Talking to guest host Pat Lynch, Virginia Postrel discusses her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, and its relevance to today’s political landscape. They also discuss potential impacts of AI, the cultural significance of glamour, cheap clothes, and the Abundance movement. Lynch ends with the question: Will market liberals eventually find a home in America’s political landscape?

The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel
The Power of Glamour by Virginia Postrel
The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel

James Patterson (00:06):
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring series commentary on law, policy, books, and culture and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Pat Lynch (00:39):
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m Pat Lynch, a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, sitting in today for James Patterson. Today we’re talking with Virginia Postrel. Virginia Postrel is a well-known journalist, public intellectual, and author who has written four major books, was a previous editor at Reason, worked for The Wall Street Journal, is now affiliated with worksinprogress.co and the Abundance Institute. And today we’re going to talk about some of her work and some of the influences that she has seen throughout the development of progress and the development of abundance and this new agenda that’s very interesting. You wrote about this topic, sort of, in 1998 with your book, The Future and Its Enemies, and you make this distinction between stasis and dynamism and you argued at that time that that was a good way of thinking about the way that public intellectuals and politicians approach these sorts of questions.

(01:31):

It seems very, very relevant today. Can you inform our listeners a little bit about the distinction that you made in that book and whether you still think it can be useful today?

Virginia Postrel (01:38):
Right. Actually, I do think it could be useful today. Surprise! And the basic distinction is between dynamism, which is open-ended discovery and progress that is driven by bottom-up problem solving, bottom-up problem defining, innovation, and feedback, also. So not every new idea is a good idea, not every idea of how to solve a problem actually solves the problem. And there is this constant process of discontent also, because whatever you have, you see what could be better about it. And that’s one reason that this progress is open-ended, but it’s very much an idea of discovery, sort of a liberalism that centers discovery and curiosity and learning. “Learning” is what I say in the book. On the other side, you have what I call stasis and I talk about two different forms. One, which is the easier to understand, is people who really center stability. Their ideal society is one that doesn’t change and often they have an ideal located somewhere in the past.

(03:02):

It could be the Middle Ages, it could be the 1950s, it could be before the agricultural revolution. There are many different forms of that type of stasis, which I call reactionary in the book. The other form of stasis is more subtle, and much more pervasive, which is the idea of, no, we like change, we like progress, we like discovery, but we want it to look exactly the way we want it to look. And this is what I call technocracy. So this is a form of stasis that is about control. So it’s not about “nothing changes,” it’s about very directed change. And since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, technocracy has dominated liberal democracies. There was a rise of thinking that, “Wow, look at all these great things that railroads and steel mills, all these corporations that have to plan these giant enterprises, we should plan the economy the same way.”

(04:09):

And obviously looking back on it and especially through the lens of some of Hayek’s work, this seems obviously wrong, especially in the forms that you find it in the early twentieth century or late nineteenth century where it really is like every single bit of the economy would be planned, but it wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t stupid people saying this. It was people drawing the wrong lessons from the world that they were living in. And so I see this continuing struggle between ideals of an open-ended discovery-oriented society that is very bottom up also. So no one is in charge, no one is in control. It doesn’t mean you have no rules. You need rules, but they need to be very general and you need to be able to have nested levels of rules so that McDonald’s can say every menu has to be the same, and somebody’s one-off restaurant can have different food every night depending on what’s fresh in the market.

(05:18):

Just take a trivial example. So that’s the idea. And so when I was writing this in the mid to late 1990s, I was looking out at the political and cultural environment and I was seeing arguments around technology. Those days it was this new thing called the Internet. You had people on the left and the right who were saying the Internet is great and we need to let it develop. And you had people on the left and the right who were saying, “Smash the Internet!” Around immigration, people have forgotten, but there was a huge fight over immigration in the mid ’90s around the evolution of the workforce, around environmental issues, whether you should allow housing to be built in Los Angeles where I was living. Guess what? The anti-growth people won and we’re living with the consequences. So, you had all these distinctions and I argued at that time that going forward this would be a better way … Oh, international trade was another one.

