the optimists can also be right. So I do realize how obsessively negative I am being. After all, among so many other good developments, extreme world poverty has decreased, technology is defeating disease, people are living longer and longer. But it is precisely those and many other kinds of technological breakthroughs that will go alongside (as well as intensify) destabilizing interactions among states and groups, and people and markets, even as new and striving middle classes arising out of poverty incessantly demand more and more of their governments. Middle classes are ungrateful. They
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