MAIN IDEA:

Here is the author’s formulation:” This book presents a new version of modernization theory – Evolutionary Modernization theory – which generates a set of hypotheses that we test against a unique data base: from 1981 to 2014, the World Values Survey and European Values Study carried out hundreds of surveys in more than 100 countries containing over 90 percent of the world’s population.”  The critical point of this theory is that human values are dependent on levels of security and economic development achieved by the people: secure and wealthy people switch to non-materialistic, secular values supportive to self-expression, individualism, and tolerant of others, who are assumed to be friendly and have similar values, while insecure and poor people retain traditional values of in-group solidarity, religion, and defense against others, who are assumed to be hostile and have entirely different values.

DETAILS:

Introduction: An Overview of This Book
Here the author presents this book as a look at the new situation in human history. It was the situation when economic development achieved such levels that physical survival is not the primary concern of the vast majority of people anymore.  At least, it is not the case in the developed world. It led to the “shift from Materialist to Postmaterialist values – which was part of an even broader shift from Survival values to Self-expression values.”  In this new and secure world, people have the luxury to pursue happiness rather than survival, be tolerant to others, and have a relaxed attitude to just about everything. However, this near paradise condition was brief and is threatening now by increased automatization of everything based on AI. This development brings back insecurity and, in turn, leads to:” High levels of existential security are conducive to a more tolerant, open outlook – but conversely, declining existential security triggers an Authoritarian Reflex that brings support for strong leaders, strong in-group solidarity, rigid conformity to group norms and rejection of outsiders.”

1 Evolutionary Modernization and Cultural Change
The author begins by defining:” Evolutionary Modernization theory – which argues that economic and physical insecurity are conducive to xenophobia, strong in-group solidarity, authoritarian politics and rigid adherence to their group’s traditional cultural norms – and conversely that secure conditions lead to greater tolerance of outgroups, openness to new ideas and more egalitarian social norms.”

The author then refers to the methodology of data collection via surveys.

Classic Modernization Theory and Evolutionary Modernization Theory
Here, the author discusses Modernization theory and repeats his central thesis that evolution optimized people for survival. When survival is practically guaranteed, people move on to develop some new previously non-existing values and direct their effort to achieve these values. 

Converging Evidence of the Importance of Existential Security

Here author reviews the situation when:” Working independently, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, evolutionary biologists and historians have recently developed strikingly similar theories of cultural and institutional change: they all emphasize the extent to which security from survival threats, such as starvation, war and disease, shape a society’s cultural norms and sociopolitical institutions.”

The Rise of Postmaterialism in the West
Here the author presents the theory of intergenerational value change, which is based on two key hypotheses:

1. A scarcity hypothesis. Virtually everyone values freedom and autonomy, but people give top priority to their most pressing needs. Material sustenance and physical security are closely linked with survival, and when they are insecure, people give top priority to these Materialistic goals; but under secure conditions, people place greater emphasis on Postmaterialist goals such as belonging, esteem and free choice.

2. A socialization hypothesis. The relationship between material conditions and value priorities involves a long time-lag: one’s basic values largely reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s preadult years, and these values change mainly through intergenerational population replacement.

The author then discusses these hypothesizes and inferences that they lead to in various areas: Cultural Change and Societal Change; Cognition and Emotions as Sources of Value Change; An Alternative Explanation: Rational Choice; Slow and Fast Cultural Change;
At the end of the chapter author presents the following list of significant predictions:

1. When a society attains sufficiently high levels of existential security that a large share of the population grows up taking survival for granted, it brings coherent and roughly predictable social and cultural changes, producing an intergenerational shift from values shaped by scarcity, toward increasing emphasis on Postmaterialist values and Self-expression values.

2. As younger birth cohorts replace older cohorts in the adult population, it transforms the societies’ prevailing values – but with long time-lags. The youngest cohorts have little political impact until they reach adulthood, and even then they are still a small minority of the adult population; it takes additional decades before they become the dominant influence in their society.

3. Intergenerational value change is shaped by short-term period effects such as economic booms or recessions, in addition to population replacement, but in the long run the period effects often cancel each other out, while the population replacement effects tend to be cumulative.

4. Intergenerational value change can eventually reach a threshold at which new norms became socially dominant. At this point, conformist pressures reverse polarity, supporting changes they had formerly opposed and bringing much more rapid cultural change than that produced by population replacement alone.

5. Cultural change is path-dependent: a society’s values are shaped by its entire historical heritage, and not just its level of existential security.

2 The Rise of Postmaterialist Values in the West and the World
The author points out that western societies are switching to postmaterialist values and presents several graphs supporting this idea. Here is one for Western countries:

The author also provides similar data for other world areas where the same process occurs, albeit slower. The author also expresses the belief that younger generations drive this process. It possesses a positive feedback loop that all but guarantees the change happening with the shift in generations.   

3 Global Cultural Patterns
This chapter discusses data obtained from Global Values Surveys that monitored 90% of the world population. The analysis included two main dimensions: Traditional vs. Secular-Rational and Survival vs. Self-Expression. The author provides a sample of questionary that used to separate individuals with “Survival values” from individuals with “Self-Expression values”:

Modernization-Linked Attitudes Tend to Be Enduring and Cross-nationally Comparable
The conclusion is:” Our theory holds that Self-expression values should be strongly correlated with indicators of economic modernization. Although measured at different levels and by different methods, we find remarkably strong linkages between individual-level values and societies’ economic characteristics. Across all available societies, the average correlation between Self-expression values and ten widely used economic modernization indicators, ranging from per capita GDP and mean life expectancy to educational levels”

The Self-expression/lndividualism/Autonomy Super-dimension
The author then presents metanalysis demonstrating that the critical factor defining cross nations clustering of values is the Self vs. Group dimension:

Conclusion

The conclusion is that society’s values are predictable based on the economic and overall security position, with individualism characteristic of a wealthy and secure community. That movement nearly always occurs with successful development, and that change is path-dependent.

4 The End of Secularization?
In the first part of this chapter author traces emergence of need in moral god depending on the primary method of production:

However, the author also notes counter-secularization trends: low fertility of secular population vs. high fertility of religious people, the substitution of hierarchically organized religion of agricultural and industrial ages with mixed bag of religious ideas and DIY spirituality of information age.  

