Unlike Jared Diamond's formative 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel , which focuses on a handful of examples (and is increasingly contested by scholars), Goliath's Curse analyzes a massive data set through digital analysis . In the modern tradition of Big Books of human history like Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything , Goliath's Curse provides a novel theory of civilizational development . feels something like reading Thomas Piketty filtered through Mad Max . a strangely hopeful book.