Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

Collapse, by the eminent Jared Diamond, is a very important book that you should read.

It studies the factors that cause societies to collapse, looking at examples from the past, including Easter Island and the Greenland Norse.

His thesis is that while many of the factors are outside the control of the society in question, e.g. the collapse of a major trading partner or global cooling, it is still not (or not always) inevitable that the society will collapse, but rather it the choices that a society makes in meeting such threats that will determine its fate.

The question then is: What choices will we make?

Read this book ASAP.