Review: The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently watched one of the “Great Courses” series on the Plague. The professor recording the lectures introduced the times of the plague by describing society, breaking it into the ruling nobles, the clerics, and the commoners, while introducing a new and up-rising class of merchants. The plague touched all classes, but obviously in different ways. For instance, nobles might be able to move to a location with no disease outbreaks, where commoners were often tied to their homes. I found this simplified breakdown of society easy to understand.

Fast forward to this book, and the author does roughly the same thing, but to explain how he believes society is changing to be more similar to plague-era society, with the commoners maintaining their spot as the lowest class. The other classes are the clerisy and the super-wealthy technocrats. The technocrats are the 1%, the richest people on earth, the billionaires, mapping to the nobles of old. They are generally supported by the clerisy, which are defined here as the journalists and thought leaders that often support the technocrats, similar to the clergy's duty in plague time. The author also mentions as a separate group at the end of the book the small business people, as a group that can work with other groups at different times for different reasons. These are very much the same groups as plague-era society, changed slightly for the times.

The focus of this book is mostly to describe the problem of the world becoming more like a feudal society. There really aren’t any prescriptive solutions to the problem offered. Interesting bits are the contrasting of Chinese and democratic societies going forward. The author sees the Chinese way of ruling as ascendant. For those interested in how the individual fares in this change in society, the author quotes from Piketty’s “Capital”, saying inheritance is becoming much more important.

The author provides many statistics and stories to back up his thoughts. It is quite readable, and unfortunately quite believable. I tend to like happy endings – but since I am not a billionaire this doesn’t have one. Makes you think, and worry.

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