Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University, wrote that a self-regulating market turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s assumption that nature and human beings are ob
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Retail trade, we are told, is not a natural part of the art of getting wealth (1257a). The natural way to get wealth is by skilful management of house and land. To the wealth that can be made in this way there is a limit, but to what can be made by trade there is none. Trade has to do with money, but wealth is not the acquisition of coin. Wealth de
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
In the eighth chapter of its first volume, Smith made the following novel argument: when a landlord, a weaver, or a shoemaker has greater profits than he needs to maintain his own family, he uses the surplus to employ more assistants, in order to further increase his profits. The more profits he has, the more assistants he can employ. It follows th
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
One of the inevitable outlets for the intellectual energies and inventiveness of the New Class is, in fact, in finding substitutes for routine and repetitive manual labor.
John Kenneth Galbraith • The Affluent Society
what the French fin de siècle social theorist Gabriel Tarde called “the grooves of borrowed thought”71—patterns of thought that are unlikely to create any serious disruption of the status quo.
Micki McGee • Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
Fred Hirsch in his 1977 book, Social Limits to Growth.65 The richer we become, the more of our desires for non-positional goods, such as basic food and shelter, are met; and the greater the fraction of our remaining as-yet unfulfilled desires pertain to positional goods, which are inherently scarce.
Nick Bostrom • Deep Utopia
Today, material goods are plentiful but their ability to reveal or enable social mobility is increasingly limited. There is no longer a dominant leisure class; in its place the aspirational class is rewriting the patterns of consumption while simultaneously disengaging in conventional material conspicuous consumption.