Yes, but under the Neoliberal Dispensation everything is best run as a business with the best way to judge the worth of everything is via a spreadsheet.
This assumes the problem is a shortage of competent rulers. It isn't. The problem is the belief that society needs rulers in the first place.
Cities don't decline because politicians lack the right training manual. They decline because governments distort prices, inflate the currency, restrict housing, regulate enterprise, and replace voluntary solutions with political ones.
Every generation promises better planners, smarter bureaucrats, and more capable administrators. Yet the result is always the same: more spending, more regulation, more centralisation, and less freedom.
The answer isn't to produce a better class of rulers. It's to reduce the power of rulers altogether. A society of free people does not need experts to organise every aspect of life. It needs politicians humble enough to leave peaceful people alone.
I enjoyed this, but found these sentences mystifying: "The reply to that is constraint was never ambition. It was always capability, with a dab of will." Would love a clearer re-phrasing.
I think you are caricaturing 'technocrats', same way many pundits dismiss CFOs as bean counters. Good managers use spreadsheets to model the world, without mistaking the model for reality. They do walk the factory floor, they do sit with support staff and listen to customer calls, they do man the front line. These things inform their decisions and their models.
If your response to an accusation of "misplaced doomerism" is to shout, "it's not misplaced!" it's pretty easy to disregard the rest of the article.
Gen Z does seem uniquely sad about the status quo, the internet does an extraordinary job of making the saddest voices the loudest. But probably more importantly, if you agree that doomerism is correct, are you really the person to put an optimistic spin on how to find or train leaders of the future? After all, what's the point?
Later, you make the point about working with the "activist machines" as if certain places like San Francisco have never thought about that before. It's hardly a recipe for good governance, it's institutional paralysis through being pulled in dozens of different directions.
Great article. I miss Train Daddy
I am not here to argue. I am here to condense.
A CITY IS A SERVICE NOT A BUSINESS.
You DO NOT run them the same way successfully.
In systems theory, we call it "category error.'
Yes, but under the Neoliberal Dispensation everything is best run as a business with the best way to judge the worth of everything is via a spreadsheet.
Neo Liberal? I believe you mean Blue MAGA.
Its real you know. Just like the Deep State.
This assumes the problem is a shortage of competent rulers. It isn't. The problem is the belief that society needs rulers in the first place.
Cities don't decline because politicians lack the right training manual. They decline because governments distort prices, inflate the currency, restrict housing, regulate enterprise, and replace voluntary solutions with political ones.
Every generation promises better planners, smarter bureaucrats, and more capable administrators. Yet the result is always the same: more spending, more regulation, more centralisation, and less freedom.
The answer isn't to produce a better class of rulers. It's to reduce the power of rulers altogether. A society of free people does not need experts to organise every aspect of life. It needs politicians humble enough to leave peaceful people alone.
I enjoyed this, but found these sentences mystifying: "The reply to that is constraint was never ambition. It was always capability, with a dab of will." Would love a clearer re-phrasing.
In other words; sinecures, red tape, and basic order.
I think you are caricaturing 'technocrats', same way many pundits dismiss CFOs as bean counters. Good managers use spreadsheets to model the world, without mistaking the model for reality. They do walk the factory floor, they do sit with support staff and listen to customer calls, they do man the front line. These things inform their decisions and their models.
If your response to an accusation of "misplaced doomerism" is to shout, "it's not misplaced!" it's pretty easy to disregard the rest of the article.
Gen Z does seem uniquely sad about the status quo, the internet does an extraordinary job of making the saddest voices the loudest. But probably more importantly, if you agree that doomerism is correct, are you really the person to put an optimistic spin on how to find or train leaders of the future? After all, what's the point?
Later, you make the point about working with the "activist machines" as if certain places like San Francisco have never thought about that before. It's hardly a recipe for good governance, it's institutional paralysis through being pulled in dozens of different directions.