Status Updates From Modern Times Revised Editio...

The final chapter, Chapter 20: The Recovery of Freedom, traces humanity’s leaps in science, technology, and sociobiology, revealing how understanding nature transformed life. Yet, despite progress, moral decay, social breakdown, and political failure persist. The warning is clear: only ethics, responsibility, and wisdom can turn knowledge into true human flourishing.

Dense, but interesting relation of the facts. I’m finding the authors conclusions interesting.

Chapter 19, The Collectivist Seventies, argues the decade’s crises were not accidental but the result of Keynesian excess, anti-business politics, monetary mismanagement, and moral drift. Europe recovered by rejecting utopia; America faltered by distrusting authority; the UN decayed without moral clarity. The 1970s mark not capitalism’s failure, but a loss of confidence in individual responsibility and freedom.

Chapter 18: America’s Suicide Attempt takes us from postwar optimism to economic decline, tracing the nation’s rise and fall through the Great Society, Vietnam, and Watergate. Ambitious domestic programs and an education boom expanded government and expectations but often backfired, fueling welfare dependence, social unrest, and economic strain.