Plagues and the Paradox of Progress

Author: Thomas J. Bollyky

DISCLAIMER: These are private notes I wrote in my public library app about the book prior to creating this site and tracking and writing about all my reading here. I am pasting those notes into this site to consolidate everything. These notes are rough, unintelligent, and pasted as is (spelling mistakes and all). Enjoy.

This was ok. I didn’t feel like he spent much of the book answering the question. One thing he mentioned is how rich cities had hundreds of years to deal with plagues and had manufacturing etc to support the boom in population once so many people stopped dying. Poor cities like Dhaka or cities in Africa, now have much less child death etc, and are booming in population, but don’t have the good paying jobs to support the young people/population. So the cities become nightmarish as they don’t have the infrastructure to support the population. Young people could become frustrated with no jobs/low pay etc and could lead to instability/revolt. That’s basically all I remember learning from the book.