Flannery, Tim, "The First Mean Streets" (review of Monica L. Smith, Cities: The First 6,000 Years, Viking, 2019, 293 pp.; and James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, 2017, 312 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. no. 4 (ngày 12 tháng 3 năm 2020), pp. 31–32. "Against the Grain... made me look afresh at the urban world. Now when I see monumental architecture, I think of the workers who in many cases literally slaved over its construction. And, having been awakened to the concept, I see cases of near-politicide everywhere, from the growing inequality of wealth in our societies, to the taxpayer-funded bank bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis.... Over the millenia the ordinary people of the city have, with some... success, striven to wrest back control of their lives. But the journey is not yet complete: slavery continues to exist, and even in our modern democracies the wealthiest continue to exert vastly disproportionate political influence. [M]ovements like Occupy và Extinction Rebellion are the latest manifestations of a struggle that is as old as cities themselves." (p. 32.)
Grandin, Greg, "The Death Cult of Trumpism: In his appeals to a racist and nationalist chauvinism, Trump leverages tribal resentment against an emerging manifest common destiny", The Nation, 29 Jan./5 Feb. 2018, pp. 20–22. "[T]he ongoing effects of the ruinous 2003 war in Iraq and the 2007–8 financial meltdown are... two indicators that the promise of endless growth can no longer help organize people's aspirations... We are entering the second 'lost decade' of what Larry Summers calls 'secular stagnation,' and soon we'll be in the third decade of a war that Senator Lindsey Graham... says will never end. [T]here is a realization that the world is fragile and that we are trapped in an economic system that is well past sustainable or justifiable.... In a nation like the United States, founded on a mythical belief in a kind of species immunity—less an American exceptionalism than exemptionism, an insistence that the nation was exempt from nature, society, history, even death—the realization that it can't go on forever is traumatic." (p. 21.)
Weiss, Volkmar. (2012). Die Intelligenz und ihre Feinde: Aufstieg und Niedergang der Industriegesellschaft (Intelligence and its Enemies: The Rise and Decline of Industrial Society). Graz: Ares. ISBN978-3-902732-01-9. - (2020). IQ Means Inequality. The Population Cycle that Drives Human History. KDP Independent Publishing, ISBN979-8608184406.
