The Conservative Futurist

Read this immediately after Abundance which was a cool, if not highly redundant, experience.

This book is a more aimless and repetitive “Abundance” that never really gets into the nitty gritty. I honestly couldn't tell you what Conservative Futurism even is.

In a sentence, I could explain Abundance philosophy. I could not do this same for Conservative Futurism as it feels like a redundant yet unspecified copy of Abundance with more affection for nuclear energy.

So much of the book is surface level I was shocked when I was 2/3 of the way through and realized that I still had no idea what the author was getting at.

Chapter 11 was better though as he finally started to get a little more in the weeds, but even there, it just felt like a worse copy of Klein and Thompson's book.

Now I'm not saying it's a bad book, it's fine. It just feels like one long chapter 1 that never gets to something more. Again, I don't even know what his claim or thesis was in this.

But to end on a positive, the biggest positive I have is how fun it was to read this as a companion piece to “Abundance”. The history in both books lines up almost exactly which makes it fun to see the dueling ideas for the future. The fun ends though when only Klein and Thompson provide a robust breakdown of their view while this book simply doesn't.