Ideas Having Sex: Governance Edition
I join Chris Kaufmann for an in-depth conversation about political decentralization and conceptual coitus in politics’s bed (without permission).
But the greatest impact of an increasing-return wave comes long after the technology is invented. It comes when the technology is democratized. Gutenberg's printing press took decades to generate the Reformation. Today's container ships go not much faster than a 19th-century steamship, and today's Internet sends each pulse a little quicker than a 19th-century telegraph—but everybody is using them, not just the rich. Jets travel at the same speeds they did in the 1970s, but budget airlines are new. So what is the flywheel of the perpetual innovation machine that drives the modern world? Why has innovation become routine? How was it that, in Alfred North Whitehead's words, "The greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention"?
—Matt Ridley
Thank you, Lord Ridley.
Since 2010, when the idea of ideas having sex went mainstream, a few of us have begun to turn “the method of invention” onto places where it has been taboo—like governance itself.
Such is still taboo in many circles but is becoming increasingly less so. That’s one reason for The Grey Robes.
In what follows, I join Chris Kaufmann for an in-depth conversation about political decentralization, as well as ideas having sex in politics’s bed without permission. Kaufmann’s show is aptly named.
