Complexity & Catastrophe – Page 21 – Public Intelligence Blog

Good Idea Partially Executed

August 11, 2007

Glenn M. Schwartz

The book, an edited work, seeks to address a gap in scholarship, to wit, where others have covered why and how complex societies have collapsed, there is vitually nothing on how some, not all, regenerate. The editors do point out that most collapses are not total, and something is left (see my review of The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) for a more nuanced review of this matter). It fails to go the full distance possible.

The combined authors posit a cycle of growth, collapse, and regeneration between ruralism and local autonomy, and urbanization with centralization of control.

In an excellent but not quite complete summary of the causes of collapse, the editors outline the following:

1. Fragmentation into smaller political entities
2. Partial or complete desertion of urban centers
3. Loss or depletion of centalizing functions
4. Breakdown of regional economic systems
5. Failure of civilization's ideology

They do not mention the latest and best explanation, that the more complex a society becomes, the more expensive it is to make incremental improvements in management, and the unaffordability of the always increasing cost for each always decreasingly effective improvement ultimately leads to implosion (see Collapse as linked above).

They do however mention in passing that large-scale inegalitarian systems tend to collapse over time–they are unsustainable. This tallies nicely with Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People while also contrasting with the literature on the The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization, and so on.

The authors are somewhat narrow in focusing on prior structures of rule, authority, and governability. One puts this book down with the impression it was a first date between a political scientist and an anthropologist, and they fell into psycho-babble as a neutral common ground. See my loaded image, with the full thesis at my web site under my photo/Early Papers.

An isolated but interesting observation on how state control of time and space (e.g. Daylight Savings Time, or in the US the more recent and most unwelcome additional hour of time change) are part of mind control, was worthy of note–just a the power of the state to define crime and insantity leaves us with a The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, legalized corporate greed, and a mendacious Vice President who has committed 25 impeachable offenses and yet carries on with impunity (see Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

The conclusion, in two parts, consists largely of psycho-babble (the first part), and a very fine second part, much more interesting for its applicability to our time, that posits that when a centralized government goes too far in overseas adventurism, this opens the way for the provinces to secede and become autonomous again. I note that we have 27 secessionist movements in the USA, and they are having their second annual meeting in October of this year. I for one feel that there is no one now running, including Ron Paul, that understands that the secessionists, not the “party base” are the ones we should be listening to, for they are the only ones that see clearly that the Republic is no more.

To save the Republic, we must destroy two things and create one thing:

1. Destroy the Democratic and Republican parties (see Running on Empty: Contemplative Spirituality for Overachievers) and
2. Destory the unbound Executive and the abdicated Congress
3. Create a transpartisan ticket that demands electoral reform prior to 2008 and provides both a Sunshine Cabinet with integrated policies announced in advance, and a sustainable balanced budget that eliminates all personal income taxes while taxing the Federal Reserve for local, state, and federal revenues.

We need to make every budget transparent, and to publish every budget in time for citizen participation in the evaluation of every trade-off. We do this, or the United States of America is destroyed, courtesy of Wall Street, the Bush Family, the Saudis, and Dick Cheney.

This is a useful book, but only an elementary start. The authors are all well-positioned to go on now to the next level. See also the various books on surviving the The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

2007/08/092011/10/22

Review: The Collapse of Complex Societies

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Catastrophe

Utterly brilliant work of genius, joins Allott's Health of Nations

August 9, 2007

Joseph Tainter

This is an utterly brilliant stunning work of genius. It begins with a comprehensive review of what appears to be every work in English relative to the topic being considered. The author has done a phenomenal job of both dissecting and then discussed the varied authors contributing to each of the following lists explanations for prior collapse of civilizations (from page 42):

1) Depletion or cessation of a vital resource
2) The establishment of a new resource base
3) The occurrence of some insurmountable catatrosphe
4) Insufficient response to circumstance
5) Other complex societies
6) Intruders
7) Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior
8) Social dysfunction
9) Mystical factors
10) Chance concatenation of events
11) Economic factors

