Sublime

The most obvious benefits will flow to the “cognitive elite,” who will increasingly operate outside political boundaries. They are already equally at home in Frankfurt, London, New York, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.

But just as we see with the most successful entrepreneurs, the state could regain its effectiveness by sealing an alliance with the most potent party of the day, the multitude. Building this alliance starts by providing the multitude with what they want: fairness and quality at scale. And the problem is that instead of improving, the quality of pub

If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and

what really makes societies tick, now and in the future, is not just the surface facts of GDP, institutions or law, though these are important. Instead, a subtler mix of norms, dispositions and cultures, in their widest sense, helps people and places to make sense of their world and how to solve their problems. These can be thought of as an equival

Social Darwinism and neo-liberal meritocracy create the impression that they favour the individual who is naturally the best. He or she would have made it anyway; we are just giving nature a helping hand to speed the ‘fittest’ up the ladder. But the reality is somewhat different. Both social Darwinists and meritocratists themselves determine who is

Now, it’s one thing to be wrong, or to have a view of the world that misses out on something important. But, argues Scott, because the state is powerful, its misperceptions of the world often take physical form, producing well-meaning but clumsy and oppressive modernist schemes that ignore local knowledge and stifle local autonomy.

In 1945 only the lucky few could be called citizens of a free country. Today, 39 percent of the world’s population has political freedom, another 24 percent has partial freedom, and 74 percent of the world’s 195 nations are at least free enough to give Classical Liberalism a try.

Maybe more important than knowing that for sure right now is knowing what the new rules of the road should be for a political economy that is both pro-working-class and globalized.