Why the West will loose relevance, learnings from historic patterns...

Quite a coincidence to have this interview as I was just putting this book on my short list to buy...
Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

In his book, Ian Morris looks into the history of civilization in order to uncover patterns that might predict how the geopolitical balance might change in the future. A bit disappointing, perhaps, his major conclusion seems to be that the West will loose a lot of its relevance in the next century (this is stating the bleeding obvious), but along the way he makes some very interesting observations. A couple of them I retrieved from the interview:

• Debt crisis might speed up the decline of the West;
• Wealth in itself will not decline in the West (though it might stagnate), but its weight in global wealth will undoubtedly decline;
• Humanity might reach a 'hard ceiling' of development for the second time in its history -this time due to the limitations of the use of fossil fuel;
• Big climatologic changes have lead to mass migration in the past, but the real paradigm change is that humanity has nuclear bombs nowadays (need to think through this one);

The book climbed a couple of places on my 'to read' list...