Loved this quote by Alfred North Whitehead:
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them".
By this formulation, civilization is about being able to drink water out of a tap without worrying about infectious diseases. It is about being able to click I Agree to credit card or iTunes terms and conditions without worrying about nasties lurking in the fine print.
The Schengen Agreement, which makes possible paper free travel between 25 countries in Western Europe, is an advance for civilization. That feels like a more important standard than some pseudo-scientific "cost benefit analysis".
By contract, the American tax code - the 70000 page document which keeps an army of tax lawyers in profitable (but profoundly unfulfilling) employment – is not just a drag on the world economy. It is an assault on civilization itself.
2 comments:
Love the definition. Makes me wonder what activities, like the tax code, are drags on civilisation. I wonder if you can be as general as 'anything that gets an economic rent', at least in the long term. Take itunes - in the short term it fulfils the criteria. In the longer term you end up locked in
Hi Greg. I too wonder about stuff like iTunes, or even Google or Facebook. I'm not sure what exactly I'm signing up to, and whether it will feel "fair" a few years from now. But at least, at some level, they're creating something intuitive and easy to use.
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