Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost. Jacobs' arguments The following is a summary of Jacobs' description of the decay in each area. Community and FamilyPeople are increasingly choosing consumerism over family welfare, that is: consumption over fertility; debt over family budget discipline; fiscal advantage to oneself at the expense of community welfare. Higher EducationUniversities are more interested in credentials than providing high quality education. Bad ScienceElevation of economics as the main "science" to consider in making major political decisions. Bad GovernmentGovernments are more interested in deep-pocket interest groups than the welfare of the population. Bad CultureA culture that prevents people from understanding the deterioration of fundamental physical resources on which the entire community depends. Jacobs' stance against ideology Overall, Jacobs argued that the very concept of "ideology" is fundamentally flawed and detrimental to both individuals and societies, no matter what side of the political spectrum an ideology comes from. By relying on ideals, she claimed people become unable to think and evaluate problems and solutions by themselves, but simply fall back on their beliefs for "pre-fabricated answers" to any problem they encounter. Example As an example, which also tied into Jacobs' views on city community life, she cited the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which killed hundreds of mostly elderly Chicagoans. The "official" reason, according to the United States Department of Health (following a multi-million dollar study), was that the victims simply did not take precautions such as maintaining a steady water supply, finding air conditioning, or circulating air in their buildings. Jacobs argued that the study, in addition to spending millions of dollars to state the obvious, was flawed because of its inherent ideology, which was individualism. She noted that a sociology graduate student, Eric Klinenberg, wrote his thesis on the disaster, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, which proved much more enlightening. By examining the social atmosphere of different Chicago neighborhoods, Klinenberg discovered that many deaths were not dependent on individual factors,