5 Cultural Change, Slow and Fast: The Distinctive Trajectory of Norms Governing Gender Equality and Sexual Orientation
In this chapter author discusses characteristics of the process of change and attempts to demonstrate these points:

1) These value changes involve very long time-lags between the onset of the conditions leading to them, and the societal changes they produce. There was a time-lag of 40–50 years between when Western societies first attained high levels of economic and physical security after World War II, and the occurrence of such relevant societal changes as legalization of same-sex marriage.

2) One distinctive set of norms concerning gender equality, divorce, abortion and homosexuality supports a pro-fertility strategy that was essential to the survival of pre-industrial societies but eventually became superfluous. This set of norms is now moving on a trajectory that is distinct from that of other cultural changes.

3) Although basic values normally change at the pace of intergenerational population replacement, the shift from Pro-fertility norms to Individual-choice norms has reached a tipping-point where conformist pressures have reversed polarity and are now accelerating value changes they once resisted, bringing major societal changes such as legalization of same-sex marriage.

The author presents a formal statement for Hypotheses of his Evolutionary Modernization Theory and then empirical data and analysis supporting these hypotheses. For example, here is one of his data sets for Income/Tolerance correlation:

In conclusion, the author notes that slow change in attitudes to sexuality and fertility seems to reach the tipping point when the conformist majority finds it detrimental to maintain old norms of sexuality, which leads to acceleration of changes. For some reason, the author also refers here to xenophobia, noting that high-income countries somehow become not less xenophobic and explain it by very high levels of immigration and terrorism.  The author also cannot help but complain about Trump’s victory in 2016.

6 The Feminization of Society and Declining Willingness to Fight for One’s Country: The Individual-Level Component of the Long Peace
Here the author offers four Hypotheses:

(1) Cross-sectionally, the publics of more developed societies will place more emphasis on Individual-choice values and be less willing to risk their lives in war.

(2) Longitudinally, in societies in which Individual-choice values are most widespread, people’s willingness to risk lives in war will fall most sharply.

(3) In multi-level perspective, individuals who live in societies with widespread Individual-choice values will be less willing to risk their lives in war.

Since historical learning is also an influence on cultural evolution, this adds a fourth hypothesis:

(4) Historically, the former Axis powers’ devastating defeat in World War II sharply diminished their people’s willingness to fight for their country; while the exceptionally strong prevalence of Self-expression values in the Nordic countries led to the emergence of a military primarily geared to peace-keeping missions and developmental aid; this, in turn, led to the emergence of a distinctive and positive view of the role of the military among the Nordic publics, making them more willing to fight for their country.

The author provides some graphs demonstrating changes in willingness to fight generally supportive of presented Hypotheses. However, he is justifiably cautious because of the dynamic character of the issue. He even provides a very relevant point:” These trends are reversible. Russia’s seizure of Crimea and intervention in the Eastern Ukraine evoked widespread concern, bringing economic sanctions, capital flight from Russia and impelling Nordic political leaders to reassess the role of their countries’ military forces. But so far, no influential Western leaders – not even the Hawks – have advocated military action against Russia. The norms of the Long Peace continue to prevail for now.”

7 Development and Democracy
The author begins this chapter with the discussion of “democratic recession,” noting that it is not unusual for long-term development.  – one should recall 1930-40 and the tidal wave of fascism and communism. Then he discusses the link between democracy and development and concentrates on the connection between self-expression and effective democracy:

The author also provides a detailed explanation of the graph:” The incongruence between the institutional supply of democracy and the cultural demand for democracy is calculated by subtracting the demand from the supply. In order to measure the incongruence that was present before the Third Wave transition, we use the pre-transition levels of democracy, as measured during 1981–1986, to indicate the supply. To calculate the cultural demand for democracy, we use Self-expression values measured around 1990 as an indication of how strong these values were before the transition.

The more Self-expression values surpass a society’s level of democracy, the greater the unmet demand. In the analysis shown on Figure 7.2, a score of –1 indicates the strongest possible lack of demand for more democracy, while a score of +1 indicates the maximum demand for more democracy. Our sample includes a number of stable Western democracies in which the levels of democracy have been constant since measurement began. These 16 democracies are in an equilibrium where supply and demand for democracy are in balance; accordingly, they are at the zero-point on the incongruence scale. They also are at the zero-point on the vertical dimension, which measures how much change a country experienced in its level of effective democracy from the early 1980s to the late 1990s: since the supply and demand for democracy were in balance, they experienced no change.”

After discussing supply and demand for democracy based on the level of development of society, the author makes an important point that general movement is in the direction of congruence between these two:

The author ends this chapter with a brief discussion of China as an outlier: economic development, in the author’s opinion, created unmet demand for democracy, that in the long run would somehow lead to the democratization of Chinese society, although he admits that there is no sign that it is happening and that he does not believe it could happen while communist party controls security forces.   

8 The Changing Roots of Happiness

Here the author discusses happiness and points out that it is not a set value, maybe even genetic, as usually thought but rather an improvable parameter. His justification:” Extensive empirical evidence indicates that the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness. From 1981 to 2007, economic development, democratization and rising social tolerance increased the extent to which the people of most countries had free choice in economic, political and social life – leading to higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction.” The author presents a graphic expression of empirical results:

The author also discusses the correlation between religiosity and life satisfaction, which is generally between 0 and 0.15, with a significant outlier in China, where the correlation is negative.

In the end, the author provides a summary of the results of path analysis for causal sequences for perceived well-being:

9 The Silent Revolution in Reverse: The Rise of Trump and the Authoritarian Populist Parties
This chapter discusses the rise of populism in the USA and Europe and what the author calls xenophobic and authoritarian movements. The author provides some interesting data demonstrating that Trump’s support is growing with age but limited by class with low- and high-income groups aligning against Trump, while middle-income group supporting:

The author also discusses the shift from economic to non-economic issues in political discourse in western democracies:

At the end of the chapter, the author allocates quite a bit of space to discuss growing inequality and political influence of the upper class, concluding that:” Rising inequality and economic insecurity are already generating powerful political dissatisfaction.”

