How to Overcome Obstacles to Broader Entrepreneurship: Another Contentious Answer

[The following perspective on what needs to be changed to get us to a better Smith-Hume future matches the one in the previous post, but with an anti-right instead of an anti-left valence...]

"First, we need to open up the possibilities for economic entrepreneurship by decisively blasting out hierarchical conservative practices and values that consign some people and some groups to passive, acted upon status while elevating others to dominant, active, innovating status.

Second, we need to open up the possibilities for cultural entrepreneurship by moving away from a stolid, deadening conservative traditionalism that puts people into boxes, with only a few people seen as artists, scientists, and as creators more generally, and the rest of us classified as mere workers of various kinds.

Finally, we need to open up the possibilities for social entrepreneurship through thrusting aside conservative norms of deference and passivity in the lower orders in favor of feistiness across the social spectrum.  As to the theory that opening up opportunities for political entrepreneurship for those further down will be enhanced by diminished political faith among those at the top: The idea is a dubious one--there is a certain unpleasant, resentment-based quality to it.  But even if its premises were granted and we wanted to reduce elite political faith, it is reasonable to think that elite conservative disdain for liberal hopes and elite conservative market evangelism are bigger problems to be addressed than hopeful elite liberalism is."

Two observations: 1) I take it that the relative merits of the contentious center-left claim as to the way forward and the previous contentious center-right claim are only determinable empirically rather than in some more sweeping fashion; 2) it's interesting (if not surprising) the way the aspiration to take down politics a peg among the elite to give more space to the people has its own competing political interpretations.

 

Comments

[Bill]

I'd be curious to read your take on Charles Murray's new book.

[Wayne]

Thanks for the to-do suggestion!

I had a groovalicious reply all drafted a little while ago on my Bayesian priors and on how my pro-future gut would probably lead me to react negatively to M's new book in a way I react negatively to other political analysis (e.g., WTMWKansas) that seem to me too suffused w/ nostalgia and on how my gut is not necessarily linked at all to the truth, etc.

All of that was lost to a software glitch leaving only the above Blog-ese rambling typed at my top warp speed of 13 wpm...

Seriously, I will try to read and blog about Murray's new one...should you have a blog w or w/o Murray commentary on it, very happy to hear about it...