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The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
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About This Book
Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality-television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of "sustainable decadence," a civilizational malaise that could endure for longer than we think..
Reviews
"Too often he conflates science fiction with expert projections we've somehow failed to fulfill."
"Douthat's elegy on the death of progress is unsparing and often pessimistic, but never alarmist ..."
"An earnest analysis buoyed by debatable evidence."
"Douthat doesn't vanquish these arguments so much as graciously acknowledge them, give them their due and then ask us to consider his perspective as well."
"Inexplicably, the book has no endnotes, so it's virtually impossible to double-check [Douthat's] claims ..."
"The evidence marshaled for...claims is as familiar as the problems themselves."
"In suggesting that this decadence might be sustainable, he remains too star-struck to ask for whom it is sustainable—after all, there are millions of people in the United States for whom the present does not feel in any way decadent ..."
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