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Does the rise of big data make Marx’s centrally planned utopia feasible? The answer is a big no.
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“As Bourdain himself says at the outset, with the focus on food and cooking, we can see what it is that drives daily life among the Haitian multitudes. He takes viewers to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Through this micro lens, we gain more insight than we would have if the program were entirely focused on economic issues.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
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Wharton was the mind that gave the most rich and complex expression of the glory and failings of this fascinating time and place. She clearly loved freedom, and despised impositions on the human personality, which is why she was one of the few literary giants of her time to see the power of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. At the same time, there is no form of freedom that can stamp out the failings of human nature; freedom is a beginning – a necessary foundation with which no human community can do without – for the development of a truly civilized society.
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There’s something about the physical experience of a spot like Cotswold Cottage at the American Institute for Economic Research that connects you to the deep past, in all its tribulations and struggle for progress, but also points to a brilliant future. Sometimes we need experiences like this to cause reflection of where we’ve been and where we are going in the forward motion of time, all while experiencing the truly permanent things, like the never-ending battle between the swifts and the sweeps.
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The hotel room in Sydney, Australia, didn’t have a coffee pot. But there was a water heater and some packages of instant coffee. Blech, right? That’s what I remember from the old days, meaning some uncertain point in the past. But desperation forced experimentation. I heated the water, poured the packet of Moccona “Indulgence” in the cup. No stirring. You know what? It was just wonderful.
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The post offices of the world are like the last of the dinosaurs roaming the earth long after evolution selected against their existence.
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As it turns out, many people have needs that cannot be appreciated or discerned in advance by intellectuals. Many times, they cannot even understand them. This has been obvious since the late 19th century, when the socialist critique of the capitalist market underwent a huge shift. The Marxists had predicted that capitalism would impoverish the working class while enriching the class of capital owners. When that turned out to be obviously false, the critique shifted: now the system was being attacked for providing too much in the way of frivolous luxury goods to the middle class.
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Markets require that people play nice. Give these same people a forum in which to argue politics and they become barbaric. Why is that?
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The rise of the city scooter as part of the app economy is a fantastic example of how markets generate solutions in the face of intractable problems. The more people tool around on these wonderful scooters, the lighter the traffic, the cleaner the city, and the happier people are. Note that no central planner came up with the idea. It has emerged out of discreet forms of market-based innovation using the best of modern technology combined with a perceived solution of a genuine use case.
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The interactions and feedback loops between invention, implementation, and full-on adoption is a fascinating process to watch. It can’t be gamed. It relies on something no one can control: the price system, human choice, resource tradeoffs, and case-by-case circumstances of time and place.
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Here is what is so amazing. It all happens without any central direction from the top down. In fact, we can go further to say that it could not happen under central direction. No government bureaucrat made this possible. They only get in the way. You need owners, marketers, manufacturers, prices, markets, banks, millions of people, and thousands upon thousands of rounds of trading across dozens of countries, plus many years, decades, and centuries of economic development, all ending in a sweet little healthy snack just for me.
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The years between 1890 and the Second World War were the golden age of the American piano. Pianos were the biggest-ticket item on every household budget besides the house itself. Everyone had to have one. Those who didn’t have one aspired to have one. It was a prize, an essential part of life, and they sold by the millions and millions. Then it all went away.
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