(06:31):

Going forward, this would be a better way of understanding the political and cultural world. It turned out not to be immediately true because what intervened was 9/11 and foreign policy became much more dominant. And this was really an argument about domestic … In so far, it was about politics as opposed to the theory of how progress happens, which is another big element of the book, that sort of interfered, but we are now living in the world predicted by The Future and Its Enemies very much so.

Pat Lynch (07:03):
The economics, I think we can all agree that the free market approach, the bottom-up approach, Hayek’s been proven correct as compared to the planners, but the political piece I think was unanticipated. We didn’t realize what the political reaction was going to be to this sort of unplanned growth and that we crave that structure, we crave that direction. You said that this has been going on for quite a while. I mean, it goes back to Adam Smith, the man of systems. And so there’s this desire to sort of structure things out and make it more predictable.

Virginia Postrel (07:30):
Right. I mean, I said the early twentieth century, and I’m thinking about the actual use of the word technocracy and the idea of engineering society, but Colbert is … I don’t mean the talk show. France is the ultimate, it’s been this way since Louis the XIV, ultimate technocratic society for good and ill. They do certain things very well that lend themselves to technocracy like building certain types of infrastructure, but they cripple their economy in other ways.

Pat Lynch (08:03):
So, if AI is now the latest manifestation of this technological advance, whether it’s a manufacturer and the Industrial Revolution, the Internet, how is AI different from these previous manifestations of it and does it pose a greater challenge to those of us who support growth and support free markets? Or is it something that’s going to be difficult to predict?

Virginia Postrel (08:22):
Well, it’s definitely difficult to predict exactly how AI will be used, what its effects will be. I mean, that’s why we’re having such fights over it to some degree. But I would say that AI, getting it right is really important. I wish I could tell you exactly how to get it right, but I can’t because AI has the potential to be the ultimate technocrat, to be very dictatorial if we allow it to be. So part of the thing, I think it’s very good that we have competing AI systems, AI companies or whatever, people doing different models. I think a lot of the concerns around AI are really concerns about human nature. People pretend it’s really about technology, but the truth is it’s about the fact that every new technology, whether it’s a stone spear or AI is one that can be used for good or ill and some people are really bad.

(09:34):

So I think when we think about the potential problems with AI in big pictures, somebody has written, informed by my work, but not my work on AI, which is very little, that what we need to figure out is how do you protect dynamism in a world of AI? And one thing people look at is open source models, at least as being part of the infrastructure, part of the ecosystem (which doesn’t necessarily mean it can be the only kind) preserving competition, preserving entry, not letting one AI system sort of take over everything, which I don’t think despite the fact that people talk about tech monopolies and stuff, I don’t think that the system left to its own devices leads to a single system taking over the world. But I think there’s certain things that governments could do to make that more likely. Although even there, the competition among governments, China versus the US in particular might lead to more than one.

(10:42):

So I definitely think that the concerns about AI and job destruction are exactly the same as they always are. And my most recent book is called The Fabric of Civilization. It’s a history of technology and science and trade through the lens of textiles. And one thing that’s really obvious and people don’t know… people know about the Luddites. They’ve heard of the Luddites. Nowadays it’s used as a term for people who are sort of ideologically opposed to technology. The original Luddites were just well-paid hand weavers who didn’t want to lose their jobs, but what people don’t know is that those well-paid hand weavers who didn’t want to lose their jobs were benefiting from a previous round of technology innovation about a generation earlier, which was the original Industrial Revolution, which was about the production of particularly cotton yarn, spinning machines. Because having enough yarn or thread to weave was the bottleneck in cloth production and spinning machines broke that bottleneck.

