Review: The End is Always Near

 The End Is Always Near purports to be a history book about apocalyptic moments from the past. In practice, the apocalyptic moments it discusses don't feel that bad. For instance, the black plague reduced the population of England from 6 million people to 2 million people. That's terrible for the people who died, but as the author explained, 6 million people was the carrying capacity of England at the time! So the people who were living were in fact barely subsisting, and in fact the survivors of the plague ended up with a much better standard of living afterwards (for about 300 years) since the manpower shortage meant that the poorest of the poor now had land, and serfs could raise a middle finger to their lords if they were mistreated. Now you know why folks like Elon Musk are worried about a population decline --- the modern day oligarchs might have to pay a living wage if population declined sufficiently!

There's a strange chapter about how in the past effectively child raising techniques are so horrifyingly brutal that all persons were raised in an abusive environment:

Lloyd deMause quotes a piece written by the chief of police in Paris in 1780 estimating that of the, on average, 21,000 children born in that city every year, only 700 were nursed by their biological mothers. (Marie Antoinette, writing in a letter to her mother, noted after her daughter recognized her as her mother in a room full of people, “I believe I like her much better since that time”—which suggests she hadn’t liked her all that much before. (pg 25)

 I'm not sure how this has to do with apocalypse.

Finally, there's an entire 1/3rd of the book about the deployment and use of the atomic bomb, including the Cuban missile crisis. The examination of the mindset by the air forces involved at that time is interesting.

One item I found strangely missing is any mention of the pre-historic severe population bottleneck, where the human population we reduced to about 1280 breeding individuals. Obviously we don't know much about that time, but not even mentioning that in the book is kind of strange.

I did get interesting insights from this book, but I'm not sure I can fully recommend it. Maybe the author's podcast is more interesting.