Goliath's Curse

This is a very powerfully-told book, sweeping from the Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestors all the way to speculation about what might happen in the future. That might sound like a recipe for generic and unfocused thinking, but what Kemp builds instead is an analysis of the underlying social systems and psychological dynamics that recur in human societies again and again across time, and how interactions between those systems and the physical environment lead to sustainable or collapsing societies across a variety of contexts.

I'm not a historian, so I can't speak to how well Kemp selected his historical sources here, but everywhere his analysis intersected with things I knew from elsewhere, I found myself nodding along with his inclusion of trends and events I was already familiar with. It's a compelling argument.

One of the most striking points he made (and there were many) was that history disproves the idea that economic growth and technological innovation are intrinsically beneficial to human life. The quality of life for the average person in ancient Mesopotamia wasn't significantly different to that of the average person 4500 years later in late medieval Europe, despite significant technological advances; most of the extra power from technology was captured by elites and never improved everyday life. And not only did industrialization and modern capitalism not improve things, but they actually made things worse. The real improvement in quality of life that some (only some!) countries have seen in the past 150 years or so correlates not with technological or economic growth but with activism by unions, democratic reformers, and other groups pushing for social and political change. Technological innovation can improve quality of life only if political and social innovation ensure it is applied to that end. The stagnation and regression of our democracies will not "unleash" technology to save us, it will unleash technology to go wander away from the public interest again, as it had for millennia beforehand.

There are a handful of spots I differ with Kemp in terms of my prognosis for the future or my diagnosis of a few specific systemic patterns, mostly in the latter half of the book around some of the quirks of modernity. For example, in discussing the ways we could strengthen our democratic systems to build societies that are more just and resilient, he makes a point that digital platforms could allow us to expand citizens' assemblies to large portions of the population; I disagree, as I think cutting out the friction of in-person human interactions could easily turn the otherwise powerful process of a citizens' assembly into an anonymized, dehumanized riot; not as bad as something like the X or Meta platforms that actively stoke rage, but problematic enough to undercut their value in decision-making.

But those are details about future policy, and even there I agree with him in spirit if not in technicality. This is a powerful, compelling book that argues that history shows us the urgent need to not only resist authoritarianism, but to actively push for more radically democratic societies at every level - from government to the workplace, from residential buildings to the international arena. It is well-worth reading for the wealth of asides and curious facts and patterns that both support the larger argument against dominance hierarchies and add richness to the historical record in ways you might not expect.