I would love to be 20 and either infatuated or causing trouble in this class. Your students are fortunate beyond their possible, at this stage of their lives, appreciation.
By this point I've heard the grand narrative enough times to get restless. It could easily be turned into a graphic book like Caplan and Weinersmith's 'Open Borders' (…
I would love to be 20 and either infatuated or causing trouble in this class. Your students are fortunate beyond their possible, at this stage of their lives, appreciation.
By this point I've heard the grand narrative enough times to get restless. It could easily be turned into a graphic book like Caplan and Weinersmith's 'Open Borders' (and it would be a very good one), but I'm wanting to boil your deck down to questions on which the future seems to turn - and I'm going to bracket the possibility, for the sake of this discussion, that climate isn't the question that eclipses most others.
When I perform this exercise I'm left with an observation, a belief, and two questions.
The observation is that capitalism needs culture, needs a regulative culture, that can contain its dynamics - but culture is an emergent phenomenon (this statement is my belief), not a software program we can somehow re-write and expect to operate according to our intentions.
The first question is whether any society can guarantee the history-defying rights that you (rightly) point out that people believe they have?
My second question is, if the answer to my first question is "no" (as is implied by my belief concerning culture) then are we not reduced to a set of high-level remedies somewhat like those proposed by, say, Peter Turchin? We can counteract inequality through redistribution, we can address the problem of frustrated (and overproduced) elites, etc. It's a short list and the lesson I took from it was that we really don't have any tools to address cultural fragmentation other than money and jobs. There are all sorts of cracks programs of this type may not get into - can 'place-based' policies really work? - but they are what we have, and using them requires some kind of faith that that culture will find a better path if the material bases are covered.
Anyway, these were my takeaways from thinking for a year or so about "Slouching". It's been a fruitful engagement.
I would love to be 20 and either infatuated or causing trouble in this class. Your students are fortunate beyond their possible, at this stage of their lives, appreciation.
By this point I've heard the grand narrative enough times to get restless. It could easily be turned into a graphic book like Caplan and Weinersmith's 'Open Borders' (and it would be a very good one), but I'm wanting to boil your deck down to questions on which the future seems to turn - and I'm going to bracket the possibility, for the sake of this discussion, that climate isn't the question that eclipses most others.
When I perform this exercise I'm left with an observation, a belief, and two questions.
The observation is that capitalism needs culture, needs a regulative culture, that can contain its dynamics - but culture is an emergent phenomenon (this statement is my belief), not a software program we can somehow re-write and expect to operate according to our intentions.
The first question is whether any society can guarantee the history-defying rights that you (rightly) point out that people believe they have?
My second question is, if the answer to my first question is "no" (as is implied by my belief concerning culture) then are we not reduced to a set of high-level remedies somewhat like those proposed by, say, Peter Turchin? We can counteract inequality through redistribution, we can address the problem of frustrated (and overproduced) elites, etc. It's a short list and the lesson I took from it was that we really don't have any tools to address cultural fragmentation other than money and jobs. There are all sorts of cracks programs of this type may not get into - can 'place-based' policies really work? - but they are what we have, and using them requires some kind of faith that that culture will find a better path if the material bases are covered.
Anyway, these were my takeaways from thinking for a year or so about "Slouching". It's been a fruitful engagement.