Richard Florida strongly reasserts commitment to his ideas about a ‘creative class’ after Joel Kotkin’s assessment that “the experiment appears to have failed” : As in all economic transformations, the invisible hand of the market can only take us so far. The rest is up to us. This is not a time to complain about…
A detailed blog post on the philosophy of Ayn Rand at the Rotman Institute: For many on the left, the sub-prime meltdown, financial crisis, and ongoing recession are proof positive that the laissez-faire, deregulatory approach is dead in the water. Rand’s followers have drawn the opposite conclusion: the crisis is the result of too much…
In his seminal ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Walter Benjamin writes: To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes…
In 1899, Thorstein Veblen wrote ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions’, Chapter 7 of which was entitled ‘Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture’ and contained the following text: …Our dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only be expensive, but it should also make…
Fran Lebowitz on the distinction between public and private from Index Magazine, 1996: What could be a worse idea in the world than privatizing jails. What could make the whole idea of jail any worse than the idea of: Let’s introduce the profit motive. This is already a horrendous situation, and let’s let someone make…
From TIME: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,” Marx wrote. A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right.