Growthology

What I Meant to Say . . .

Some timely humor, courtesy of here:

And I totally wish I'd had this poster in hand for yesterday's post:

QOTD: "Though some kinds of future, I fear, can only be found in the past."

That's from Paul Collins' look back at Omni magazine over at Slate.com.  I never read Omni, though judging by the demographic description and timeline, I should have.  I guess all my allowance was going towards comic books and baseball trading cards back then. Heck, I can still remember when I heard a college physics professor talk about an "unstopable force meeting an immovable object" and I thought, Wow, he read X-men #137. Impressive.

The yawning chasm

“There is no making sense of the world we now inhabit until we confront the yawning chasm that separates our age from the vast bulk of human experience.”

- Brink Lindsey, The Age of Abundance (2007)

This book was less economic and more sociohistorical than I expected, but very enjoyable overall and in places extraordinary. Plus, Lindsey is a wonderful wordsmith. I notice this peculiar trend in some thinkers with which I have a deep affinity -- they are Marxist Capitalists.  It may sound like an oxymoron, but I think if you are honest about intellectual history, by which I mean having the internal courage to assess the rightness and wrongness of ideas and events and people, then you can't help but admire the real Karl Marx and his insights while acknolwedging his deep, almost unforgivable, errors. And I think Lindsey achieves this perfectly. Marx saw what so many modern Marxists do not: there is progress in the human condition, and furthermore that progress is essentially capitalist. The reconciliation of old capitalism's contradictions will be (and now has been) resolved by empowering labor.