I agree, a great article. I also agree with your feeling that we are not better equipped. This is due, in large part, to the fact that the growth system we now have (the world wide modern industrial society) is more complex than anything that has come before. The larger and more complex a system is, the more spectacular and devastating is the collapse. Furthermore the more integrated you are in this system, the worse that impact will be.
I think that last point - being more integrated in the system and consequently the impact being worse - is what he's getting at. But I think he's ignoring many of the realities of our world, not exactly his fault - his blinkers are a result of his upbringing and social immersion (and age), as we all have to some extent (some more than others).
Consider what he is saying with respect to employment though, and apply it to oneself. Part of what he is saying is that the management classes need to go and the structure to become flatter - fair enough. I've already done that as circumstances prevent me from participating in the local labour market, but it means competing in the global market place - and that means earning a lot less on account of competition from India and China (and having little job security). So my boss is me, but I pay a steep price (even if I do realise other benefits, I don't think they remotely outweigh the cost, I just have no realistic choices).
However, while my expertise (software engineering) may fare better than plenty of other professions - surely there comes a point in the process of collapse and simplification where there are far too many software engineers (one of countless professions supported by the cheap plentiful energy he identifies as underpinning modern civilisation)? That is my one area of arguable expertise, and while there are other things I can do, I have no qualifications in anything (including software engineering), and not a great deal of experience in anything else. The odds of my changing to another profession in the face of competition from people with much greater experience and pieces of paper are therefore pretty small, excepting to find some sort of a strange niche.
So what am I to do, should I become unable to afford to eat?
I have enough experience of poverty to know what the limitations of society are, and can read the writing on the wall well enough to know I would be an absolute fool to trust to the mercy of the "system" as implemented by my society (or any other I might be passing through).
In an ideal world I would control some land and be able to support myself fairly self sufficiently upon it. However the price of land in nations I can legally live is so high that I would have spent far more to do that than I have spent to do what I have done - and therefore it is an option that is simply mathematically unavailable (have never been able to afford to do it, just as I never could afford to buy a house).
That leaves the option of heading into the wilderness to try to survive with my accumulated resources and knowledge, or if unable to decouple from society to that extent - to fall back upon violence for survival. As collapse accelerates, in some senses everywhere could be said to become wild in the sense that law and order will retreat, but there is at least some moral ground (and sensible strategy) to opting out of violence as long (and much) as reasonably possible.
If you take my personal attributes and my resource level and place in society - violence is ultimately an entirely rational choice (especially without sufficient preparations for completely decoupling from society). I'd be curious to know what counter arguments he could make to that.
Think of the Roman Empire, a growth system that spanned the Mediterranean and most of Europe. When it collapsed, it plunged this area of the world into the dark ages and it took nearly 1000 years to recover. Meanwhile, China was unaffected.
Therein lies a reason it is a worse collapse by far than most previous - it's global in reach - and from a population base previously unprecedented for our species (far more scope for violence, far less places to run and hide).