Comments on: The Past is a Foreign Economy

By: Soccer Dad

Soccer Dad — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 11:02:29 +0000

If ... you must 09/03/2007...

If you haven't read Don Surber's Forgetting the actual victim; you must. The campaign for the driver of the getaway car was successful and his sentence was commuted. The general point still holds. People who agitate for the lives of murderers usually...

By: anjin-san

anjin-san — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:26:03 +0000

Imagine an egalitarian world in which all food is organic and local, the air is free of industrial pollution

I would argue that the world has never been egalitarian, there have always been haves and have nots. And the fact that modern medicine has given us much longer life spans does not mean that organic/local food & the absence of pollution are bad things.

We should embrace the benefits of modern technology while seeking to mitigate its negative aspects, such as pollution.

For Ben-Ami to argue that he is somehow one of the "few" who recognize the benefits of modern technology sounds like something one would expect to see in a freshman term paper.

By: floyd

floyd — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:37:24 +0000

Just imagine the year 2525,"if man is still alive". Will we then look aghast at our ancestors who were required to live a lonely existence, actually producing their own thoughts and decisions in a stark world of isolation called privacy.A world without soylent wafers where food had to be processed and had imperfect nutrition. A strange world where people had to be exposed to sunlight and even cities had terrifying areas known as "outdoors". Will our children look back horrified at a misguided "non-globalized" past where the people actually embraced "diversity" because conformity was not a simple matter of implants and programming,finally making the world a safe place to live, and completely democratic. They will each know,to the exact same degree, just how fortunate they were not to have been subjected to the 21st century.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:09:21 +0000

A few additions to the differences between then and now

In the federal census for 1900 90% of Americans listed their occupations as farmers. Now 2% of Americans are farmers. Only 10% are even rural—most Americans live in cities or in the urbanized areas around cities.

89% of American adults were literate in 1900; now 97% are. In 1900 very few women worked outside the home; as of 2000 77% of women did.

One thing to remember: people change from doing A to doing B because they think they'll be better off doing B. They can be mistaken. They can be mistaken a lot of the time. But probably not all of the time. Should give one pause in longing for the wonderful circumstances of some imagined past.