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Reading the book description on Amazon, I don't associate Constrained or Unconstrained with Conservative and Progressive respectively.
by brightball 6y ago
Reading the book description on Amazon, I don't associate Constrained or Unconstrained with Conservative and Progressive respectively.
- jsonne 6y agoIt's a great book and one you should truly read before passing judgement on. It's helped me rationalize the various current political and social issues in the US a lot as I've read it.
- brightball 6y agoI'll definitely add it to my list. I've generally found that a healthy study of psychology and economics, along with a deep dive into US history has given me a fairly clear picture of where things are today, how we got there and noticeable forces at work in public messaging/trends.
- baryphonic 6y ago"Constrained" is in the spirit of Adam Smith, Burke and Hayek (all of whom would be aghast at being labeled "conservative"); "unconstrained" is in the spirit of Rousseau, and in particular his claim that "man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains." The Constrained vision assumes that the best we can do is choose a set of trade-offs that are least bad; the Unconstrained vision assumes that trade-offs are illusions imposed by defective institutions, and so if we improved/reformed/abolished the institutions, we could eliminate the trade-offs. There's a lot more to it, so you should read the book, but that's the basic thesis.