12 Comments
Oct 24, 2022Liked by Brink Lindsey

Fantastic article and Substack overall. One question I am trying to dig into is - who is working to address some of these challenges? In other words, for those who want to be part of a positive solution where can we direct our attentions?

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Really excellent. Keep recommending books too please.

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Oct 6, 2022Liked by Brink Lindsey

Thanks for this. As an innate capitalism fan, I know I will gain some useful perspective along the way. I have a quick question though. You have a quick little dig against factory farming but it seems to me that factory farming has been one of the big success stories of the past century, increasing production at a tremendous scale and enabling us to feed many more people than we would have thought possible.

Wouldn’t we want to keep that? Are you worried about environmental impacts? Or perhaps you’re focused on animal welfare? Just curious.

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It would be useful to address the question: is part of the crisis a decline in future orientation, i.e. a decine in our cultural desire, or ability to coordinate, to lay foundations for a much better world for our children? Subquestions would include:

-- How would we measure whether this is occurring?

-- What is known about whether and how future orientation varies across cultures and times?

-- If future orientation is declining, do we have any clues as to why or what would fix it?

-- If future orientation is not declining, how do we explain the extreme difficulty of coordinating on pretty obvious investment areas, e.g. pandemic prevention, pollution reduction, healthspan and cognitive capacity extension, which have very high 50-100 year ROI we are "leaving on the table"? Is it just that these are harder coordination problems somehow than our ancestors faced and we need to up our game?

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