In praise of the dynamic future

The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress
Virginia Postrel
Free Press, 1999

The title, modelled (unacknowledged) from Popper, equates the future with the victory of dynamism (defined as evolution through variation, feedback and adaptation, p. xviii; “a world of constant creation, discovery and competition”) over stasis, the static state, or even a planned attempt at change, “a regulated, engineered world” (p.xiv). In the opening chapter the author points out that the situation is no longer a simple Left-Right alignment: Pat Buchanan and Jeremy Rifkin are both against such things as globalization, NAFTA, WTO, and Free Trade generally. Both want control over people and processes they disagree with and, disturbingly, with the Left wrapped up in Conservation and the Right in Conservatism, the similarity of the two concepts results in an alliance of people in search of stability.

The plight of the superbureaucrat, longing to administer what he knows is good for other people and thwarted by the market, is almost comically enunciated by Jacques Attali, who fears that as a result “Western Civilization is bound to collapse”. There is an unwillingness to admit that freedom to investigate the unknown cannot possibly guarantee the discovery of anything in particular, only an attempt to make use of what is found.

That, hearteningly, things have changed from what they were twenty to thirty years ago is instanced by the Nixon Administration’s attempts to control the price and distribution of oil and petrol and Galbraith’s dictum that entrepreneurs were no longer possible. The book is very interesting and multi-faceted in a way that makes it difficult to summarize structurally and, although it is packed with illustrations and examples, I should like to have had an examination of “externalities” and whether self-correcting mechanisms exist for such problems as environmental degradation.