This book is exceptionally well organized, well presented, and well spoken. The complex discussion is delivered in easy to read and absorb constructs. After a review and elegant dismissal of all of the prevailing theories, the author leads us into his approach by positing the collapse of civiliazations as resulting from the collapse of the larger systemic process for processing information to effect the increasingly complicated system of systems. In the author's words, at some point the cost of micro-managing a complex system is so high, and yields such poor returns on investment, that the natural and beneficial response of the whole is to collapse into more readily sustainable and resilience smaller parts.

I am reminded of Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, in which he discusses how simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and correct; sophisticated systems have multiple points of failure that interact in largely unforeseen ways and are very difficult to diagnose and correct; and the finally, Earth and Humanity, a system of systems so complex that “Intelligent Design” is failing us, and a natural Darwinian selection is kicking in.

For America to have 27 robust secessionist movements and a plethora of “Home Rule” regimes springing up local levels, while the Bush-Cheney regime runs the nation into bankruptcy with their elective war in Iraq that has cost half a trillion dollars that could have been better used to restore our failing infrastructure and our failed schools, tells us all we need to know: the federal government has collapsed, and the Republic as a whole is next absent draconian public engagement and mandated electoral reform prior to 2008.

The author concludes that “complexity is a problem-solving strategy” and that when it fails to solve the high-level threats or challenges, then the society collapses so that smaller and more resilient parts might be more innovative and adaptive, and hence survive better without the burden of inept “guidance” from above.

In the context of this book, the 27 secessionist movements in America are clearly what the author calls “resistance” to the now unaffordable higher costs and lower results of the federal mismanagement of the nation, best depicted by the grotesquely inept and even inhuman lack of effectiveness with respect to New Orleans and the Katrina hurricane.

There are gems throughout the work, which joins that of Philip Allott, also of Cambridge, who in his The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State suggested that the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge mistake, and we should have elevated and recognized peoples instead of sovereign states, as the latter have been too easily corrupted into aided the global elite to loot every commonwealth. A few that I noted:

Military expenditures and arms races suck the health out of nations. See my review of The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs), a book in which one author discusses the consequences of allowing the military to dominate what passes for strategy in the budget, while the politicians pander to domestic interests bereft of any grasp of international reality, and the intellectuals posit solutions that have no political, military, or overall holistic integration of all the sources of national power over time and space. The books on War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It and The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy, 1898-2005 are mounting in influence today.

The author notes that the physics of time and space make an extended dominance of distant cultures and places impossible when relying solely on the force of arms. I am of course reminding of Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People as well as Derek Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World.

The author notes that no strategy can be considered viable that steals from the future to support the present. This observation is in perfect harmony will all that has been done by Herman Daly in Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications and Paul Hawkins in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, among other works.

Collapse is cultural, systemic, a collapse of process, not of any discrete event, institution, or location. The information processing becomes impossible for a complex system that does not adapt from an industrial-era model of command and control to an information era model of distributed localized resilience. I think of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) and The The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back on the one hand, and the varied books on the “wealth of knowledge,” wealth of networks.

Although others including myself in my US Institute of Peace paper on virtual diplomacy have expressed concern over the growing gap between people with power and people with knowledge, this author has provided us with what may well be the most erudite focused diagnosis of the coming collapse of the West, a lumbering industrial era mammoth whose small elite brain cannot compete with the sleeker Third World “tigers” that are using leap-ahead technologies to avoid our legacy of ashes.

In my view, the West can be saved only if America achieves electoral reform and restores the constitution, with a draconian reduction of federalism and the federal budget, while restoring to the states all of the powers not explicitly assigned to the three branches. Open Carry, Open Spectrum, all of the “opens” must prevail against the rule of secrecy and the use of scarcity to impoverish rather than enrich what should be “seven billion billionaires (forthcoming from Medard Gabel).”

