Great book. I finished it maybe over a month ago and didn’t immediately write down my thoughts, so my read on its base case is:
Technology progress has to compound, have noticeably hire benefits each wave, and you must keep pushing more and more, or you reach a point where you’re comfortable enough to stop growing/changing and you become decadent: “Life is easy. What else is there?”
Decadence kills. Stagnation is bad. Deflation is bad.
Ross ends the book by basically saying: we need to go back to the moon and to mars to ignite the cultural imagination and grow our way out of our malaise.