10 The Coming of Artificial Intelligence Society
In this last chapter, the author looks at the future impact of mass implementation of AI and sees quite a bleak picture of increased inequality and practical destruction of the middle class. Here is the graph of trends that point in this direction:

All this looks very scary to the author, and he sees signs of impending danger in such events as the Trump election and presidency. So, he is looking for a political solution to substitute the old New Deal Democratic coalition with the new incarnation of an ever bigger government that will reallocate income more fairly. The author believes that it could be done by converting stupid middle- and lower-class people who voted in mass for Trump into believing that they will be much better off if they vote for democrats. The foundation of this conversion and the goal of big benevolent government supported by unchallengeable majority will be increased recognition of unfair distribution of wealth when most wealth goes to already rich with consequent mass demand for redistribution, and by “Developing well-designed programs to attain this goal will be a crucial task for social scientists and policy-makers during the next 20 years.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

This book is fascinating, with a significant amount of interesting empirical data. I agree that values change with the increase in wealth and security. Still, I think that author underestimates to what extent the parameters of wealth and security are relative to the wealth and safety of others. For example, an American who lost a good job and had to live on handouts because the company shipped this job to China or hired an illegal immigrant may drop his values of tolerance and openness to others.

Despite this underestimation, the author clearly understands that shifting the population of Western democracies from wealth and security to poverty and insecurity that will hugely accelerate by implementing AI does not sound suitable for continuing the status quo. However, the author’s suggested solution: an ever bigger government that redistributes more wealth according to the wise advice of social scientists is not workable. It is because of the relative character of wealth and security. The people who cannot act on their own and achieve what they want will not accept some Universal Basic Income that makes them equal in poverty. It is especially true when the top levels of the society, from government-made billionaires to well-paid social scientists, time after time waste resources on implementing costly and non-working social programs. Obviously, nobody knows what lies ahead, but I am afraid that it could be as funny and entertaining as the Russian or French revolutions.   

MAIN IDEA:

The main idea is that developments of the information age broke government and elite stronghold on information flow. It resulted in the dissolution of trust in authority and the ability of people to organize by using the social network, sometimes so effectively that the popular revolt with no straightforward program or effective organization could overthrow established authoritarian governments. The author supports this idea by presenting details of such processes as they occurred in the Arab revolution and then provides a warning that it could also happen in established western democracies in which authorities and the elite are currently losing the support of the public. The author also provides recommendations on preventing the unraveling of democracy, which comes down to protecting the private sphere, increasing government transparency, and avoiding big unrealistic projects that usually fail, undermining whatever is left of public trust in government.  

DETAILS:

1 PRELUDE TO A TURBULENT AGE
The author begins by making a connection between online universities and Arab insurgencies. He then links it to the crisis of governments, financial systems, and overall cultures in developed countries. He also concludes that the present is turbulent, and the future is unknown and unpredictable. The explanation for all this was in information explosion when its abundance deprived it of authoritativeness that it used to have. Here is an excellent illustration:

And here is the author’s formulation:” Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.”

In short, the author sees the dissolution of authority and fears that it would crash everything he holds dear, which are institutions of the contemporary western world.

2 HODER AND WAEL GHONIM

In this chapter author looks at two Internet personalities: Hoder – a very popular Iranian blogger who caused the wrath of Iranian ayatollahs, ran away, but then unreasonably came back to Iran and winded up in prison with 20 years sentence. Another one Ghonim – the Facebook executive who provided effective media support for Arab Revolution that removed Mubarak in Egypt and a few other dictators in other places from power. The author uses these examples to observe the strange embrace between information and power when information and disinformation could be saturated to such an extent that it changes people’s minds not only on the side of the oppressed but also on the side of oppressors. Hence, tanks and guns are not enough to keep power if people who sit inside and hold these guns stop complying with orders because their minds are changed.  

3 MY THESIS
Here is how the author defines his main point:” My thesis is a simple one. We are caught between an old world which is decreasingly able to sustain us intellectually and spiritually, maybe even materially, and a new world that has not yet been born. Given the character of the forces of change, we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture. You who are young today may not live to see its resolution.”

And here is how the author defines forces fighting in this conflict:” Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that has dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest. The two protagonists share little in common, other than humanity—and each probably doubts the humanity of the other. They have arrayed themselves in contrary modes of organization which require mutually hostile ideals of right behavior. The conflict is so asymmetrical that it seems impossible for the two sides actually to engage. But they do engage, and the battlefield is everywhere.”

The author then describes methods and tools used in this fight, mainly in information and networks. He also discusses polarization, the weakening of the Center, and the resulting threat to democracy:” That democracy became hierarchical, organizational, an institution of the Center, is less a paradox or a conspiracy theory than a historical accident. The consequences are beyond dispute. Many aspects of representative democracy have become less democratic, and are so perceived by the public. The defection of citizens from the voting booth and party membership give evidence to a souring mood with the established structures. Many have been moved to a sectarian condemnation of the entire system as ungodly and unjust. The more assertive political networks today proclaim our current procedures to be the tyranny of Big Government or a farce manipulated by Big Business.”

The author then reviews the positions and ideas of some well-known theorists of the information age and generally finds them lacking. The last part of the chapter demonstrates how people in control of information flow between individual and political regimes mediate this flow and how this process is changing. The author presents it in a series of graphs, starting with individuals accepting status quo situations mainly based on exclusive control over information by the political regime. Then, increasingly doubting the validity of status quo based on additional information from other sources and ending with the rejection of status quo based on acceptance of some alternative source as more valid than existing political regime:

At the end of the chapter author presents his position as believing that control over information flow can influence political power and offers his hypothesis in the form of three specific claims:

4 WHAT THE PUBLIC IS NOT
In this chapter, the author discusses the nature of the public by using the method of exclusion in analyzing complex questions. Here are the author’s points:

• The public is not the people but likes to pretend that it is

The public is not, and never can be, identical to the people: this is true in all circumstances, everywhere. Since, on any given question, the public is composed of those self-selected persons interested in the affair, it possesses no legitimate authority whatever, and lacks the structure to enforce any authority that might fall its way. The public has no executive, no law, no jails. It can only express an opinion, in words and in actions—in its own flesh and blood.

