Looking ahead to when, after the midterm, I get to humanity's true watershed boundary-crossing of 1870: how I now think I will present things, summing up the history of human economic growth to that..
I don't know Engels, but it is succinct, logical, and has many wonderful turns of phrase.
Someone needs to either consolidate or obliterate the world 'Socialist'. Russians could not agree what it meant in 1917, and it has only gotten worse. Now many Americans think the word means progressive taxation and a strong safety net (Social Democrats in the EU), some think it is forced equality, a few fossils think it means state ownership of the means of production, and for the rest it is just name calling.
If we ban "socialist," we'll have to reinvent it. It simply means ranking the public welfare first, ahead of money-making. It is what Brad calls "Polanyian." The problem is that the founding socialists grossly under-appreciated how difficult and inherently experimental Polanyianism is. It takes time and trial-and-error, and genuine (not cheap/ersatz/"traditional") knowledge of our species-being.
That’s a good definition of Socialism too. My point isn’t the definition but that a word with such vastly different connotations and denotations within the population is reduced to a form of miscommunication.
I like it and wish I were in the class. My add-on would be about the Marxist assumption that sociology is easy rather than hard. Figuring out how to tame the old elites and administer a fair and balanced and humane society of sufficiency was taken to be easy and obvious by the founding socialists. It isn't. It's actually an order (half an order?) of magnitude harder than figuring out how to turns 0s and 1s into low latency megaspeed communications networks. The Menshevik instinct at least pointed to that, but wasn't really equipped to explain it well, given the rude state of democracy and the lack of actual knowledge of human nature, not to mention (ahem ^^^) human economic history.
The nature vs nurture framework is missing. By that I mean the ways Malthusian life influenced the gene pool such that traits that we are born with encourage a will to domination. Stalin would easily have understood that. As would Darwin. So no matter how big the pie gets you still get oligarchs.
I'm skeptical that there is a gene for domination, much less many such genes acting in concert. And I'm more skeptical that there has been enough time during the era of domination -- roughly, the 8000 years or so since the development of agriculture -- for natural selection to select for such genes.
The peabrain ignorantly thought of how, in current and unfortunately in the past politics, our thought leaders are living in the past. Mr tDrumpf and JDee want the past to magically reappear. Their MAGA followers lust for the past.
On the world stage, Putin is living in the past glory that was the Russian empire and the USSR. Are Modi and Xi living there too???
As in science, will society advance one funeral at a time?
I have read it through several times and on each point that I had a « but what about » thought, I quickly realized « no, ino, he’s got this. » Like Michael Dawson, I too would love to be in this class.
I don't know Engels, but it is succinct, logical, and has many wonderful turns of phrase.
Someone needs to either consolidate or obliterate the world 'Socialist'. Russians could not agree what it meant in 1917, and it has only gotten worse. Now many Americans think the word means progressive taxation and a strong safety net (Social Democrats in the EU), some think it is forced equality, a few fossils think it means state ownership of the means of production, and for the rest it is just name calling.
If we ban "socialist," we'll have to reinvent it. It simply means ranking the public welfare first, ahead of money-making. It is what Brad calls "Polanyian." The problem is that the founding socialists grossly under-appreciated how difficult and inherently experimental Polanyianism is. It takes time and trial-and-error, and genuine (not cheap/ersatz/"traditional") knowledge of our species-being.
That’s a good definition of Socialism too. My point isn’t the definition but that a word with such vastly different connotations and denotations within the population is reduced to a form of miscommunication.
I like it and wish I were in the class. My add-on would be about the Marxist assumption that sociology is easy rather than hard. Figuring out how to tame the old elites and administer a fair and balanced and humane society of sufficiency was taken to be easy and obvious by the founding socialists. It isn't. It's actually an order (half an order?) of magnitude harder than figuring out how to turns 0s and 1s into low latency megaspeed communications networks. The Menshevik instinct at least pointed to that, but wasn't really equipped to explain it well, given the rude state of democracy and the lack of actual knowledge of human nature, not to mention (ahem ^^^) human economic history.
The nature vs nurture framework is missing. By that I mean the ways Malthusian life influenced the gene pool such that traits that we are born with encourage a will to domination. Stalin would easily have understood that. As would Darwin. So no matter how big the pie gets you still get oligarchs.
I'm skeptical that there is a gene for domination, much less many such genes acting in concert. And I'm more skeptical that there has been enough time during the era of domination -- roughly, the 8000 years or so since the development of agriculture -- for natural selection to select for such genes.
The peabrain ignorantly thought of how, in current and unfortunately in the past politics, our thought leaders are living in the past. Mr tDrumpf and JDee want the past to magically reappear. Their MAGA followers lust for the past.
On the world stage, Putin is living in the past glory that was the Russian empire and the USSR. Are Modi and Xi living there too???
As in science, will society advance one funeral at a time?
I have read it through several times and on each point that I had a « but what about » thought, I quickly realized « no, ino, he’s got this. » Like Michael Dawson, I too would love to be in this class.