I often juxtapose engineering thinking and powerpoint thinking here. Two basic approaches to the world. The former is focused on solving problems, the latter on manipulating people. I believe that if the trend of civilizational decline and decay is to be halted, engineering thinking must once again prevail over powerpoint thinking.
It is interesting and intellectually rewarding when one comes across an author who sees things exactly mirror opposite. In this case, even a very prominent author who repeatedly states in several books that trade (i.e. redistribution) is the source of value, wealth and civilisational progress, and for whom production is not worth mentioning. If he mentions engineers and scientists, it is exclusively in a negative context, as those who threaten progress and from whom the introduction of a totalitarian system is threatened.
Does it boggle your mind where the author is? Friedrich August Hayek, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and chief ideologue of Thatcherism. A political philosopher whose ideas shaped the Czech 1990s. Virtually all the enthusiasm for the free market in the last generation has come from Hayek.
So when they closed the mines in England under Thatcher, got rid of the factories, opened more banks and stock exchanges and expected to get rich from it, we know where they got it from. And where the architects of the Czech economic reform, which was also a radical deindustrialisation, got it from. Why did we feel then that it didn’t matter that there were fewer engineers and more managers and lawyers?
It’s interesting that I’ve read those books several times and didn’t actually notice those remarks. It wasn’t until the last few months, when I was going through them again, that this topic hit me because it’s what I’m thinking about.