The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress - Softcover

Postrel, Virginia

 
9780684862699: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress

Synopsis

Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians laments our current condition -- as slaves to technology, coarsened by popular culture, and insecure in the face of economic change. The future, they tell us, is dangerously out of control, and unless we precisely govern the forces of change, we risk disaster.
In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel explodes the myths behind these claims. Using examples that range from medicine to fashion, she explores how progress truly occurs and demonstrates that human betterment depends not on conformity to one central vision but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error. She argues that these two opposing world-views -- "stasis" vs. "dynamism" -- are replacing "left" and "right" to define our cultural and political debate as we enter the next century.
In this bold exploration of how civilizations learn, Postrel heralds a fundamental shift in the way we view politics, culture, technology, and society as we face an unknown -- and invigorating -- future.

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About the Author

Virginia Postrel is a columnist for Bloomberg View and has been a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Forbes. Formerly the editor of Reason magazine, she is the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. She teaches a special seminar on glamour in the Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780684827605: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  0684827603 ISBN 13:  9780684827605
Publisher: Free Pr, 1998
Hardcover