(11:50):

And as a result, the weavers enjoyed what one historian called a “golden heyday.” A software engineer recently told me that everybody he knows who’s a software person is giddy about the potential of AI, but he is way upper tail and he and I suspect all his friends will do fine. There are routine programmers who may see the end of their golden heyday, and that is the process of creative destruction. I mean, you get productivity jumps in general, but there are people particularly if they’re at certain point in their lives who get left behind and that is a problem with the process. But if you stop the process, you stagnate and your economy and your society kind of dies. And I can speak about this. When I wrote The Future and Its Enemies, my profession, which is journalism, was great and now it’s terrible. So I have some personal familiarity with this process and I would say that things that have made the world very, very difficult for journalists have on the whole been good for the world if not for our individual bottom lines.

Pat Lynch (13:11):

So you’d say long-term, you see it as a cycle. You see it as an economic cycle driving a political outcome. But also you would consider yourself a long-term optimist about all these changes?

Virginia Postrel (13:20):
Yes. Long-term, I would say. Well, I’m a long-term optimist in the sense that I believe that if you pursue this, if you protect the really … We’re talking about liberal institutions. If you protect the liberal institutions and the process of discovery and this decentralized process of discovery, it is long-term good for people in general as well as having intrinsic value. Hayek kind of talks about it having intrinsic value. Progress is movement for movement’s sake, he says, but then he says it’s the way in which man enjoys the gift of his intelligence, this problem solving. I think it has more than just intrinsic. I do think it has intrinsic value, but I think it also has practical value in the way that people like Deirdre McCloskey write about. We enjoy this enormous—

Pat Lynch (14:19):
So from a utilitarian perspective—

Virginia Postrel (14:20):
From a utilitarian—

Pat Lynch (14:21):
Overall, we are better off as a Pareto frontier out there.

Virginia Postrel (14:22):
Exactly.

Pat Lynch (14:25):
Let’s talk a little bit about fashion or let’s talk about glamour. Let’s start with glamour. I think that before we move on to fabric. So you’ve written about glamour and I think I remember when that book came out and I thought, oh my goodness, what can this possibly be? But I found the book to be really, really compelling. Can you tell us a little bit about your book on glamour and what your view on it is?

Virginia Postrel (14:47):
So my book, The Power of Glamour, came out in 2013. And I always say it’s my least successful book, even though I think intellectually it’s very successful. But the reason it’s my least successful book is that people have no idea what I mean by glamour, just looking at the book and it’s not fashion, it’s not celebrity. The subtitle of the book is Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. So what I do is I analyze glamour as a form of rhetoric, a form of persuasion, a form of communication and I analogize it to humor. How do you know if something is funny? It could be spontaneous or it could be written by a comedy writer. You know because of the way the audience reacts.

(15:38):

You can’t write rules that will guarantee that something will be funny, although people have analyzed humor, written tomes about it. But I believe glamour is a word we can use to describe a similar process where the audience reacts with a sense of projection and longing. And just as humor takes many different forms depending on the culture, depending on the individual, so does glamour. What do you long for? What is it that you long to be? If only, if only I had that house, my life would be perfect. If only I had that car, if only I had that job, if only I could sit in a library surrounded by books pursuing the contemplative life, which is one of my versions of glamour, which knowing my personality has a major illusion in it, which is another element of glamour. Glamour, the word was originally a Scottish word that meant a literal magic spell.

(16:41):

You cast a glamour on someone and they saw things that were not there and particularly it transformed things that were bad into looking good. And so when the word came into English, first through writers like Sir Walter Scott, it was used in that way and it gradually transformed. But it always preserved that sense of magic and illusion and fantasy, if you will. And so my analysis of glamour starts with the idea that it arouses a sense of projection and longing, which is based on your unarticulated longings, the things you don’t necessarily express to yourself, but then when you perceive a glamourous idea, it crystallizes it. But then I also analyze elements that all of these many different forms of glamour have in common. One is a promise of escape and transformation. Another is an illusion. Glamour hides flaws, it hides difficulties, it hides boring things. And the third is mystery and mystery encourages projection and it also helps to hide flaws.

