We Need Usable Futures

Metadata

• Author: Henry Farrell
• Full Title: We Need Usable Futures
• Category: #articles
• Summary:: Henry Farrell argues that American politics lacks attractive futures, which hinders progress. He believes that the book “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson can help reshape our view toward a hopeful future. To escape the current political traps, we need to focus on the shared goal of abundance across the political spectrum.
• URL: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/we-need-usable-futures?r=4ej7an&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

Highlights

• One of the big problems of American politics - and of politics in plenty of places elsewhere - is that we lack usable and attractive futures. The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause. (View Highlight)
• On the one hand, as Dan Davies says (riffing on post-punk philosophizing), if you don’t have a dream then how’re ya gonna have a dream come true? On the other, no single dream is capable of foretelling the One True Path To Abundance (or, for that matter, any other desirable goal) so you want to have useful arguments between people with different dreams, and different plausible paths. (View Highlight)
• When an author sells an idea to the the world, people don’t just download the idea into their heads, just as the author conceived it. They pick it up because it can be adapted for their own purposes, or react against it because it seems to threaten something that they care about. (View Highlight)