This is a righteous book. I have loaded two images from my own earlier work (at my web site under the photo in Early Papers) and am now working on War and Peace in the Digital Era. This book here is Ref A.

2007/07/072009/10/16

Review: Dunces of Doomsday–10 Blunders That Gave Rise to Radical Islam, Terrorist Regimes, And the Threat of an American Hiroshima

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad

Citizen's Primer on Failure of Government & Parties

July 7, 2007

Paul L. Williams

I like the reviews I see here, so rather than repeat them I will simply say that I know Paul Williams, his first book, Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You is first class, and both that book and this book are on my list of top 40 books for Earth Threat #9: Terrorism.

It should trouble all Americans that the US Government, under the failed congress (see The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy) and Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders), parties (see Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It), and Dick Cheney (see Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, my long review itemizes the 23 high crimes and misdemeanors documented by the book), is focusing on terrorism rather than all ten threats. See my lists on threats, policies, and players.

I have put this book second in my list for terrorism, it is easier to read that Ralph Peters, but both books will make your blood boil. My own two books helpful to the public are available free at OSS.Net, but much more fun if you buy them in book form from Amazon:

The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

2007/02/262009/12/04

Review: Collapse–How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe

Solid, specific, provocative, and useful call to action,

February 26, 2007

Jared Diamond

Let's get a couple of things straight before I enter my review:

1) There is no debate on this issue. There are the honest folk with the facts on their side, and then there are the unethical oil companies (Exxon leading the way) that have adopted the tobacco industry strategy of trying to sow doubt and turn facts into disputable theories, and the intellectual whores who do their bidding for money.

2) What's different today, apart from Al Gore's achieving global effect, is that the public now has a digital memory and digital sense-making. The World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER), under the leadership of Paul Hawkin,Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming is going to do what neither Lester Brown (Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition) nor Lori Wallich (Seattle street demonstrations against WTO) have been able to achieve. It's over. The people have won. See A Power Governments Cannot Suppress The only question now is how soon we liquidate the dictators and corporations that refuse to attend to the people's needs for a sustainable earth.

Here is my review, focusing mostly on specifics that are not in the other reviews.

Published in 2005, this book is more relevant and more useful now that Al Gore has finally impacted on the public consciousness in a big way. Climate change and global warming are now understood by all to be very real and very close to a tipping point.

It is in this context that I am glad I have waited to read this book. The author has been praised by many for combining an understanding of geopolitics with an understanding of environmental causes and effects. Here are a few of the things that stayed with me:

1. Although the High-Level Threat Panel of the United Nations placed Poverty and Infectious Disease above Environmental Degradation, the author points out that Ecocide must now be seen as much more dangerous to the planet as a whole than either disease of proliferation and a nuclear event (which by the sheerest coincidence, Michael Scheuer of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror has just told the NYT will happen soon–but see my review of Paul Williams' Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You for a complete overview).

2. The author has conducted arduous research and lined up a number of case studies to support his five part framework of examining the topic of how societies choose to succeed or fail. They are:

a. Environmental degradation, whether man=made or natural
b. Climate change (as distinct from desertification, deforestation, etc.)
c. Hostile neighbors
d. Less friendly neighbors (loss of support)
e. Societies' responses

3. On this latter point, the one thing we have control over, the author reminds me of the book Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series), when he lists the following factors as causing disaster to turn into catastrophe and collapse:

a. Lack of anticipation
b. Lack of perception once upon us (denial starts here)
c. Impact of a selfish few unobserved or uncontested by the majority
d. Insulated elite not realizing or caring about impacts on the majority
e. Continued refusal, or inability, to solve the challenges (denial continues here)

The author emphasizes that the principal negative of globalization is that it assures a global collapse–there is no longer any insulation from diseases or other ill-effects of a collapse elsewhere.

