{"id":6040,"date":"2015-02-26T07:01:47","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T12:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6040"},"modified":"2015-02-26T07:01:47","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T12:01:47","slug":"the-externality-trap-or-how-progress-commits-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=6040","title":{"rendered":"The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"post-title entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2015\/02\/the-externality-trap-or-how-progress.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>I&#8217;ve commented more than once in these essays about the cooperative dimension of writing:\u00a0\u00a0the way that even the most solitary of writers inevitably takes part in what Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the flow of ideas and insights across the centuries that\u2019s responsible for most of what we call culture. Sometimes that conversation takes place second- or third-hand\u2014for example, when ideas from two old books collide in an author\u2019s mind and give rise to a third book, which will eventually carry the fusion to someone else further down the stream of time\u2014but sometimes it\u2019s far more direct.<\/p>\n<p>Last week\u2019s post here brought an example of the latter kind. My attempt to cut through the ambiguities surrounding that slippery word \u201cprogress\u201d sparked a lively discussion on the comments page of my blog about just exactly what counted as progress, what factors made one change \u201cprogressive\u201d while another was denied that label. In the midst of it all, one of my readers\u2014tip of the archdruidical hat to Jonathan\u2014proposed an unexpected definition:\u00a0\u00a0what makes a change qualify as progress, he suggested, is that it increases the externalization of costs.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been thinking about that definition since Jonathan proposed it, and it seems to me that it points up a crucial and mostly unrecognized dimension of the crisis of our time. To make sense of it, though, it\u2019s going to be necessary to delve briefly into economic jargon.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide I&#8217;ve commented more than once in these essays about the cooperative dimension of writing:\u00a0\u00a0the way that even the most solitary of writers inevitably takes part in what Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the flow of ideas and insights across the centuries that\u2019s responsible for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[150,180,181,3797,1825],"class_list":["post-6040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-collapse","tag-crises","tag-crisis","tag-externality-trap","tag-progress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6041,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6040\/revisions\/6041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}