Sublime

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

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One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows – one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report – and she didn’t mince her words. ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’ she declared in the late 1990s; ‘we’ve got to have an enough.’ In response to t

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Thomas Sowell

However, he continues, over the last 50 years the need for people to be “legible” and fit into a standard model of work has merely become “industrially preferable.” This puts government and institutional leaders in a position where they are incentivized to convince people that following rigid paths in their institutions is the correct path for ever

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The economist, philosopher, and writer Henry Hazlitt sums up the dilemma: In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for ye... See more