(18:11):

So whether you’re talking about old movie glamour or you’re talking about the glamour of aviation… aviators were one of in the early twentieth century were described as glamour boys. That was one of the first uses of the word and the way we use it today. Glamour is not female coded despite what people think. It is a human phenomenon whether you use the word or not.

Pat Lynch (18:41):
So, but it could be material or it could be—

Virginia Postrel (18:43):
It could be material. It could be spiritual. I talk about the glamour of nuns, the glamour of the contemplative life, it can be political and often has been political. When I was writing the book, I talked about Barack Obama’s glamour in 2008. Glamour is unusual in a political candidate because usually you have too much information for glamour. You have charisma, which is a different thing. And the way I distinguish between charisma and glamour is: charisma is a personal quality that the person kind of owns and it draws people to that person, to follow them. And then there’s a whole literature on the original spiritual sense or religious sense of charisma. Glamour is in the audience. It’s the audience projecting their desires onto the person, which is why you can have a … And I’m not saying that Obama was not also charismatic. You can’t get to be president unless it’s a lucky accident without a certain degree of charisma.

(19:54):

But he was very unusual because he was also glamourous as opposed to say a Bill Clinton who was highly charismatic, but people were not necessarily projecting all their longings onto Bill Clinton. He was more like a guy you might want to have a beer with or you trust him. Yeah.

Pat Lynch (20:16):
So it’s difficult. It is kind of difficult to define. It sounds a little bit like, you know, it when you see it sort of thing with glamour then. I mean, because you’re reacting to it and you are reacting to the audience, right?

Virginia Postrel (20:25):
Yes, yes. So the book, as I say, this is very intellectual book, even though it’s full of pictures and very pretty. And I do define, I create a definition of glamour, but it’s like creating a definition of humor. In order to perceive glamour, you have to be affected by it.

Pat Lynch (20:51):
So thinking about the world today and what we find glamourous today, what are the changes that you are seeing in terms of how glamour is, how we are reacting to different things? So this is not really style, this is something more than that.

Virginia Postrel (21:08):
No, it’s not style. Yeah. I mean, if you desire to be stylish, it could be. Okay. So one thing that changed between the time I wrote the book and the time the book came out (so that’s a very short period of time) was how people talked about celebrity and glamour. So, when I was writing the book, people would ask me things like, how can there be glamour when celebrities make sex tapes? I would say, well, not all celebrities make sex tapes. There are glamourous celebrities who keep some mystery. But when the book came out, they asked a different question, which was very perceptive and is not in the book because of the timing, which is that, oh, this is like what Instagram is about. Instagram is like we’re all curating a glamourous vision of our lives. And the joke is 10 years later … well, first of all, this causes people to look at their friend’s feed and go, “My friend’s life is so much better than mine.” But of course it’s leaving out the boring parts, the difficulties. And also 10 years later you look back at your memories and it’s like, wow, my life was so much better then.

(22:22):

Well, it’s because it’s a glamourous kind of ideal. And so I think that that’s one thing that’s changed and what exactly that expresses depends on the person. But taking pictures of all your restaurant meals, these perfectly plated, beautiful things. I mean, there’ve been whole developments in the restaurant industry because of Instagram.

(22:52):

Everybody creating an image of their life as interesting and exciting and beautiful and of themselves similarly–that is a form of glamour. So one thing, if you want to talk about downsides of this. When people were watching movies about rich people in the 1930s, it was glamourous, but they didn’t think that huge numbers of people were living that way. What we have now is a situation where there’s been–and this isn’t just about glamour–but there’s been a vast expansion of the upper middle class. So it’s not that the richer are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The poor are richer, the middle class is richer, but the upper middle class is significantly richer and much larger. And so people’s sense of what’s normal and to be expected is distorted in a sense. People who are middle class think that middle class lifestyle involves a lot of European travel and granite countertops and an island kitchen and all of these things.

(24:15):

And those are really things that once upon a time were only available to quite affluent people, very affluent people. And so there’s been a kind of democratization of a lot of luxury, but that has led to a kind of discontent among people who don’t have access to that luxury because they’re just regular, in the sense that somebody from 50 years ago would recognize as normal.

