The quote from Paul Shepheard, "Cultivation—the work of humans…is the human reordering of the material of the wilderness" and your observations on it remind me of C.S. Lewis thought on domestic animals--summarized and paraphrased, that wolves are cool because they're wolves, but dogs are reordered, and kind of a fuller expression of, um, dog-ness because of their intentional cultivation.
Also, thanks for the news on engineering a mosquito-unfriendly microbiome, and sign me up.
That one paragraph you quoted from Teles and Saldin's Hypertext essay is by far the most congenial to dynamism. The rest of the parts that aren't about political strategizing read like a technocratic screed, one innocent of the last 100 years of thinking about incentives and information and the hazards of government planning. It sounds like Robert Moses envy, or Chinese Communist Party envy, or Woodrow Wilson envy, or FDR envy. (Even its historical understanding is distorted--we have plenty of historical memory recovery noting that the "needs of the time" that the Progressive movement was addressing were the dilution of the Northern European gene pool by swarthy immigrants, the undercutting of the wages of white native males by all others, the unleashing of productive energy by capitalism and technology to transform the economy, etc.) That they constantly talk of coalitions with "business" but never use the term "markets" is a warning sign about their vision, which seems to be less about permissionless innovation and private property and contract rights to build things than it is about empowering dirigiste bureaucrats to run transmission lines through your backyard in the name of amorphous climate change concerns.
The odd thing about the essay is that the one area where the national government ought unquestionably to be supreme--defense and foreign policy--gets zero mention. The problems of sluggish bureaucracy and inability to meet the urgent supply-side needs of the moment ought to be sounding a loud alarm bell in light of current events in supplying Ukraine, building our Navy back up to a size that can confront China and maintain our other commitments, etc. Our defense-industrial base is bloated and sclerotic and our service bureaucracies are failing to meet these challenges. Let's see the authors address that stuff before they start telling us about how enlightened national bureaucrats are going to save the economy and the rest.
The quote from Paul Shepheard, "Cultivation—the work of humans…is the human reordering of the material of the wilderness" and your observations on it remind me of C.S. Lewis thought on domestic animals--summarized and paraphrased, that wolves are cool because they're wolves, but dogs are reordered, and kind of a fuller expression of, um, dog-ness because of their intentional cultivation.
Also, thanks for the news on engineering a mosquito-unfriendly microbiome, and sign me up.
That one paragraph you quoted from Teles and Saldin's Hypertext essay is by far the most congenial to dynamism. The rest of the parts that aren't about political strategizing read like a technocratic screed, one innocent of the last 100 years of thinking about incentives and information and the hazards of government planning. It sounds like Robert Moses envy, or Chinese Communist Party envy, or Woodrow Wilson envy, or FDR envy. (Even its historical understanding is distorted--we have plenty of historical memory recovery noting that the "needs of the time" that the Progressive movement was addressing were the dilution of the Northern European gene pool by swarthy immigrants, the undercutting of the wages of white native males by all others, the unleashing of productive energy by capitalism and technology to transform the economy, etc.) That they constantly talk of coalitions with "business" but never use the term "markets" is a warning sign about their vision, which seems to be less about permissionless innovation and private property and contract rights to build things than it is about empowering dirigiste bureaucrats to run transmission lines through your backyard in the name of amorphous climate change concerns.
The odd thing about the essay is that the one area where the national government ought unquestionably to be supreme--defense and foreign policy--gets zero mention. The problems of sluggish bureaucracy and inability to meet the urgent supply-side needs of the moment ought to be sounding a loud alarm bell in light of current events in supplying Ukraine, building our Navy back up to a size that can confront China and maintain our other commitments, etc. Our defense-industrial base is bloated and sclerotic and our service bureaucracies are failing to meet these challenges. Let's see the authors address that stuff before they start telling us about how enlightened national bureaucrats are going to save the economy and the rest.