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Defending Dynamism and Getting Stuff Done

vpostrel.substack.com

Defending Dynamism and Getting Stuff Done

Virginia Postrel
May 17, 2022
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Share this post

Defending Dynamism and Getting Stuff Done

vpostrel.substack.com

Last Wednesday, Ross Douthat devoted his NYT column to applying the stasis/dynamism model I developed in The Future and Its Enemies to understanding Elon Musk: A term like “conservative” doesn’t fit the Tesla tycoon; even “libertarian,” while closer to the mark, associates Musk with a lot of ideas that I don’t think he particularly cares about. A better label comes from Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book “The Future and Its Enemies”: Musk is what she calls a “dynamist,” meaning someone whose primary commitments are to exploration and discovery, someone who believes that the best society is one that’s always inventing, transforming, doing something new.

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