Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs and Steel fame, has written an essay for The Edge Society cataloging how societies fail to solve problems. My surface read is that this essay isn't particularly insightful. The essay mostly consists of anecdotes and I can't discern any real predictive power from it's findings. His major point is that, in spite of four distinctive ways in which societies fail, they've still managed to make quite a bit of progress.
And...?