Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of... See more

The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in

... See more

The most insidious feature of kludgeocracy is the hidden, indirect, and frequently corrupt distribution of its costs. Those costs can be put into three categories — costs borne by individual citizens, costs borne by the government that must implement the complex policies, and costs to the character of our democracy.The price paid by ordinary... See more

Instead, each person should be able to take the money they’ve saved on taxes and pay for the stuff that matters to them : their own art, their own private schools, their own concierge doctors, their own backyards. That’s liberty . I find this type of thinking counter to pretty much everything I believe, but I also grew up in a place where a lot of... See more

In western time constructs, time is a limited resource. If we want to spend time outside of productivity we have to have earned it in some way, we can’t just have it.