Following a detailed review of specific past case studies (you can spend the time in the middle of the book, or read all my other reviews for a more diverse overview), the author lists twelve factors challenging all of us today:

1. Destruction of natural habitats
2. Over-fishing to point oceans and rivers do not replenish
3. Loss of diversity (which is essential to balanced complexity)
4. Soil impoverishment (top soil farming blows away the top soil)
5. Peak Oil and declining availability of fossil fuels for the larger population
6. Dramatic decreases in replenishable fresh water (aquifers down 1 meter each year)
7. REDUCTION of solar energy due to climate change. This was the only thing in the book I did not know already. Climate change REDUCES the degree to which solar energy can be harvested. This is HUGE.
8. Toxic chemicals in the ground, water, and atmosphere (see my reviews of the marvelous books, Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy and Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness as well as The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
9. Alien species (in sense of rabbits over-running Australia)
10. Human activities
11. Increased population
12 Increased per capita impact (i.e. an order of magnitude worse than just increased population.

There are two paragraphs that in my view are priceless gifts from the author in this context, and the merit quoting here:

Page 429. “The remaining solution to the tragedy of the commons is for the consumers to recognize their common interests are to design, obey, and enforce prudent harvesting quotas themselves. That is likely to happen only if a whole series of conditions is (sic) met: the consumers form a homogeneous group; they have learned to trust and communicate with each other; they expect to share a common future and to pass on the resources to their heirs; they are capable of and permitted to organize and police themselves; and the boundaries of the resource and of its pool of consumers are well defined.”

Page 487. “The public has the ultimate responsibility” to define the accountability of big business and the justice framework that big business must respect.

The latter extract is part of the author's chapter-length observation that without big business on board, nothing the consumer groups do will matter. This is of course true, and the question is, do we win over big business with boycotts, boycotts, new forms of public corporation, and perhaps (my favorite) the end of corporate personality.

The author ends on a positive note: of all the societies facing collapse, only ours, today, has the opportunity to learn from the past. I would add to this, only ours has the Internet and the dramatic increase of transpartisanship among concerned and informed citizens. We the People can indeed restore the power of the people, and the sensibility of the people, to all that hold in trust for the future of Earth and Humanity.

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2007/01/282009/12/04

Review: The Great Turning–From Empire to Earth Community

6 Star Top 10%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Information Society, Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

People are the new super power–local resilience, global community,

January 28, 2007

David C Korten

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is unquestionably a five-star work of reflection, integration, and focused moral intent. On the other hand, while it introduced a broad “earth-friendly” literature that I was *not* familiar with, it does not “see” a much broader literature that I have absorbed, and so I want to do two things with this review: feature the highlights from this book, and list a number of other works that support and expand on the author's reflections for the greater good of us all.

Early highlights include the continued relevance of Dennis Kucinich and the emerging value of the Case Foundation and Revolution Health as funded by Steve Case, founder of AOL. The author posits early on the choice we have been a great unraveling and a great turning. He describes all our institutions as failing at the same time that we have unlimited potential. He concludes, as have many others, that centralized authority is not working, and suggests that we must confront that which does not work and devise new constructive alternatives (“for every no there must be a yes”).

In the middle of the book he describes the five levels of consciousness as magical, imperial, socialized, cultural, and spirirtual. I would have put socialized ahead of imperial, since the industrial era used schools to socialize us into both factory workers and conscripts for the armed forces. He concludes this section with a commentary on moral autism, which of course reminds us of nakedly amoral Dick Cheney.

The author moves toward a conclusion by pointing out that people are the new super-power, with the Internet and its many new features as the foundation for bringing people together and making people power effective.

A large portion of the middle section is a historical review of America, with its genocidal, slavery, and unilateral militant interventionist nature, and its extreme inequality now, which the literature on revolution clearly identifies (the latter, concentration of wealth) as a precurser to almost inevitable violent revolution).

The book ends with four strategic elements:

1) Awakening of cultural and spiritual consciousness
2) Resistance of the imperial empire's assault on children, families, communities, and nature
3) Form and connect communities of convergence
4) Build a majoritarian political base.

