> I understand that the self-organizing neighborhood committee that removes a tree that blocks their street does not go on to build the Empire State Building. My argument is slightly different. To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry. Brilliant minds will find their way towards poem writing when poem writing and poem reading is the thing that people do.
I don't necessarily agree with the "kids these days-ism" direction the article goes, or that Silicon Valley is a pinnacle of human achievement (to me, its the opposite), but I definitely agree that there needs to be a bottoms up approach and cultural shift to start moving again.
I have a friend that is very involved in state and national politics and is heavily invested in top down solutions, where systems and elected officials are the instruments of change. We frequently discuss our different perspectives and usually arrive at the notion that you need both top down and bottom up changes working in conjunction. I think this article is mostly trying to say that there's an imbalance of too much top down with not enough support from the bottom up.
Agreed. A possible "between the lines" reading of what the author is saying is that good overall solutions are formed from the balance of many different ones.
> I understand that the self-organizing neighborhood committee that removes a tree that blocks their street does not go on to build the Empire State Building. My argument is slightly different. To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry. Brilliant minds will find their way towards poem writing when poem writing and poem reading is the thing that people do.
I don't necessarily agree with the "kids these days-ism" direction the article goes, or that Silicon Valley is a pinnacle of human achievement (to me, its the opposite), but I definitely agree that there needs to be a bottoms up approach and cultural shift to start moving again.
I have a friend that is very involved in state and national politics and is heavily invested in top down solutions, where systems and elected officials are the instruments of change. We frequently discuss our different perspectives and usually arrive at the notion that you need both top down and bottom up changes working in conjunction. I think this article is mostly trying to say that there's an imbalance of too much top down with not enough support from the bottom up.