Easterbrook vs. Diamond

Gregg Easterbrook has some sensible caveats to offer about Jared Diamond's Collapse.

Personally, I suspect that Diamond worked on his book too long. By the time he got it done, history had moved on and the word "collapse" was less evocative of environmental catastrophe than of what has happened to birthrates among the productive portion of the world's population. Diamond's book will help scare bright and impressionable young people into childlessness, which is turning out to be a much worse problem for civilization than the deforestation that scares Diamond.