Sorry. I get the point that Steve is making and I agree with it. However, the blog post from Sultan Knish strays into errors of its own. He writes: "The production society is concerned with taking more territory, exploiting that territory to the best of its ability and then discovering new techniques for producing even more." and "In a production society, the role of government is to expand the territories of exploitation and to protect those territories. " and then "The sort of society we have is fit for passengers adrift at sea on a lifeboat parceling out their last crackers."
One of the comments he got right away pointed out that error, that capitalism requires conquest. I look to Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and many other places that succeeded well without conquest. Even Holland as an imperialist power held few colonies and very little European territory. Seizing territory is just another kind of rationing worldview: only so much to go around; we grab ours from them. On a more subtle point, as a writer, I make my own mistakes. This would be one of them. "In a production society, people compete for production. In a rationing society, people compete for entitlements." Sultan Knish closed his article with this: "A production society defines achievement in terms of production. A rationing society defines it in terms of control."
He used the same word to express two aspects of a topic. He needed another way to hallmark production, just as he used "control" to reinforce the concept of "rationing." It seems a minor point, but I submit that it reveals a lack of depth. Sultan Knish had the right idea at the core, but wandered off down a trail that went nowhere (conquest). I believe it is because that while Sultan Knish can perceive the errors in the rationing society, he has not been so cogent in his conceptualization of production, creation, innovation, invention, enterprise, entrepreneurship, risk, uncertainty, and much more... I much preferred this: "Scientific management, rather than predicting human variables, has done its best to make everything predictable, and a perfectly predictable thing is static."
That is a good expression of fact. Even though it repeats the word "predictable" it does so with a literary intent. (Put "repetition tropes" in your search engine.) I will have more to say about the Lifeboat Problem. I believe that are, indeed, on a lifeboat. Look at a picture of Earth from outer space. Ain't no doubt... But that does not mean that resources are so limited that our survival is uncertain. (Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 4/23, 4:18am)
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