while providing good explanations of how things happen, often does a horrible job (when that job is even evident) of trying to discuss WHY things happen. He views human history as a set of scientific tests that he can then develop scientific principles from and attempt predictions based therein. This view suffers greatly in accounting for the HUMAN aspect of history as well as failing to account for the multiple perspectives that history is invariably formed from. To compound the issue, his works seem to be rather apologetic for the horrible decisions of humanity, as he views those decisions as being reliant on material factors and non-variable scientific principles, rather than recognizing the inherently variable and mostly free nature of human decisions and actions.
As for this book, I’ll give it a read and see if he’s presenting anything new in collapse theory, but the line from the editorial where he states that we’re the first society with the opportunity to learn from others’ collapses is patently ridiculous. The theme of societal collapse has been present in almost the entire breadth of recorded history. Whether those writings are acted upon is a whole other story, and that problem remains for our time.
Someone with a mind to read up more on this subject might want to check out a book entitled “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by an author named Tainter. Good read.
Boy, the the last of this book is BAD…see more comments on my blog at http://mildride.blogspot.com
Your comments are very weird.
From what I’ve read by reliable sources, I’m not inclined to purchase it. But I may be persuaded to read certain portions of it.
So not only have you not bought it, you haven’t even read it.
Diamond attempts to extrapolate from history a cautionary tale of current environmental woes. I’m afraid this is a path I’m not going to follow Diamond down. And not because I think environmental problems are insignificant. I do, but perhaps not in ways Diamond does.
Diamond falls into the neo-Malthusians, carping about overpopulation and resource exhaustion. I tend toward the Cornucopians, championed quite well by Julian Simon and, more recently, Bjorn Lomborg.
No doubt Diamond’s inferior exposition, lacking accuracy and circumspection, will proliferate through common discourse.
WTF? Dude. Read first. Critique after. Never do it the other way around.