Pat Lynch (24:44):
That’s interesting because I think it’s an underappreciated aspect of the populist reaction that recent politics has brought about. And I like that term democratizing, because you’ve not only democratized the material piece of it, you’ve democratized the glamour piece of it because everyone’s got an Instagram and everyone’s got a Facebook and everyone’s … So you can display this stuff and it’s common and people think, “Well, why am I not like that? ” But in your view, it is better if glamour is more widespread, right? Or does glamour lose something if it has less or if it’s more widespread? Does that make it less important?

Virginia Postrel (25:15):
No, I think glamour is important. I don’t think it’s good or bad.

Pat Lynch:
It’s just a fact of life.

Virginia Postrel:
I think it’s a phenomenon that exists and that shapes people’s behavior and it shapes people’s mental states. It can be used deliberately for good or used deliberately for bad, and it can also be accidentally used for good or accidentally used for bad. And my message to avoid the problems of glamour is to remember that it always has an element of illusion. It can be very inspiring and positive. You can be inspired. Why do I have the career I have? Because I was raptured with a glamourous idea of the public intellectual life. I’m the only person in the world who read Making It and thought it was glamourous because I was naive and it was much later… I forgot that I don’t like New York and I don’t like dinner parties and there’s a lot of stuff that … But I was enamored of this book and I had this and I wanted to be a magazine editor and I wanted to edit Reason, which I did eventually.

(26:29):

That was just sheer luck. But I now know all the things that were hidden. So it was good, but it was an illusion at the same time. But there are also cases where people get into really bad things. I mean, I write in the book about the glamour of terrorism, the glamour of being a jihadi. I’ve written, I think this was for my Bloomberg column, not in the book, but about the Boston bombers and people criticized Rolling Stone for running a photo and said it was glamourizing, but really the whole story is a story about glamour. They had this idea of being this kind of Islamic hero and it was terrible.

Pat Lynch (27:13):
When you think about major like assassinations, the healthcare CEO who was killed and that his killer is now a hero for many people, right? There’s glamour associated with that. So there is a downside to these sorts of events.

Virginia Postrel (27:24):
And those are extreme cases. There’s also, you have a glamourous vision of moving to the big city and you move to the big city and you hate it.

Pat Lynch (27:36):
Let’s try to focus on the positives.

Virginia Postrel (27:38):
Right, right, right.

Pat Lynch (27:39):
So let’s turn to fabric and I’ve heard your presentation of your book, read it. I think it’s an awesome book. And I guess one of the questions I wanted to ask you is like, what’s your view of fast fashion?

Virginia Postrel (27:52):
This is actually a question I get asked a lot by people who are more industry oriented.

Pat Lynch (27:56):
Well, and the reason I ask about this is that I think there is a tendency among people, of a more conservative bent, to view a lot of the materialism and a lot of things that are coming out of this economic progress that we’ve seen over the past 20, 30 years, and to view it as wasteful, not productive, sort of not focusing people on the right sorts of moral questions or the right sorts of social questions or personal questions. And that is an example… I see it in my life because my daughter consumes it a lot, and there’s some very pretty stuff that comes out of it. So what’s your view on that development?

Virginia Postrel (28:28):
So my quick view is that fast fashion proves that, contrary to everything you may read, young people don’t care about the environment, at least in the way that environmentalists would like them to care about the environment. They care about other things a lot more and that’s probably true. There’s good fast fashion and bad fast fashion. Originally, fast fashion was used to describe companies like Benetton this is a long time ago where they would come out with a sweater in a bunch of different colors and because of the way they organized their manufacturing, they could see which colors were selling and then they’d make more of those, quick turnaround. The notion of speeding up the fashion cycle goes back at least to the ’90s. But, of course, nowadays when people think about it, they’re thinking about things like Shein, which really a lot of the quality is terrible.

