Doctorow, well alright. I’ll add Little Brother to the list.

On the creative destruction front, Wikipedia gives us this clip from Danny De Vito in Other People’s Money. Doctorow’s business exec mouthpiece uses the same kind of language, framing the restructuring as a kind of progressive, libertarian inevitability … yielding to the “tide of history” … with press conference showboating that draws heavily on the image of the entrepreneurial multitude, as seen in developing world microfinance & the rhetorics of crowdsourcing.

Later, when it all goes under, the same character admits to a certain amount of bullshitting -

“I’ve been standing on the bridge of this sinking ship with my biggest smile pasted on for two consecutive quarters now. I’ve thrown out the most impressive reality distortion field the business world has ever seen. Just because I’m giving up doesn’t mean I gave up without a fight.”

On the Perez vs. Mokyr front, I haven’t properly read either, but it looks as if they’re working from a similar base. Perez limits her analysis to developments since the Industrial Revolution, and focuses on the relationship between & movements of financial and productive capital over the course of a K-wave. Or something. It’s a bit more of a spatial model, with little diagrams emphasing social reproduction and repetition, than a historical overview.

And, regarding Doctorow, I’d heartily recommend Little Brother as a point of entry. It’s a little OTT and, well, convenient at times, but – for a kids book – the central message is pretty powerful.

*exhales*

The thought that grabbed my attention is “the ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontiers.” You lost me at “Kondatriev”

I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure, unsustainability and its relation to Schumpeterian philosophy (which I definitely swear by: see my portrait of creative destruction… I have a bunch of related posts). The best introduction to Schumpeterian techno-economic thought I’ve seen is Joel Mokyr’s “The Lever of Riches” which basically makes a lot of the case in that Perez extract. I wonder what the new stuff is in Perez that goes beyond Mokyr.

Most people who are interested in sustainability come at it from a preservation mindset, which derives from the deeply flawed notion of nature as a beautifully stable thing.

Creative-destruction OTOH, has elements of libertarian and business-conservative thinking. So how do you reconcile the 2? I think sustainability has to be divorced conceptually from stability/unchangingness. Sustainability is the art of leaping from one meta-technological life creative-destruction cycle to another without triggering species extinction. The nonzero risk of extinction at every leap is a necessary attribute of Schumpeterian dynamics, since that is essentially a modified social Darwinism.

I didn’t get a good sense of Doctorow’s views from your quasi-review. He’s one writer I’ve avoided reading since something about him vaguely turns me off. Maybe it is the little-guy rhetoric implicit in titles like “here comes everybody”