Finding Fault With Opponents of Change

The strength of “The Future and Its Enemies” lies in the author’s passionate belief in the inherent virtue in creativity, innovation and competition. But the book’s weakness, and it is a considerable one, is its emphasis on attacking people and ideas the author thinks are opposed to her ideas. A tiresome tone of querulousness pervades what otherwise would be a fresh and provocative look at contemporary social science.

The editor of Reason magazine, a journal of aggressive libertarianism and contrarianism, Virginia Postrel presents the thesis that there are two kinds of attitudes toward the world: “dynamism,” which embraces open-ended discovery and competition, and “stasis,” which wishes either to manage the affairs of the world through technology and its technocrats or to remain fixed in the supposed verities of an earlier time.

Her concepts, in general, are valid enough. The tendency of objects to remain stationary unless pushed with sufficient force is universally understood to be a barrier to progress. Making it new invariably means overturning the old.

But it turns out that what Postrel has in mind is not a general philosophical discussion but a particular political agenda. And a narrow one it is. She speaks ill of, among others, the Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer Products Safety Commission, Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, the concept of product liability, Vice President Al Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton. They have all attempted, in one way or another, to clog the wheels of dynamic activity in society, she writes, because they simply assume “that each new development demands official activity to stop, control or, occasionally, endorse it.”

“The FDA’s product approval process, while usually scientifically rigorous, is strongly biased against risk taking,” Postrel writes disapprovingly. Well, of course it is, since the risks to be taken are with the lives of the citizens. Postrel is saying, in effect, that the FDA is too careful.

She applies the same standard, a deep skepticism of what she calls the “technocratic” approach to societal decisions, to the Consumer Products Safety Commission. It “considers only safety, not fun, in evaluating toys,” she complains. Mothers and fathers will no doubt disagree with her. Exploding cigars are fun, but are they suitable toys?

Postrel regards with horror any attempt to regulate the global economy.

“Whom do we want at the wheel of the world economy? Just having Alan Greenspan at the Fed is scary enough,” she writes.

Her favor falls instead on decisions that are made from the bottom up, not the top down. She speaks well of the South Floridians who fended for themselves without government help after Hurricane Andrew; they justify her belief in local common action over government bureaucracy. Her approval also goes to Steve Forbes and his proposal for a flat tax (everyone, rich and poor, would pay income tax at the same percentage rate of income); the informal, off-the-books Peruvian economy; and the enterprising Cambodian immigrants who have captured such a large share of California’s doughnut shops.

The threat to such enterprising activity comes from those who argue that society’s future can be preserved only through government intervention. Gore’s interest in environmentalism galls Postrel because of his bias toward government action to defend the environment against despoliation. She seems to be saying that a correction will come after enough people see that a wrong way has been taken.

She strikes the same attitude toward land-use zoning, arguing, for instance, against communities’ regulatory resistance to “mansionization” of neighborhoods. A city without zoning laws, like Houston, seems to be her ideal.

Postrel attacks Hillary Clinton for worrying that consumerist capitalism is undermining “the kind of work ethic, postponement of gratification and other attributes historically associated with capitalism.” “Always, in such assumptions,” Postrel writes, “there is the notion that dynamism depends on stasis virtues: that goodness, morality, ethics and peace are attributes not of the evolving future but of the unchanging past, not of decentralized, out-of-control competition but of top-down authority.”

In these cases, Postrel lets her belief in “reason” outrun the lessons of the experience of life. Government regulation, that is, regulation by the representatives of the citizens, does not always, as she implies, bring about adverse unintended consequences but may in fact do good. (Can anyone plausibly argue that the worldwide governmental elimination of smallpox has set back the human race?) On the virtuous outcome of “out-of-control competition” Postrel places her bet.