• The public is not the masses but was once buried alive under them

It seems to the author that the public is at least somewhat educated, informed, and definitely thinking part of the population that has constantly been increasing from the beginning of the industrial age and had been applying democratic political forms. Eventually, the small numbers of members of the Republic of Letters back in the XVIII century turned into millions.  These people wanted control over their lives, and political regimes had to manage this via controlling information, propaganda, and public relations.  If these tools failed, the public could become so upset and unsettled that it would incite the masses to action.

• The public is not the crowd, but the two are in a relationship (it’s complicated)

Here are the author’s definitions:

“The relationship between the public and the crowd is not transparent. Though closely associated with one another, the two are never identical. The public, we know, is composed of private persons welded together by a shared point of reference: what Lippmann called an interest in an affair, which can mean a love of computer games or a political disposition. Members of the public tend to be dispersed, and typically influence events from a distance only, by means of “soft” persuasion: by voicing and communicating an opinion.

A crowd, on the contrary, is always manifest, and capable of great physical destructiveness and ferocity. It is a form of action which submerges the desires of many individuals under a single rough-hewn will. In direct democracies like ancient Athens, it could be said to represent the will of the sovereign people. Everywhere else, the crowd can represent nothing but itself. Yet the persons who integrate a crowd invariably make larger claims of identity: with political crowds, such claims often reflect the more emotive aspects of the public’s agenda. A crowd can thus perceive itself, and be perceived by others, as the public in the flesh, “the people” or “the proletariat” or “the community” in action.”

At the end of the chapter author characterizes the current situation in such a way:” In the worldwide political collision between the new public and established authority, the image of the crowd has assumed a decisive importance. A willingness to face down power, even to die, in front of cell phone cameras, has equalized the asymmetry of this conflict to a surprising extent. A government can respond with old-fashioned brute force, as it did in Syria, but at the cost of tearing to shreds the social contract and becoming a global pariah. Every beating and every shooting will be recorded on video and displayed to the world. Every young man killed will rise again on the information sphere, transformed, in the manner of Mohamed Bouazizi and Khaled Said, into a potent argument for revolt.”

5 PHASE CHANGE 2011
The author begins this chapter with a discussion of distrust and fear that increasingly dominates the public and the elite relationship. Then, he specifically reviewed events of 2011 when mass demonstrations occurred in many western countries. Finally, he describes events in Spain, UK, Israel, and the USA and notices how little is needed to initiate mass protests against the elite. 

6 A CRISIS OF AUTHORITY
The author begins with defining the meaning of authority:” authority, as I use the term, flows from legitimacy, derived from monopoly. To some indeterminate degree, the public must trust and heed authority, or it is no authority at all. An important social function of authority is to deliver certainty in an uncertain world. It explains reality in the context of the shared story of the group. For this it must rely on persuasion rather than compulsion, since naked force is a destroyer of trust and faith. The need to persuade in turn explains the institutional propensity for visible symbols of authority—the patrician’s toga, the doctor’s white frock, the financier’s Armani suit. Authority being an intangible quality, those who wield it wish to be recognized for what they are.”

Then he describes how various branches of authority in western societies: science, experts, financiers, and politicians, lost the public’s trust by overpromising and underdelivering in a great many areas of life, consistently being caught lying just about everything and distorting reality. He then describes symptoms of life without authority: uncertainty and impermanence.

7 THE FAILURE OF GOVERNMENT
In this chapter, the author extends the discussion of loss of authority to the government. He compares public attitudes to many failures of JFK, which the press covered up and quickly forgave and forgot, with the mass movement of Tea Parties against Obama for his Obamacare. Here is the author’s point:” The claims of competence made by the government over which Barack Obama presided were as extraordinary and improbable as those asserted in JFK’s time. Everything had been diminished except the talk. The radical disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of government was apparent to anyone with eyes to see, and, amplified by the information sphere, was itself a major vector for the contagion of distrust.”

The author retells the story of the city of Brasilia: an excellent example of the disconnect between government experts and reality, which typically cost a lot of lives and treasure to the public. The author completes the chapter with a discussion of “why most things fail.” The last part of the chapter is about the negativity of Obama and his attempts to be on the side of the public against out-of-control authority despite the simple fact that he, Obama, was this authority.  

8 NIHILISM AND DEMOCRACY
Here, the author discusses what could substitute for the declining grand hierarchy of the industrial age and could find nothing except for nihilism. Everything around is getting worse: climate, economy, and international politics. He concludes that:” The crisis of authority was a crisis of democracy. The public’s assault on the institutions was often an assault on the democratic process.” And it is not only a loss of belief in democracy, and it is even a loss of faith in revolution. It looks like the massive rise of nihilism caused by obsolesces of industrial mode, and the author is afraid that:” To the extent that the institutions of democracy remain lashed to the industrial mode of organization, they risk becoming part of an immense cultural extinction event.”

9 CHOICES AND SYSTEMS

In this chapter author moves from analysis to recommendations, which are: Protect the personal sphere from political interference and use the diversity of available options for everything. “The failure of government isn’t a failure of democracy, but a consequence of the heroic claims of modern government, and of the constantly frustrated expectations these claims have aroused. Industrial organization, with its cult of the expert and top-down interventionism, stands far removed from the democratic spirit, and has proven disastrous to the actual practice of representative democracy. It has failed in its own terms, and has been seen to fail, and it has infected democratic governments with a paralyzing fear of the public and with the despair of decadence.”  The author then discusses that a great many people do just that: ignore the government. He even presents a nice graph demonstrating that cute cats beat government hands down as an object of the public interest:

The author’s to-do list then has the requirement to change that by improving government transparency and a more realistic approach to claims and objectives. The author seems to believe this is imperative because:” Tremendous energies have been released by people from nowhere, networked, self-assembled, from below. That is the structural destiny of the Fifth Wave—the central theme of my story. Democratic government in societies of distrust can choose to ride the tsunami or to be swamped by it. The latter choice will leave government mired in failure and drained of legitimacy. It will leave democracy, I fear, at the mercy of the first persuasive political alternative.

10 FINALE FOR SKEPTICS
The author begins here with another precise formulation of his central thesis:” My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 and 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.”