In parting notes he points out that the status of our children is the key indicator of our future, and that today one out of every two children is born into and lives into poverty (one reason why the High Level Threat Panel put poverty above infectuous disease and environmental degradation).

He ends by calling for local living economies at a human scale.

If you have the time to only read one book within the broad literatures of imagination, corporateism, and constructive prospects for the planet, this is probably that book. Below I want to a list quite a few that support this author's thesis, and for which I have provided a summative as well as an evaluative review within these Amazon pages:

The Corporation
WALMART-HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE (DVD/FF/FR-SP-SUB)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

See also:
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
“The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past”
Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems
Deep Economy

There are many more should you wish to explore via my categorized lists, but the above both lend great credence to the author of this single book, and expand considerably on the reflections that he has distilled into this one book.

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2007/01/102009/12/04

Review: The Myth of Progress–Toward a Sustainable Future

Atlases & State of the World, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Disaster Relief, Economics, Science & Politics of Science, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Amazon Page

End of Immoral Capitalism, Rise of Sustainable Societies,

January 10, 2007

Tom Wessels

I pulled this book from my waiting stack after reviewing Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency While all that we do wrong is rooted in corrupt politics such as Dick Cheney represents so well, I wanted to get away from the personalities and focus on the underlying truths of the greatest challenge facing all of us, preserving the planet for future generations.

This thoughtful careful author from New Hampshire has created a really special book, small, readable, and packed with fact (superb footnotes). He gives all due credit to his predecessors in the field–Georgescu-Roegen, Meadows, Dalay, Hawken et al.

He brings out the nuances of complex systems and how our linear reductionist thinking, and our false assumption that technology will resolve our waste creation and earth consumption issues, combine to place all that we love at risk. I was personally surprised to learn that even if we fund 100 water desalination or decontamination plants, and resolve our shortfalls of clean water, that the energy required to do so would result in entropy and further losses.

The author brings up the need for better metrics (see my reviews of “Ecology of Commerce” and “Natural Capitalism” as well as my list on “True Cost” readings. He points out that the GDP does not reflect the non-cash economy or the degree of equality/inequality in the distribution of new wealth. I would add to that the importance of counting prisons and hospitals as negatives rather than positives.

A good portion of the book (a chapter for each) is spent discussion the three fundamentals: the limits to growth; the second law of thermodynamics (entropy); and the nuances of self-organization and what happens when you reduce diversity.

The author lists the attributes of complex systems as being emergent properties that arise from the interactions (i.e. the space between the objects); self-organization, nestedness, and bifurcation into either positive or negative consequences.

The bottom line for the first part of the book is that in complex systems, especially complex systems for which we have a very incomplete and imperfect understanding, “control” is a myth, just as “progress” is a myth if you are consuming your seed corn.

The author excels at a review of the literature and demonstrating the flaws of economic theories that are divorced from reality and the “true cost” of goods and services (e.g. a T-shirt holds 4000 liters of virtual water, a chesseburger 6.5 gallons of fuel).

I have reviewed a number of books on climate change, in this book the author makes the very important point that the annual cost of weather disasters has been steadily increasing, and is the annual hidden “tax” on our reductionist approach to clearing the earth, losing the forests and mashlands, and so on.

He points out that concealing or ignoring true cost does not make it any less true, it simply passes the cost on to future generations. In the same vein he is optemistic in that he believes that if we take positive action now, however small, the benefits of that action as the years scale out, will be enormous.

This is actually an upbeat book for two reasons: first, it makes it crystal clear that the classical economics that have allowed corporations to pilage the world, bribe dictators and other elites, and generally harvest profit at the expense of the commonwealth; and second, it ends on a note of hope, on the belief that we may be approaching a dramatic cultural shift that embraces reciprocal altruism, true cost calculations, equitable wealth distribution, and so on.

