To what extent do you think the anti democratic pro technocratic vision has moved sales? The audience seems to be just those who want to run the world benevolently and who believe that at the end of the day (and maybe even the beginning) it is the smart and talented who will benevolently guide the world best and everyone will live long and prosper so long as the greasy mob stays in its place. Sorta like Atlas Shrugged but for the nerdier more benevolent crowd.
Newt Gingrich and Paul Krugman credit Asimov's Foundation as the beginning of their intellectual lives. DeLong's also a fan. Hari Seldon is a fantasist's image of Marx, and Asimov is one notch above Ayn Rand.
Sci Fi and speculative fiction are the preferred art of technocrats: illustration, read for text and not subtext. The subtext of philosophy is the history of philosophy, as the subtext of economics is the history of economics. And both philosophers and economists hate the history of their fields because it laughs at them. "Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future."
The only pulp fiction ever taken seriously by readers of what snobs call "literary fiction" are crime novels. Observation may age, and age badly, but it never becomes kitsch.
To what extent do you think the anti democratic pro technocratic vision has moved sales? The audience seems to be just those who want to run the world benevolently and who believe that at the end of the day (and maybe even the beginning) it is the smart and talented who will benevolently guide the world best and everyone will live long and prosper so long as the greasy mob stays in its place. Sorta like Atlas Shrugged but for the nerdier more benevolent crowd.
Newt Gingrich and Paul Krugman credit Asimov's Foundation as the beginning of their intellectual lives. DeLong's also a fan. Hari Seldon is a fantasist's image of Marx, and Asimov is one notch above Ayn Rand.
Sci Fi and speculative fiction are the preferred art of technocrats: illustration, read for text and not subtext. The subtext of philosophy is the history of philosophy, as the subtext of economics is the history of economics. And both philosophers and economists hate the history of their fields because it laughs at them. "Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future."
The only pulp fiction ever taken seriously by readers of what snobs call "literary fiction" are crime novels. Observation may age, and age badly, but it never becomes kitsch.