After that author discusses failures of democracy in various places such as Venezuela, Ukraine, and Turkey, then makes the point that history demonstrated unpredictability of the future. Therefore, the author ends with this:” The failure of democracy plays no part in the null hypothesis, but becomes a possibility in the framework of my thesis. A rebellious public, sectarian in temper and utopian in expectations, collides everywhere with institutions that rule by default and blunder, it seems, by habit. Industrial hierarchies are no longer able to govern successfully in a world swept to the horizon by a tsunami of information. An egalitarian public is unwilling to assume responsibility under any terms. The muddled half-steps and compromises necessary to democracy may become untenable under the pressure applied by these irreconcilable forces.

Democracy isn’t doomed. As an analyst, I have rejected prophecy and destiny as tools of the trade. I see the future with no greater clarity than you, reader. But processes at play today, right now, if continued, could well lead to the crumbling of what has always been a fragile system of government.”

— TRUMP, BREXIT, AND FAREWELL TO ALL THAT

The original book was published in 2014 before Brexit and Trump, a supplement for the new edition. The author is bitching about this authentic expression of populism and, while clearly understanding the decay of the elite, he has a tough time accepting this reality. It shows in his description of events of 2017.  

MY TAKE ON IT:

I agree with the author that new information technology opened access to the public forum to all kinds of amateurs. It undermined and practically destroyed old forms of authoritarian governments based on limited access to information.  It also seriously damaged traditional forms of democracy when the elite controls narrative and consequently obtains legitimacy in the ballot box mainly by minimizing access to alternative narratives and, if needed, just falsifying election results. However, I think that this does not mean that either authoritarianism or democracy became unviable. On the contrary, they will have to change and include new information processing functionality in their corresponding systems. For example, AI and networks would allow authoritarian governments much stronger control over people’s behavior and thoughts than had ever been possible before.

In contrast, applying such technology in a real democracy would allow the removal of intermediary information repackaging by the elite and open direct and unlimited flows of data to support the interests of non-elite members of society. So, in the short run, the authoritarian regime could become more stable, while democracy less so because the reconciliation of many often conflicting interests without elite control would become more complex.  However, the authoritarian regime could become increasingly unstable in the long run due to the fights for power at the top with periodic massive leaks in the interests of one faction or another, made possible by the instant distribution of information to the population. The traditional solid beliefs in the god-given legitimacy of top leaders are gone and will never come back. So one bunch of authoritarian crooks could use a sudden leak of negative news to push the currently incumbent bunch of crooks out of power.

Democracy, on the other hand, could become much more robust because massive access to information from a multitude of sources would disqualify anybody who would pretend to be the Demos and will eliminate the ability of the elite to make large-scale decisions for all. The massive distrust of the elite would eventually push most decisions down to the private sphere, leaving for the government a minimal role as envisioned in the American Constitution.

MAIN IDEA:

The main idea of this book is to present the latest discoveries based on the newly obtained ability to read ancient DNA, even DNA from bones of Neanderthals that were dead for 30,000 years. This ability allowed drastically reassess the history of human migrations, expansion of humans all over the globe, and formation of different human populations. It is also allowed to reassess, at least to some extent role of interbreeding between humans and other humanoids. In addition, other areas of research are presented: the historical narrative that could be extracted from the DNA of currently living people, for example, male/female interactions over time-based on wars and conquests. Another, not precisely, the scientific objective of this book is to protect the author and his research against political correctness attacks because the research results clearly demonstrate that human populations are genetically diverse in many essential areas.

DETAILS:

Introduction
The author begins with reference to “Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the founder of genetic studies of our past.” Then, he describes ideas of past genetic research and provides an original model of historical human movements based on primitive technology of 1993. Finally, the author presents a map based on the technology of 2015:

After that author provides an estimate of accumulated genetic data and discusses how it is massively used:” This book is about the genome revolution in the study of the human past. This revolution consists of the avalanche of discoveries based on data taken from the whole genome—meaning, the entire genome analyzed at once instead of just small stretches of it such as mitochondrial DNA. The revolution has been made far more powerful by the new technologies for extracting whole genomes’ worth of DNA from ancient humans.” The author also describes some key results:” A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today. DNA extracted from remains of people who lived, say, ten thousand years ago shows that the structure of human populations at that time was qualitatively different. Present-day populations are blends of past populations, which were blends themselves. The African American and Latino populations of the Americas are only the latest in a long line of major population mixtures.”

The author also describes in introduction structure of the book and the objectives that he targets to achieve in each chapter.

Part l: The Deep History of Our Species

This part:” describes how the human genome not only provides all the information that a fertilized human egg needs to develop, but also contains within it the history of our species.”

1: How the Genome Explains Who We Are
This chapter:” argues that the genome revolution has taught us about who we are as humans not by revealing the distinctive features of our biology compared to other animals but by uncovering the history of migrations and population mixtures that formed us.”

2: Encounters with Neanderthals
This chapter:” reveals how the breakthrough technology of ancient DNA provided data from Neanderthals, our big-brained cousins, and showed how they interbred with the ancestors of all modern humans living outside of Africa. The chapter also explains how genetic data can be used to prove that ancient mixture between populations occurred.”

3: Ancient DNA Opens the Floodgates
This chapter:” highlights how ancient DNA can reveal features of the past that no one had anticipated, starting with the discovery of the Denisovans, a previously unknown archaic population that had not been predicted by archaeologists and that mixed with the ancestors of present-day New Guineans. The sequencing of the Denisovan genome unleashed a cavalcade of discoveries of additional archaic populations and mixtures, and demonstrated unequivocally that population mixture is central to human nature.”

Part II: How We Got to Where We Are Today

This part:” is about how the genome revolution and ancient DNA have transformed our understanding of our own particular lineage of modern humans, and it takes readers on a tour around the world with population mixture as a unifying theme.”

4: Humanity’s Ghosts
This chapter:” introduces the idea that we can reconstruct populations that no longer exist in unmixed form based on the bits of genetic material they have left behind in present-day people.”

5: The Making of Modern Europe
This chapter:” explains how Europeans today descend from three highly divergent populations, which came together over the last nine thousand years in a way that archaeologists never anticipated before ancient DNA became available.”