He cites other authors but gives very positive insights into public ownership (by stakeholders, not the government), essentially repealing the flawed court-awarded “personality” of corporations, and re-connecting every entity to its land-base and the people it serves. He recommends, and I am buying, David Korten's “Post-Corporate World.” By restoring the populace to the decision process, we stamp down the greed that can flourish in isolation.

The book ends hoping for a cultural shift from consumption to connection. I believe it is coming. Serious games/games for change, fed by real-world real-time content from public intelligence providers including the vast social networks from Wikipedia to MeetOn to the Moral Majority, could great a wonderfully distributed system of informed democratic governance that implements what I call “reality-based budgeting,” budgeting that is transparent, accountable, and balanced.

This is a much more important book than its size and length might suggest. It is beikng read by and was recommended to me by some heavy hitters in the strategic thinking realm, and I am disappointed at the lack of reviews thus far. This book merits broad reading and discussion.

2007/01/042009/12/04

Review: Tragedy & Hope–A History of the World in Our Time

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Complexity & Catastrophe, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Economics, History, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

First Stone in the Digital Study of Abusive Wealth,

January 4, 2007

Carroll Quigley

This is a very long book, longer than Laurie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health and it has taken me over two months, between other easier to read books, to examine. I strongly recommend that W. Cleon Skousen's book The Naked Capitalist be purchased at the same time, as it offers a very helpful “Cliff's Notes” and summary of the larger work.

I give this book 5 stars for substance, 4 stars for personal bias, and 4 stars for being both too late, and too soon–to late to have saved us from what Derek Leebaert calls The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World, too soon to be centerpiece, as I would have it be, of a massive public intelligence digital project to nail down all the relationships and follow all the money.

Carroll Quigley's book is excruciatingly dull and filled with thousands of facts in very small print. I never-the-less recommend it for purchase because it may well be one of the more fundamental references of our time. Two other books that complement this one are Mike Rupert's Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil and Jim Marrs' Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. See also Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

Now to my final point: others get nervouos when I begin to engage the “conspiracy literature,” and I have to reiterate that the conspiracy literature is no more nor any less rife with bias and error than the conventional literature. See my reviews of John Perry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth' and Larry Beinhart's Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. And if your really want to worry, read John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past on how inept and ignorant most of our scholars are, or the more conventional Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman.

Quigley is the cornerstone for a public intelligence digital map that will emerge over the next few years. I anticipate that thousands of books and articles, including Sterling and Peggy Seagrave's “Gold Warriors” (which has strangely disappeared from Amazon but is being read by millions of Chinese in both Mandarin and common Chinese) will all “make sense,” and I believe they will make enough sense to warrant a massive restriction on illicit wealth such as has never before occured under non-violent circumstances. I am NOT saying repossession, but rather an end to banks lending money they do not have, governments borrowing from banks, and intermediaries charging excessively while ignoring “true cost” of their goods to the planet. This book is revolutionary, but it is also before its time.

The books below provide critical insights into how we can empower the five billion at the bottom of the pyramid to create infinite wealth. I and 23 other co-founders have created the Earth Intelligence Network to do precisely that.

They also afford me an opportunity to make clear that understanding abusive wealth does not mean we much confiscate ill-gotten gains. Doing so would serve no useful purpose and it would spread so thinly among the five billion poor. We must let sleeping dogs lie, and create infinite wealth that stabilizing localities and enables peace everywhre.

Please do at least read my review of each of the below gifts from others:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All

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Category: Complexity & Catastrophe

Review: After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies

Review: The Collapse of Complex Societies

Review: Dunces of Doomsday–10 Blunders That Gave Rise to Radical Islam, Terrorist Regimes, And the Threat of an American Hiroshima

Review: Collapse–How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Review: The Great Turning–From Empire to Earth Community

Review: The Myth of Progress–Toward a Sustainable Future

Review: Tragedy & Hope–A History of the World in Our Time