You seem to have become, like, totally Malthusian since reading Turchin, so I wonder if you had the same reaction to this as I did:

>As documented in Benjamin Friedman's The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth the norms which we might define as broadly liberal individualism seem contingent upon a regime where one perceives that the future will be characterized by greater prosperity than the present.

If you believe that, and you believe in limits to growth, that means that liberalism is a phenomenon limited to the steep part of the sigmoid curve that's doomed in the long run. Looking at the blurb for Friedman's book at Amazon, he wants exponential growth forever to make the world safe for liberalism, but whether that's possible is questionable.

If you believe that, and you believe in limits to growth, that means that liberalism is a phenomenon limited to the steep part of the sigmoid curve that's doomed in the long run. Looking at the blurb for Friedman's book at Amazon, he wants exponential growth forever to make the world safe for liberalism, but whether that's possible is questionable.

at the end of the day everything is ephemeral.... (heat death and all) transient states might not be a great proportion of the total time over any given interval, but they're where a lot of the action happens.

Razib

Are you familiar with the journalism of Daniel Ben Ami? His arguments seem to complement Benjamin Friedman's.

http://www.spiked-online.com/ind...e/article/2678/

http://www.spiked-online.com/ Art...000000CB04D.htm

Thinking about the Dubai case; maybe decadence is stronger than puritanism. Heaven-on-earth tends to undermine people's willingness to wait for heaven.