I am starting to go through the manuscript of my forthcoming book, paragraph-by-paragraph, adding in the full notes that could not make it into the print version...
NB. Heinlein's libertarian utopia is closer to a benevolent dictatorship. There is an AI secretly manipulating everything. He makes it pretty clear - to keep the tension up - that without that everything would quickly end in disaster from the protagonist's point of view. (And even so, it has a low probability of success, for an idiosyncratic notion of probability often encountered in SF, and explicitly discussed.)
Maybe the needs to be another book fleshing out, "But that social-democratic order did not pass its own sustainability test, and gave way to neoliberalism, which repeatedly failed to deliver the goods, and now here we are."
Part of the fleshing out is how the rhetoric of those who believed that there is nothing inherently social democratic in state ownership of telephone or railroads or petroleum producing companies or in having the state decide how many and how often trucks and airplanes could carry freight and passengers from point A to B or that industry C was more worth of protecting from import competition than industry D got appropriated by those who just wanted rich people to pay less tax.
stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.
NB. Heinlein's libertarian utopia is closer to a benevolent dictatorship. There is an AI secretly manipulating everything. He makes it pretty clear - to keep the tension up - that without that everything would quickly end in disaster from the protagonist's point of view. (And even so, it has a low probability of success, for an idiosyncratic notion of probability often encountered in SF, and explicitly discussed.)
Perhaps it's a Leninist libertarian utopia.
Maybe the needs to be another book fleshing out, "But that social-democratic order did not pass its own sustainability test, and gave way to neoliberalism, which repeatedly failed to deliver the goods, and now here we are."
Part of the fleshing out is how the rhetoric of those who believed that there is nothing inherently social democratic in state ownership of telephone or railroads or petroleum producing companies or in having the state decide how many and how often trucks and airplanes could carry freight and passengers from point A to B or that industry C was more worth of protecting from import competition than industry D got appropriated by those who just wanted rich people to pay less tax.
Karl Polanyi
stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.
Is this a rhyming version of Karl?