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“The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg is a book that has interesting perspectives and it pursues the ambitious goal of describing the transition that our world is going through. Written at the end of the 90’s the book examines how information technology will reshape the world over the coming decades.
While reading the book for the first time almost 20 years after it was written, sometimes I got the feeling it pages were almost prescient… Predicting everything from Bitcoin to Trump. Even though “The sovreign individual” is not the most important book I have ever read, I think it makes a good job highlighting the cycles and re-cycles that humanity appaently cannot avoid going through every so many centuries. The average reader may though benefit from a good historical background, with major focus on the shifts from prehistoric society to ancient society, Middle Ages to Renaissance, and Modern Age to Industrial revolution.
The parallels between the Church in the Middle Ages and today’s Nation States are original and in my opinion well fit. Linking well how technological revolutions empower larger groups of individuals with the power of knowledge.
If nothing else, “The sovreign individual” is a book that will make you think, especially if you are interested in cryptocurrencies, the sharing economy, the current political developmente in North America, and the unraveling of the present world-wide political scene.
The authors in my opinion have a broad knowledge of what happens behind the scenes of the political power stage, where the average person seldom gets the chance to peek a look. Many of the predictions are scarily accurate and prescient, too much in a way, almost like the authors knew the things that would have come. However, the tendency the authors to proclive towards conspiracy theories in the tail end of the book, do make it so that some of their credibility is flushed away.
The real core of the book remains in my opinion the thourough historical, psychological, cultural, and technological analysis that undergirds the predictions they make. Those analyses are in fact both fine-worded and rich of insights.
I read once in an Amazon review that “Although written almost twenty years ago […] The Sovereign Individual is anything but anachronistic”.