Sublime

Joaquin Aguirre

In 1869, in Boston, on the 100th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth, Agassiz, by then America’s most renowned naturalist, would recount in a long speech the incredible life of his mentor, the monumental productivity right up until the end, the trip to the Urals in 1829, the historic series of lectures in Berlin, the friendship with Goethe, the new car

As Johnson observed, “[Our] new environment may well select for artists who are particularly adept at inventing new career paths rather than single-mindedly focusing on their craft.” In other words, it’s favoring people who can move horizontally and integrate vertically, who can create innovative empires, not just produce work.

The great driver of scientific and technological innovation [in the last 600 years has been] the increase in our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people, and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with our hunches and turn them into something new.

It’s about winning the war for popular opinion, teaching the world to abandon the old and embrace the new.

But what is now represented by a sharp, clean, static line between the skills of the two sides is becoming blurry and shifting. Companies are finding it in their immediate interest to create public goods and to offer free products and services. Governments are turning to individuals to solve problems and become co-creators. Consumers are increasing

Adam Smith, the great inventor of modern economic thought, living in Scotland in the eighteenth century, published his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776. As a great humanist, he observed the consequences of globalization with a globalist perspective rather than British partiality. (In his own work on moral sympathy, Smith spoke about the