I'm afraid that this simply wasn't a book for me. Based on the title, I was expecting something significantly more academic than this. I spent the first digestible 200 pages or so thinking that the author had simply put pen to paper to conjure up some loose ideas without bothering to provide any robust foundation. But after that, the book just simply veered off the road and smashed headlong into a wall of platitudes.

I can't really say I enjoyed this book. I appreciate the goal the author set for themselves - to present the course of history of these civilisations/societies and see if a thread can be made as to what lead to their (inevitable) downfall. What I expected and did not get, was more rigorous scientific approach to the study of these societies. I admit I'm used to a bit of a higher standard when it comes to books like these.

I recieved a free copy from netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I think one of the most important things that needs to be pointed out about this book is the fact that it is written for the general public and therefore may appear simplistic in areas.
I think this book job does of offering topics in a clear manner. This book is a good starting point. It is by no means an end to the discussion.
I'm not sure that he completely proves his hypothesis but there are good ideas presented.

Nothing is forever. Every society turns over, just like every empire and religion and being. In Samuel Cohn’s All Societies Die, the idea is to learn what makes that happen at the societal level. For me at least, it doesn’t work.

The book attempts to list all the many factors that might cause a society to fall, fail or fade away. Cohn talks about the fall of the Roman Empire, which lasted nearly 800 years. It had been defending itself from outsiders and rebellions for centuries, but the rot was likely from within. Societies last for several hundred years, with outliers in both directions.

Some societies failed because they were on a circular path of needing more and more silver to pay soldiers. This meant a constant state of aggression and expansion, enslaving the conquered to mine the silver, which was never enough to cover expenditures as the empire became larger and more expensive to administer with every success. At some point, it must fail. Kingdoms often fall into this trap.

More recently, we can look at industrialized societies and determine that a matrix of factors interact to produce either growth or death. The same factors can work both ways: growth and decline. This is the book’s best value, and Cohn has produced a multistaged graphic, one page at a time, to show the interactions. There’s something for everyone in this graphic. Too much. You can pick a single cause from it, and draw conclusions that it will have domino effect all around the circle. Because everything is connected to everything else.

Another point is that societies don’t necessarily build on past developments: “There is no law that says technological skills and educational capacities cannot be lost. Much of classical Greek and Roman learning was forgotten during the middle ages and had to be rediscovered during the Renaissance,“ he says.

It also transpires that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is not the godsend we think it is. We measure it carefully and jealously. We rank countries by it. It is supposed to show the attractiveness of a society. But it doesn’t really help in the long run. Cohn shows that FDI has its biggest positive impact in the first five years, when money pours in. But in the following 15 years, companies take their profits out, reinvesting little or nothing. This alone will not cause a society to die, but it might be a factor in say, rising unemployment and consequent unrest.

A large section of the book is devoted to big government. Cohn points out that infrastructure is something that private industry cannot tackle successfully on its own. Without government spending, there would be no education, roads, drinking water, etc. Additionally, government spending pays off big for regions where it is infused. He gives the example of the greater Boston area, which is festooned with eight major research universities. They produce $7.4 billion in economic activity annually, including staff, startups, commercial licenses, etc. The federal government provides $1.5 billion to fund their research, for an annual return of 393%.

Cohn shows that taxes are critical to success. He says “there is no consistent statistical evidence that lowering taxes produces jobs.” But cutting taxes damages defense, infrastructure, science, education, crime prevention and with it, long-term investment in economic growth. “The benefits of tax cuts are ephemeral or fictive. The damage from tax cuts is both lasting and substantive.”

He posits that a decline in taxes leads to ineffective civil servants, which leads to corruption and the decline of government itself. “If you don’t like big government now, you will like it even less when it goes corrupt,” he says.

Oddly, he doesn’t also show that so-called free markets are anything but, except for the regulation, promotion and subsidies from government. Markets, mercantilism and trade would be a significant factor in the ascent and decline of societies, I would have thought. But Cohn doesn’t mention them. This is the kind of incomplete analysis that makes the book less than comprehensive or authoritative to me.

He also likes to toss off quick facts that are anything but. In discussing religion, he dismisses criticism of Islam by offering that several Islamic countries are peaceful, such as Morocco, Malaysia and Azerbaijan. Well, Morocco is a repressive kingdom constantly putting down protests and rebellions while denying rights. Free speech is nonexistent. Malaysia is so unequal it actually represses Chinese Malaysians, right in the constitution. Azerbaijan is in the midst of a thorough ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh, removing Armenians wholesale. They have been offered a single, long road out towards Armenia, on which they will not be shot, having to leave behind everything they built over the past thousand years. These examples of internal terrorism are nothing to make positive examples of. So Cohn’s point is far from taken.

Cohn is very big on landlessness as a major factor in the decline into chaos. But we are in a different era, when most people do not own land and still manage to live well in the middle and upper classes. The vast majority of people live in cities now. They rent or own apartments, not land. It is not upsetting to them, and they don’t take to the streets over it. It does not mean they have nothing to lose, like it did in the middle ages. His analysis does not take our current society into account at all.

He also has capitalism itself as a factor. But unlike most analyses, Cohn’s looks at booms and busts as running out of innovation. “Busts occur when the engineering of a given product becomes so well understood that no new improvements can be made,” he says. That ignores government overspending, inflation, kleptocracy, inequality, overtaxation, inflation, deflation, financial fraud and a host of other causes that are well documented for recessions and depressions.

But my biggest complaint is that Cohn does not ever show that any of his factors have combined to bring down a society. He never offers any proof. He never cites an example. At no point in the narrative of his factors does he say this is what caused the end of Norse society, or Mayan society or Egyptian society. Readers are left to figure out how, if at all, any of his factors have impacted any society anywhere, ever. This, to me, is the top weakness of what is a weak book. If one of his students had presented him a paper written this way, I’m sure Cohn would have failed him or her on the spot. From All Societies Die, readers cannot see societies die.

David Wineberg