(29:34):

It is literally disposable clothes. And I don’t have a huge problem with that because my view is if you’re really concerned about having too much crappy poly … Excuse my French, bad, poorly made polyester blouses in the waste stream, you should do what the Swedes do and incinerate them and use that for cogeneration. And it’s hard to even argue that it’s a waste of money because it’s so cheap compared to— I remember being a teenager in the ’70s when clothes were quite expensive, and really longing for clothes and having three outfits. So I sympathize with the … I don’t think fast fashion is a very adult thing. I think it really is for young people because they don’t have a lot of money, and because they are in a social environment with all the social pressures that once you get to be an adult are still there, but less dominant.

(30:49):

Now that is the really super cheap stuff. And you can divide it up. There’s also things like Zara, that are just lower price point fashionable clothes and they’re a little better made and a little higher quality, et cetera, and very important in countries that are not as rich as the US. They have a market in the US, too, but if you go to Spain or you go to Brazil or someplace like that, that’s actually a higher end product than we perceive it to be. So my message about fast fashion is if you really care about quality and you care about the environment and all these things that people say they do, shop at thrift stores because we have amazing thrift stores nowadays. And my buddy Adam Minter has a great book called Secondhand, which is about the secondhand market and the amazing … It’s a very sort of dynamist book and the amazing ecologies and markets and ingenuity, these systems that have developed around the world to make use of things that Americans in particular dispose of.

(32:03):

Everything from clothes to furniture to cars. And electronic waste, also.

Pat Lynch (32:12):
I spent a lot of time in Guatemala a few years ago, now a number of years ago. And if you want to know where American school buses end up, they end up in Latin America, and they look a lot prettier. They dress them up very nicely.

Virginia Postrel (32:26):
And I’ve seen those buses that you’re talking about, but I never realized where they came from.

Pat Lynch (32:31):
And if you take a look at the cars that are quote unquote totaled, they are rebuilt and then usually sent down there as well because the safety is not really as much of a component for it, not much of a care. Let’s turn to abundance and the abundance agenda. We had a conference on this recently—

Virginia Postrel (32:44):
Right.

Pat Lynch (32:44):
Do you feel like the abundance agenda is … I guess my reaction to it was that it is a new idea to the extent that there are these technological frontiers out there that seem very attainable. And we talked about some of those things and I’d love to hear your thoughts on those, but that ultimately it seems like another project where someone is trying to manage a market outcome and control the market in a way that is just not possible and to take that and create more large government planning instead of accepting the dynamism of markets and just sort of living with that.

Virginia Postrel (33:17):
So one of the differences between the world we live in now and the world in which I wrote The Future and Its Enemies is what has happened to the alliances between dynamism and technocrats, or between reactionaries and technocrats. So right now we’re in a period where reactionary thought, which was pretty dormant in the ’90s… well, it existed. People like me knew about it, but it’s now aligned with sort of technocracy in a way that it wasn’t then. I don’t talk about the abundance agenda. I talk about the progress and abundance movement, which is an intellectual movement which involves super technocrats like Ezra Klein, who actually said to me, “I read your book and I’m a technocrat.” Who wants to make the world exactly how Ezra Klein wants to make the world. It involves a lot of people that you might call “soft dynamists” for some regulation, but they think more like economists and they understand some of the problems of regulation, and hardcore market liberals. And not just market liberals.

(34:46):

And so it is a kind of broad ideological alliance. People disagree about how things should be accomplished. What they share in common is the idea that you can have a good future built on positive sum exchange, that we don’t live in a world where in order for there to be winners, there have to be losers or it has to be one and one. I was thinking about this interview and I was thinking about Donald Trump and I was thinking, Donald Trump doesn’t believe in trade. I don’t mean he doesn’t believe in international trade, he doesn’t, but he really doesn’t believe in gains from trade. He believes one side loses and one side wins. And that’s a fundamental difference in mentality and how you think about market exchange. And so what we have in the sort of progress and abundance movement is yes, there are a lot of super technocrats, but they are at least technocrats who have learned that you need supply as well as demand.

