The dude loves to go on and on and on about the coming technocratic utopia. Given the track record of technocrats in places like San Francisco and France, things might not turn out the way he thinks.
I often hear conservatives shouting about the globalists and the deep state and other cabals who want to take over. I'm pretty sanguine about the whole thing. The cabals don't seem to know how anything really works.
"The cabals don't seem to know how anything really works"
ReplyDeleteI would extend that, to no one really knows how anything works. That is, in fact, the entire problem with planned economies of all sorts, or with believing any political parties who campaign on a claim that they, and they alone, know how to "fix things". It is simply not possible to control or guide the economy (or the culture) in any more than the most clumsy and ham-handed manner. The data needed to have in order to decide what to do is inevitably weeks, months, or even years out of date. And any tools you might have to control things are impossibly coarse, unselective, and uncertain as to what it is they are able to do. You might as well try to peel grapes with a sledgehammer, or remove someone's appendix by running over them with a locomotive.
And on top of it all, anything you do to adjust the economy or the culture is constantly thrown off by the fact that the they are composed of billions of individuals, all of whom are looking for ways to take advantage of the things that you do so that they can turn a quick profit somewhere. The best thing to do in most cases is just to stand back and let things work themselves out, because the chances of anything you do giving the desired effect are pretty close to zero.
I remember a book I read years ago (I think it was "In The Country of the Blind", by Michael Flynn), that had an interesting tag line that relates to this:
"What if there really were a secret society controlling the world -- and they were incompetent?"
I keep thinking that this isn't a "what-if" situation. There almost certainly are people trying to secretly control the world, and they are inevitably incompetent because this is not something that it is possible to be competent at.