6: The Collision That Formed India
This chapter:” explains how the formation of South Asian populations parallels that of Europeans. In both cases, a mass migration of farmers from the Near East after nine thousand years ago mixed with previously established hunter-gatherers, and then a second mass migration from the Eurasian steppe after five thousand years ago brought a different kind of ancestry and probably Indo-European languages as well.”

Here is the general picture of agricultural expansion:

7: In Search of Native American Ancestors

This chapter:” shows how the analysis of modern and ancient DNA has demonstrated that Native American populations prior to the arrival of Europeans derive ancestry from multiple major pulses of migration from Asia.”

8: The Genomic Origins of East Asians
This chapter:” describes how much of East Asian ancestry derives from major expansions of populations from the Chinese agricultural heartland.”

9: Rejoining Africa to the Human Story
This chapter:” highlights how ancient DNA studies are beginning to peel back the veil on the deep history of the African continent drawn by the great expansions of farmers in the last few thousand years that overran or mixed with previously resident populations.”

Part III: The Disruptive Genome

The last part:” focuses on the implications of the genome revolution for society. It offers some suggestions for how to conceive of our personal place in the world, our connection to the more than seven billion people who live on earth with us, and the even larger numbers of people who inhabit our past and future.”

10: The Genomics of Inequality
This chapter:” shows how ancient DNA studies have revealed the deep history of inequality in social power among populations, between the sexes, and among individuals within a population, based on how that inequality determined success or failure of reproduction.”

The discussion here is mainly about the typical process of mixing of populations when winners-male killed out losers-male and enslaved losers-female, resulting in different levels of genetic diversity between mitochondrial DNA and Y Chromosome:

Based on the genetic evidence, the author concludes that inequality has deep, maybe even biological roots. He expresses hope that:” Evidence of the antiquity of inequality should motivate us to deal in a more sophisticated way with it today, and to behave a little better in our own time.”

11: The Genomics of Race and Identity
Here author:” argues that the orthodoxy that has emerged over the last century—the idea that human populations are all too closely related to each other for there to be substantial average biological differences among them—is no longer sustainable, while also showing that racist pictures of the world that have long been offered as alternatives are even more in conflict with the lessons of the genetic data. The chapter suggests a new way of conceiving the differences among human populations—a way informed by the genome revolution.”

The author basically agrees that there are DNA-based differences between populations and then spends quite a bit of time debating Nicolas Wade’s work that highlights these differences and explains them by different evolutionary paths of these populations. The author accuses Wade of racism, but then states:” So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that behavioral or cognitive traits are influenced by genetic variation, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations, both with regard to their average and their variation within populations? Even if we do not yet know what those differences will be, we need to come up with a new way of thinking that can accommodate such differences, rather than deny categorically that differences can exist and so find ourselves caught without a strategy once they are found.” The author very reasonably calls to get over racial differences and look at individuals, but then praises racist organizations specializing in African ancestry. The author also hilariously complains that his own population – Ashkenazi Jews are too smart and overstudied, so he announces that he would not spend his lab resources to learn about his own DNA. 

12: The Future of Ancient DNA

This chapter:” is a discussion of what comes next in the genome revolution. It argues that the genome revolution, with the help of ancient DNA, has realized Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s dream, emerging as a tool for investigating past populations that is no less useful than the traditional tools of archaeology and historical linguistics. Ancient DNA and the genome revolution can now answer a previously unresolvable question about the deep past: the question of what happened—how ancient peoples related to each other and how migrations contributed to the changes evident in the archaeological record. Ancient DNA should be liberating to archaeologists because with answers to these questions in reach, archaeologists can get on with investigating what they have always been at least as interested in, which is why the changes occurred”.

MY TAKE ON IT:

It is an excellent book with lots of valuable data presented in very nice and clear form. I agree with the author that the future of history would include a significant amount of information derived from DNA that could create lots of knowledge of who we humans are, where we came from, and what kind of evolutionary history we have. Moreover, it could be done not only at the population level but also at the level of individuals. I am also with the author in his belief that new tools and obtained data would help drive one last nail in the coffin of racism, but unlike the author, I hope that this would happen to all forms of racism: anti-black, anti-white, and anti-whatever. I also hope that all this staff about inequality would also be put to rest. As far as I am concerned, we all are different, and we all should be equal before the law and in the eyes of others regardless of our ancestry, race, good or bad luck of our ancestors, or whatever. One final thing that I would like to say is about stereotypes. Attempts to forbid and suppress stereotype use are unrealistic and bound to fail because it is a necessary evolutionary tool for survival. The normal process of thinking while encountering somebody else is to use stereotypes for external presentations of individuals and then discard this stereotype as soon as individuals become more familiar. We just need to speed up and automate data extraction for this process as much as possible, so using stereotypes would become redundant

MAIN IDEA:

The main idea of this book is to reject the usual understanding of freedom as a combination of individual rights and the ability of individuals to live free from interference from coercive government and convince the reader that it is entirely different: the ability to participate in government decisions and election of individuals to the government. To achieve this author provides a nice historical review of the appearance and expressions of the idea of freedom in history from ancient Greeks to our time.   

DETAILS:

Introduction: An Elusive Concept
The author begins by posing the question that she intends to answer in this book: “TODAY MOST PEOPLE TEND TO equate freedom with the possession of inalienable individual rights, rights that demarcate a private sphere no government may infringe on. But has this always been the case? Does this definition, whereby freedom depends on the limitation of state power, really offer the only—or even the most—natural way of thinking about what it means to be free in a society or as a society? And if not, how and why did our understanding of freedom change?”

The author answers that the current understanding of freedom is wrong and offers a different understanding:” For centuries, Western thinkers and political actors identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with exercising control over the way one is governed. Theirs was a democratic conception of freedom: a free state was one in which the people ruled itself, even if it lacked a bill of rights, an independent judiciary, and other mechanisms to patrol the boundaries of legitimate state power.”

The author then proceeds to define the understanding of freedom as individual freedom as a counterrevolutionary concept. The author also goes into some “Nuts and Bolts” of the historical development of the notion of Freedom.  She apologies that this book is based on Western history, presents some references to existence of such notion in other cultures and seeks excuse for this transgression in her limitations of her own expertise.

