we've allowed and encouraged economics to slip the bonds of politics. This has given successful entrepreneurs, corporate executives, bankers, and financiers an unprecedented degree of autonomy, with profit-seeking overriding political or cultural loyalties or restraints of any kind. Up until recently, most of us have hoped or assumed that everyone would benefit from this development — a rising tide raises all boats and so forth — but the reality has proven more problematic.
How economic thinking is ruining America - The Week - 1 views
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The world seen through an economic lens is a place where people are motivated entirely by instrumental concerns — above all by concerns for profit and loss, competitive advantage and disadvantage. When the government acts in a way to diminish profits, it is doing something (in economic terms) that is unambiguously bad.
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something that is economically unjustifiable may be politically necessary and even salutary. Unlike economics, politics combines instrumental considerations with non-instrumental ideals such as community, loyalty, citizenship, and the common good. A world in which these ideals have been sacrificed on the altar of economic profit-seeking will be a world…well, it will be a world that looks a lot like our own.
Among the Disrupted - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.
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Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.
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the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms:
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Andrew Sullivan: America's New Religions - 0 views
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Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.
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By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).
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Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.
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Among the Disrupted - The New York Times - 0 views
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even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science.
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The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university,
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The contrary insistence that the glories of art and thought are not evolutionary adaptations, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.
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