The “low-altitude economy” is a big trend in China. XPeng, one of China’s leading EV manufacturers, recently released a low-altitude flying car. Drone deliveries are becoming increasingly common in Chinese cities, and various regions are actively developing low-altitude transportation networks. Shanghai, for instance, plans to establish 400 low-altitude flight routes by 2027. But this is the first time a local government has monetized its low-altitude airspace
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The poorest US state's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is higher than Europe's top five economies, except for Germany.
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The poorest US state's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is higher than Europe's top five economies, except for Germany.
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Biden is sending billions to Syria. Syria!
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Marx Rumination
Utopia is an imaginary or hypothetical place, system, or state of perfection, often contrasted with reality. (Definition of "utopia" in OED)
Magness on Marx's peculiar popularity resurgence:
"The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.
By every measure of its own merit, Marx’s economic system should have been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history – and for a brief moment it was. Marx’s Capital struggled to find an audience in his own lifetime. He died in 1883 in relative obscurity and with little following outside of a small band of fanatical leftists led by his friend Friedrich Engels. Even among fellow socialists, Marx was a controversial figure. He spent the last decade of his life locked in endless internecine feuds with anarchists, non-revolutionary socialists, and even other competitor revolutionary factions. For decades after his death, he faced credible accusations of plagiarising his theories from other writers. The Manifesto has more than a few arguments that strongly resembled an 1843 pamphlet by French socialist writer Victor Considerant, and Marx’s doctrine of “surplus value” closely follows an earlier work by democratic socialist thinker Johann Karl Rodbertus."
"The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.
By every measure of its own merit, Marx’s economic system should have been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history – and for a brief moment it was. Marx’s Capital struggled to find an audience in his own lifetime. He died in 1883 in relative obscurity and with little following outside of a small band of fanatical leftists led by his friend Friedrich Engels. Even among fellow socialists, Marx was a controversial figure. He spent the last decade of his life locked in endless internecine feuds with anarchists, non-revolutionary socialists, and even other competitor revolutionary factions. For decades after his death, he faced credible accusations of plagiarising his theories from other writers. The Manifesto has more than a few arguments that strongly resembled an 1843 pamphlet by French socialist writer Victor Considerant, and Marx’s doctrine of “surplus value” closely follows an earlier work by democratic socialist thinker Johann Karl Rodbertus."
Marx's failures have been examined to exhaustion. There are basic overarching truths. The essence of every utopian dream is the emphasis on results over process. Even the great revolutionary Christian promise hinges upon self-sacrifice. Social utopias, however, always involve the sacrifice of others. That process is arbitrary and messy---and often horrible. It is that process that revolutionary prophets downplay, preferring the wonderful arcadian endpoint over the mass grave intermediary.
There are so many examples of utopian failures that it's hard to imagine people would not be adequately immunized. Maybe that's the reason that utopians uniformly dismiss or change history. And allows for the greatest of Marxian ironies as Marxism claims its birth in the analysis of history.
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