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Notes -
Yeah, the track record of these types of works is bad. Prediction is hard, and authors who would write grand explanations of human history are almost always recency biased. Relevant examples include "The End of History" and "The Population Bomb" but you could pick pretty much any book in this category and it's the same.
That's not that these authors are uniquely wrong, only they don't have any explanatory power. They reflect the biases and thoughts of our current time, and will inevitably look silly in 10 or 20 years.
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