“Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull for life to go in the common

Let Them Eat Cake - Dreams of Electric Sheep

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2021-06-08 11:30:09

“Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull for life to go in the common way.”

Since world war II, some might say society has been on a steady march upward. Poverty has declined by orders of magnitude, healthcare – despite its Kafkaesque implementation – has become nearly ubiquitous, and farmers in Burkina Faso have more computing power in their shoddy shacks today than the entire world had in 1950. That sounds excellent, right?

Well, that’s one version; the other is less glamorous. In this world, the rise of the technocrat after the second world war led to a valorization of statistics über alle – even at the expense of the people’s wellbeing. And, in the government’s interest, anything that couldn’t be measured, didn’t matter: we can’t precisely measure life satisfaction, but we can quantify GDP per capita, which as we know can be easily faked.

So, these technocrats replaced self-sufficiency – national sovereignty and personal independence – with efficiency, and regulatory capture coupled with nefarious financialization ensured that the same bureaucrats would get wealthy over and over again. They were truly men for all markets.

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