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Greg G's avatar

Thanks for another great essay. The part about your intellectual journey particularly resonated with me, although I've taken a different path. In particular, reading your book Against the Dead Hand was a turning point for me in understanding the incredible power of capitalism to raise standards of living, and that's been a guiding principle for me ever since. I believe that one day we will reach some approximation of a post-scarcity society, but even then capitalism seems important for human flourishing. In the meantime there is still a massive amount of heavy lifting to do.

I'm still struggling with the communitarian prescription, but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly why. Maybe it's that I still don't get the mechanism of action. If we take a person currently in a small town who seems deprived of economic opportunity and/or a sense of direction and motivation, what are their options now? On the economic front, they could get more education or move to a location with more labor demand overall - think shale oil areas or locations with lots of construction activity. Personally, they could join a social group or a church. It seems like we're concerned that this person isn't taking any of these options now.

With the founding of new communities, is the idea that this person will be motivated to pursue building up one of those new towns, even when they're not currently motivated to take their other options? Is the relevant variable that the new community feels less top-down than the current small town? Is the current small town particularly top-down? I just find myself confused about how social alienation manifests itself for a person now, and how that person's situation would change with this new homestead initiative. Maybe I need the short story version of the idea.

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David Richardson's avatar

I'm reading a book, Humanly Possible ~Sarah Bakewell (700 years of Humanism). You have a lot of the Humanist in your mind, a little Petrarch, a little David Hume, a lot of Thomas Paine. . . .

Humanist don't mind being wrong. Like the Buddhists, they are forced to take the "middle-way."

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