Part l: The Long History of Freedom
1. Slaves to No Man: Freedom in Ancient Greece
Autor begins this chapter in 480 BC when Spartans refused to submit to Xerxes’ power, even if submission meant protection and economic benefits and rejection could mean annihilation. The reason for this rejection was high value of freedom in Hellenic culture.  Author then discusses notion of freedom as opposite of slavery, specifically personal freedom from bondage, rather than political freedom. However right away she switched it to something different when referring to Spartans’ rejection:” They had, in other words, a democratic conception of freedom: in their view, a free state was a state in which the people controlled the way it was governed; it was not a state in which government interference was limited as much as possible.” author then discusses “invention of political freedom by Greeks and their celebration of tyrant-killers Harmodius and Aristogeiton. After retelling a bit of Herodotus’s history, the author poses the question whether Greek freedom was mirage or reality.  She answers that Greek understanding of freedom was political and meant democratic form of government and rule of law: features that differentiated Greeks from anybody else. Author then compares conditions of Persians, which despite being formally completely submissive to the king, in reality had quite a bit of freedom of possessions and actions, while Greek formal freedoms were quite limited not only by being extended only to a small share of population – free male citizens, but also by variety of political actions available for individuals in power. Author then discusses ancient critics of freedom: Oligarchs, Sophists, Plato, and many others. The final part of chapter deals with the raise of Macedon that brought all Greeks under power of king Philip and then Alexander, but with a special feature when local powers in many places still were selected democratically and maintained the rule of low. The establishment of kings power in Hellenic world brought change to debates about freedom:” While many Greek intellectuals continued to extol the importance of democratic freedom, others came to argue for a very different understanding of the term. Freedom, they argued, did not necessarily depend on the political institutions under which one lived. Rather, whether one could live a free life or not had more to do with the one’s strength of character or self-control. A person could be free even when he was ruled by a tyrant, as long as he had the appropriate moral strength. Thus, Hellenistic thinkers came to propagate a wholly personal, inner kind of freedom, mirroring the growing disempowerment of ordinary citizens in Greek political life.”

2. The Rise and Fall of Roman Liberty
Author begins this chapter with the story of Lucretia that led to revolt and establishment of republic: res public or “public thing”. Obviously in reality it was rule of patricians, but plebeians managed to establish some participation in power via Tribunal Assembly. Author then discusses validity of various sources of Roman history and notes that Romans pretty much accepted Greek notions of freedom. Author then allocates quite a bit of space to discussion of struggle for power distribution between different parts of Roman society men vs. women, patrician vs plebeians, and rich vs. poor. All this struggle was for control of political power via control such institutions such as the senate, which lasted for a long time in multiple incarnations and had various levels of impact on individual freedom of Roman citizens. Eventually republic was substituted by Empire, in which power struggle become more concentrated at the top. Author describes an interesting approach when Emperor strictly avoided formal designation as the king in order to maintain perception of freedom, just a bit better managed than in old Republic. For example, coins and other image carrying artifacts normally included goddess of Liberty. Author then describes some intellectual works such as Livy and Plutarch nostalgic for Republic. Another writer that author reviewed in details is Tacitus. Overall these writers maintained kind of Cult of Freedom, which eventually was demised during later imperial period when Christianity shifted top level control to the god, consequently promoting externally submission to power that is, while remaining internally submissive to God only. At the end of chapter, the author describes Middle Ages when power of kings and queens was established everywhere in Europe and notion of freedom was mainly moved into personal domain as spiritual pursuit. Any remnants of political power of population slowly disappeared remaining only partially in some urban areas.        

Part II: Freedom’s Revival
3. The Renaissance of Freedom
This chapter begins with reference to Dante who placed tyrannicides Brutus and Cassius into the Hell – direct opposite of Greek’s attitude, indicating that the only legitimate form of government is monarchy. The author describes how Renaissance undermined this approach in Italy, how this process was reflected in arts, and how after reviving ancient cult of freedom in XIV-XVI centuries it faded away. However. it did not disappear, but rather moved across Alps, where Gutenberg’s invention prompted expansion of freedom in Northern Europe, especially in such places and Switzerland, Netherlands, and others. Author describes in some detail events related to search of freedom and personalities that were driving these events in France and England. After that author looks at Reformation and notes that while fighting papal authoritarianism this movement was also authoritarian. However, this struggle between two quite intolerant religious movements opened gate for breakthrough to tolerance and freedom that was demanded by both these movement in places where they were not strong enough to suppress others. Eventually it produced a curious result: appearance of ideas of natural rights. Here is how author describes this result: “By the late seventeenth century, the notion that one could be free only if one did not depend on the will of another—meaning that individual freedom could exist only amid collective freedom—was so well established that dictionaries confirmed it.”. All this led to English Glorious Revolution and penetration of ideas of freedom into culture of European aristocracy, creating ideological foundation for revolutions.

4. Freedom in the Atlantic Revolutions
In this chapter the author describes revolutions that came at the end of XVIII century on both sides of Atlantic: American and French. Author mostly concerned with ideological and artistic representation of ideas of freedom, which was understood in variety of ways. Author defines and discusses in details one specific understanding presented by Richard Price as widely shared among American and other revolutionaries:” In Price’s view, being free in a society or as a society had nothing to do with the extent to which government interfered with one’s life. Rather, one was free as long as one had a say in the direction of one’s country. This was not because the act of governing in and of itself set one free. Price carefully avoided such claims. Rather, in Price’s view, self-government was necessary for the robust enjoyment of Liberty. Under a despotic government, private men “might be allowed the exercise of liberty; … but it would be an indulgence or connivance derived from the spirit of the times, or from an accidental mildness in the administration.” Author also discusses inconsistencies of American revolution when American freedom was perceived at least somewhat consistent with slavery. By the end of XVIII century Cult of freedom triumphed at least as ideal if not as reality of everyday lives of great many people. Author allocates lots of space to ideas of natural rights and various declarations of individual rights, but somehow at the end of chapter she managed to conclude that these individual rights are not intrinsic part of freedom and democracy, but contradict these ideas:” Yet, the late eighteenth century was not just a crucial time for the dissemination of the democratic theory of freedom; the outbreak of the Atlantic Revolutions also sparked a powerful backlash against democracy. This backlash led to the conceptualization of a wholly new way of thinking about freedom, in which Liberty had nothing to do with establishing popular control over government. Rather, a person was free if they could peacefully enjoy their lives and goods—and that condition was, if anything, threatened rather than secured by the introduction of democracy. Thus, as we shall see, the concept of freedom was gradually transformed from being a weapon to fight for democracy into an instrument that could be used to battle against it.”