(36:02):

And that’s the fundamental insight of the book Abundance, is that people to the left of center have emphasized subsidizing demand, but that only makes sense in a world in which supply can respond to the increased demand. If you choke off the supply of housing, it doesn’t matter. If nobody can build apartments, it doesn’t matter if you give people housing vouchers. If nobody can build solar arrays, it doesn’t matter if you subsidize solar energy. Also, and they don’t play this up as much because it’s a very political book. It has an agenda. It’s trying to influence the Democratic Party and the Democratic Coalition in a very specific way, but implicitly it’s also a critique of sort of the hair shirt left. The people who say that the aspirations of ordinary people to comfortable lives are icky, which is a great departure from the sort of traditional left, whether it’s the sort of US center left or whatever you want to call it, or it’s the Marxist’s left, which was: It’s about getting people more!

(37:33):

And so I think that insofar as it’s a technocratic reaction, it’s a technocratic reaction that’s badly needed within the technocratic coalition. And one thing that I would change if I were writing The Future and Its Enemies today is, I anticipated that the environmental movement would entirely be for stasis in a reactionary way, because those ideas are deeply embedded in sort of green philosophy. But it turns out confronted with the prospect of climate change, there are enough sort of problem solvers, people who see it as a problem to be solved as opposed to an excuse to go back to the Middle Ages or something, to ignite, if not a dynamist approach, a dynamist-friendly technocratic approach. Which is sort of contradictory. But I draw these stark distinctions in the book, but really it’s a continuum.

Pat Lynch (38:45):
It’s interesting because I’m increasingly frustrated with the use of left and right because I don’t know what they mean anymore, and it’s very difficult. I think we sort of in our heads have a vision of what this was like 20 years ago. But I wanted to end with a question that I think is sort of relevant to what you just pointed out, which was: Where will the political home, if there is one, be for market liberals in the future? Where do you think those of us who believe in markets and defend markets, where will we eventually find support and find comfort? Because right now it’s difficult to see it anywhere.

Virginia Postrel (39:18):
I think, either in complete exile, which could happen— We’re getting there. Yeah, we’re getting there. Or in an abundance faction within the Democratic Party.

Pat Lynch (39:27):
Are you optimistic that that could happen, that latter outcome?

Virginia Postrel (39:31):
I would give it, my optimistic estimate would be a 40 percent chance.

Pat Lynch (39:36):
That’s pretty optimistic.

Virginia Postrel (39:37):
But that’s my most optimistic estimate.

Pat Lynch (39:41):
And would it involve compromising on the extent to which you’d have to have significant redistribution of that wealth that’s going to be created through that?

Virginia Postrel (39:48):
Yes, yes. And one of the important things about the dynamist/stasist distinction is that it doesn’t say anything about redistribution other than: Don’t screw up the price signals.

Pat Lynch (40:05):
And that’s difficult to do.

Virginia Postrel (40:06):
Which is hard to do, or: Seek to be as undisruptive as possible to price signals.

Pat Lynch (40:13):
Is it because Klein and Thompson have a very different view on that matter, right?

Virginia Postrel (40:17):
Yeah.

Pat Lynch (40:18):
And as I read that book, they do not have the same kind of subtle concern about these sorts of things. They just think markets are like, we’ll flip a switch and all of a sudden there’s wealth everywhere, right?

Virginia Postrel (40:26):
Okay. So my view is that Thompson understands markets better than Klein, but it’s a co-authored book and I can’t prove that. I base that on their other writing. Klein is a very smart guy, but he really wants to run the world. But if you look at somebody like Matt Yglesias, who is very close to them politically… he understands markets. I mean, he doesn’t understand markets maybe the way we do, but he does have a sophisticated understanding of markets. And one reason that many people on the Democratic Coalition hate him is that he has an understanding of markets.

Pat Lynch (41:11):
Virginia, thanks a lot for taking the time to be with us today.

Virginia Postrel (41:13):
Thank you.

James Patterson (41:14):
Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.