In Jonah Lehrer’s latest piece for The New Yorker, he examines the work of Oswald Spengler, a noted German philosopher, and several other more contemporary historians who posit, and speculate as to the reason(s) why, America and the Western world are in a decline. Are the great principles of the Western world fading? Is the decline of America’s social and economic ideals inevitable?
This is not the first time Lehrer has written about a concept called the decline effect. A few months prior, The New Yorker published an article entitled The Truth Wears Off wherein Lehrer considers the presence of this phenomenon within sets of data gathered by a handful of respected science doers. » Read the rest of this entry «