[13] The End of Growth: Richard Heinberg - Review

This starts as an overall primer on economics. If you know nothing, you'll get enough of a feel and conversational ability about the basics and history. It depicts clear graphs and analogies and is certainly seeking to be understood. It's a complicated topic where this represents the "easiest" way it can be talked about.The first chapters can act as a primer on the language of the finance world and how it was/is construed to beckon collapse.

The problem is that we're talking about the big bad world of financial markets. The language can become confusing in spite of itself and sorting through the players who had instrumental roles they chose not to play can feel overwhelming. I find a lot of the information redundant but necessary, but in trying to speed or power through you can find yourself losing information you may have thought you were beginning to understand. Or maybe that's just me and being impatient.

I'm tempted to call this "the one book you can reference" to get a picture of how the economy works. You'd just have to have the patience to read and maybe map out the concepts to make them easier to think about. Heinberg seeks to give context and perspective of many schools of thought, and in an already complex environment, picking up disparate points of view is difficult.

At some point it becomes too much information to just sit and read comfortably. It's like hundreds of studies and reports condensed into quasi-predictions about the future. Need a graph related to zinc? No? Huh, because here's one for zinc and 4 other metals. The book starts to feel extremely redundant using every example possible to show you irresponsible resource allocation can't be sustained forever, let alone be used to "grow."

I'm running into book after book that is "overtly academic." The information is usable, powerful, and damming. It makes the case, but just not in a way that you're going to tell everyone you know to read the book.