I applaud your article and look forward to others in the series.
I think it is sufficient for an article to be useful that it highlights a particular important feature of something even if that highlight is not an original contribution. Your article suggests a bunch of thoughts I had after reading Matt Ridley’s “Rational Optimist” (which I very highly recommend to anyone interested in the genetic basis of economics and the extraordinary advantages it has given to humans). So these are not new thoughts for me, and probably not original to you.
But they are thoughts that I didn’t have for the first 25 years I knew something about markets and economies of scale and mass production. That last step to “no one makes anything they use” is a great one. “Sustainable” isn’t just inefficient, it is our dinosaur hunter-gatherer gene’s rising up and reasserting themselves against the much more efficient distributed economy enabled by trade.
This is a tough site. There are all sorts of things that are good that the karma-leaders on this board think are bad, and with only 8 karma to your name (as I checked) you could easily fall below the level where you can post your follow up tomorrow. If you decide to put it on a blog somewhere else, please let me know, I would like to read the rest.
I applaud your article and look forward to others in the series.
I think it is sufficient for an article to be useful that it highlights a particular important feature of something even if that highlight is not an original contribution. Your article suggests a bunch of thoughts I had after reading Matt Ridley’s “Rational Optimist” (which I very highly recommend to anyone interested in the genetic basis of economics and the extraordinary advantages it has given to humans). So these are not new thoughts for me, and probably not original to you.
But they are thoughts that I didn’t have for the first 25 years I knew something about markets and economies of scale and mass production. That last step to “no one makes anything they use” is a great one. “Sustainable” isn’t just inefficient, it is our dinosaur hunter-gatherer gene’s rising up and reasserting themselves against the much more efficient distributed economy enabled by trade.
This is a tough site. There are all sorts of things that are good that the karma-leaders on this board think are bad, and with only 8 karma to your name (as I checked) you could easily fall below the level where you can post your follow up tomorrow. If you decide to put it on a blog somewhere else, please let me know, I would like to read the rest.