(Sir Thomas More (1477 - 1535) was the first person to write of a 'utopia', a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. ... He coined the word 'utopia' from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. It was a pun - the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means 'a good place'.)
The NYT has an article by Ezra Klein, The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting. Below is a segment. The Left's problem with Supply-Side Economies is, I think, accurate. But it has an underlying viewpoint--as does the referenced Bastani--that is worth reflection: what will make people happy and the world stable? Their answer seems to be, A Workless Paradise.
"The left needs to think as much about supply as it does about demand. But look closely and you can see something new and overdue emerging in American politics: supply-side progressivism. . . .
. . . [P]rogressives are often uninterested in the creation of the goods and services they want everyone to have. This creates a problem and misses an opportunity. The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit. That requires a movement that takes innovation as seriously as it takes affordability. . . .
. . . Supply-side progressivism shouldn’t just fix the problems of the present; it should hasten the advances of the future. A problem of our era is there’s too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now — artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant- and cell-based meats, and genetic editing — at the center of a postwork, post-scarcity vision.
“What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time — from climate change to inequality and aging — we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?"
The NYT has an article by Ezra Klein, The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting. Below is a segment. The Left's problem with Supply-Side Economies is, I think, accurate. But it has an underlying viewpoint--as does the referenced Bastani--that is worth reflection: what will make people happy and the world stable? Their answer seems to be, A Workless Paradise.
"The left needs to think as much about supply as it does about demand. But look closely and you can see something new and overdue emerging in American politics: supply-side progressivism. . . .
. . . [P]rogressives are often uninterested in the creation of the goods and services they want everyone to have. This creates a problem and misses an opportunity. The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit. That requires a movement that takes innovation as seriously as it takes affordability. . . .
. . . Supply-side progressivism shouldn’t just fix the problems of the present; it should hasten the advances of the future. A problem of our era is there’s too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now — artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant- and cell-based meats, and genetic editing — at the center of a postwork, post-scarcity vision.
“What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time — from climate change to inequality and aging — we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?"
But there is no shortage of "utopian thinking" on the Left. The Left always has their default position available: what if people were different than they are? What is more utopian than that?
2 comments:
ICHAN HAS ALLWAS LIVED IN SHADY SIDE
Don’t worry about people in PORTLAND, WORRY ABOUT THINGS CLOSER TO HOME.
Saint Tomas More had no idea what he was talking about, He wa from Portland
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