Part III: Rethinking Freedom
5. Inventing Modern Liberty
Author begins this chapter with reference to work of Johann Eberhard who presented the new understanding that:” when talking about “the liberty of the citizen,” one should distinguish between two very different kinds of Liberty: civil Liberty and political Liberty. A people had political Liberty when it participated in government. Hence political Liberty existed only in republics, and it was most extensive in democratic republics. In contrast, individuals who had the right to act as they wished, insofar as such acts were not restricted by law, enjoyed civil Liberty. This type of Liberty did not depend on the form of government; it could exist as easily in a monarchy as in a republic.” Author then describes polemics about these ideas and designate the ideas of individual freedom as counterrevolutionary and directed against democracy. This way she puts Burke who supported American revolution and opposed French revolution on the same side as loyalists who were against both. Actually, author does not hide unpleasant features of French revolution such as terror, she even provides some illustrations of the period contrasting these two revolutions:

However, she clearly expresses her position:” In short, in the decades after the outbreak of the Atlantic Revolutions, counterrevolutionary thinkers rejected the democratic theory of freedom again and again, arguing that freedom, or at least civil Liberty, should be understood as the ability to peacefully enjoy one’s life and possessions. It might be tempting to dismiss these arguments as self-serving and empty of meaning; and indeed, some counterrevolutionary publicists seemed to claim that any kind of government—as long as it was not democratic—was capable of guaranteeing Liberty. But other counterrevolutionary thinkers developed more sophisticated arguments, reviving a number of claims already put forward by ancient critics of freedom while also developing new views. Some ideas developed by counterrevolutionary thinkers proved so powerful that they would continue to be echoed in the debate about freedom for decades to come.”

Author then provides historical review of ideological struggle between the two notions of freedom in West European countries and America, consistently stressing that individual freedom is counterrevolutionary concept that complicates achievement of “true freedom” of democratic self-government. 

6. The Triumph of Modern Liberty
In this chapter the author continues her historical review of the period after failed revolutions of 1848. She describes how ideas of individual freedom became strongly linked to America where there were no army, police, and little bureaucracy. The America was considered a crazy place, which somehow provided the best living conditions in the world without anybody actually directing society from the top. Author then describes the Modern Liberty in America (1848-1914):” Around the turn of the century, in short, the counterrevolutionary conception of Liberty had become more widely accepted in the United States than ever before. While, for most of the nineteenth century, this way of thinking had been defended in public debate by relatively few, most of whom were disgruntled members of the elite, this changed in the wake of a backlash against democracy provoked by the Civil War and mass migration. Doubts about the political abilities of blacks and new migrants led Gilded Age liberals to claim that Liberty needed protection from democracy. That protection was secured by limiting state power, instituting countermajoritarian institutions, and restricting the suffrage.” After that author describes powerful movements against Modern Liberty in Europe (1880-1945) that led to Soviet communism that author describes with some sympathy and fascism that author just briefly mentions.  The last part of this chapter is description of reincarnation of individual freedom ideas as “negative freedom”, strongly supported in America after WWII despite massive expansion of “positive freedom” of the New Deal and strong support of government expansion from intellectuals.

Epilogue: Freedom in the Twenty-First Century

Here author repeats her central thesis that traditional historical understanding of freedom is popular self-governance, but the new understanding of freedom as freedom of individual in society is result of reactionary reaction to Atlantic revolutions: American and French. Once again, she summarizes the ideological struggle of the last two centuries as “democratic freedom” vs. “modern freedom” and laments that the former often considered thread to latter and the modern – individual freedom remain dominant ideal:” In virtually every American political camp, the idea that freedom should be identified with personal security and individual rights predominates. But perhaps we would do well to remember that there is another side to the story of freedom. After all, for centuries freedom was seen as a compelling ideal because it called for the establishment of greater popular control over  government, including the use of state power to enhance the collective well-being. In particular, we might do well to remember that, for the founders of our modern democracies, freedom, democracy, and equality were not in tension but were inherently intertwined.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

This book is an excellent example of sophisticated leftist-academical thinking that would make Orwell proud of his foresight. The idea of juxtaposing democracy/self-governance and individual freedom, one as the traditional and noble understanding of the notion of freedom and another one as reactionary, counterrevolutionary, and therefore somewhat illegitimate, strikes me as an excellent articulation of the contemporary divide of dominant American ideologies. However, the most interesting here is the author’s continuing lament that everybody, even leftist commentators on big government propaganda media such as CNN and MSNBC, continues to pretend that they kind of support individual Liberty. She would rather have them announce, clearly and unequivocally, that the “real freedom” going back to ancient Greeks is the unrestricted ability of elected or unelected politicians and bureaucrats to suppress “counterrevolutionary” individual freedom. It seems that for the author, an individual’s ability to own and control one’s own body and property is subject to limitations in the name of “enhance collective well-being.”

The author’s obvious frustration with Americans provides hope that America is still healthy enough society to reject the thesis of “slavery is freedom” that the author promotes as soon as this thesis is expressed clearly enough. As to the core of author’s argument of “freedom is democracy/self-government”, it is hardly deserving serious consideration due to the simple fact that there is no Demos or collective Self as thinking, feeling, and acting entity. Democracy and self-government are nothing more than the method of selection of individuals to wield coercive power of the state in hope, usually futile, that they would do it in some vaguely defined “common interest” instead of clearly defined, albeit always hidden, their own interests. It is clearly better than selection of individual into such position by birthright as in Aristocratic societies or by who kill whom first, as in autocratic societies, but really not by that much. Even such clear advantage of Democracy as ability of people remove unpopular leaders is usually overestimated if one look at reality of senators not capable to speak and in diapers due to fragility of old age as Strom Thurmond or FDR who become president for life for all practical purposes. The prosperity of America and high quality of live that is still the norm in areas not under leftist control, comes from individual freedom to do what people want and private property to do it with. If this individual freedom is lost, the prosperity and high quality of live will be lost too.