Dark Age Ahead
Jane Jacobs, author of the brilliant and influential Death and Life of Great American Cities, fears that we are embarking collectively in upon a journey into a new dark age, a cultural catastrophe. She sees learning being replaced by credentialism, and science supplanted by faith in bureaucratic verities. This is not always a closely argued book; Jacobs attack on the mythmaking of traffic planners may well be correct, but we need evidence that Jacobs clearly thinks too dull and technical for her readers in these decadent times. Nonetheless, it's a convincing and disturbing diagnosis.