Rating: 
Summary: Pop Hayek
Review: This book promises a new way to think about otherwize puzzling phenomena. It doesn't disappoint.I enjoyed the book immensely, and thought its pronouncements on the bizarre alliances between "right" and "left" quite enlightening. The book's central theme involves a conflict between what Postrel calls "stasism" and "dynamism," where the former view involves a blend of both reactionaries (whose primary value is social stability) and technocrats (whose primary value is control - "one best way for everyone"). This analysis enables us to understand the weird overlaps between reactionary environmentalists, who think that the only threat ecosystems face is human-caused instability, and conservatives, who fear cultural instability ("I refuse to let you affect my life.") Then there are the technocrats, who, as Postrel ably describes, think that if one day care center has an in-house play area, then all of them should. Postrel quotes with merry abandon, laying bare the code in which technocrats talk (they love phrases like "national standards," "comprehensive plans," etc.). These then are the future's enemies, and they tend to share either a distrust or ignorance of what Postrel, following F.A. Hayek, calls "localized" or "tacit" knowledge. Hayek described such knowledge as "the knowledge of specific circumstances, time, and place" -- that is, the sort of knowledge no technocrat in Washington could ever master, no matter how big his computer. The existence of this sort of knowledge is the reason why large-scale plans foisted on everyone, regardless of circumstances, tend to fail, and why markets, with their endless ability to customize and tailor products to even the most obscure of needs, tend to succeed. Hayek wrote of these things many years ago, but even he disparaged his own writing skills. (Nonetheless, I am hard-pressed to think of a greater social thinker in the 20th century than Hayek.) It is a good thing that there are people like Postrel to take up the banner.
Rating:
Summary: A superb exposition of the dynamic or evolutionary worldview
Review: This is an outstanding commentary on the contemporary social and political scene in the tradition of such trail-blazing libertarian authors as von Mises, Hayek, and M. Friedman. Readers with an affinity for Reason Magazine (of which Postrel is editor), Cato Institute, or the Institute for Justice will feel right at home as they turn the pages. It would be most unfortunate, however, if readership were limited to those who identify themselves as libertarian because this volume contributes to a much larger enterprise. It is a significant contribution to the burgeoning body of research and literature on evolutionary processes and spontaneous order that is the prime intellectual achievement of the twentieth century. Postrel presents us with a major exposition of the dynamic vision. Thus, my only reservation about this book concerns its title. It seriously underrepresents the contents of this work and may also present an obstacle to the spread of this point of view. Those who are ill at ease with the evolutionary vision are not necessarily enemies of the future, but persons who have a very different view of the ideal state of human society and how to achieve it. This touches on a major question that is rarely well specified: What is the interaction between evolutionary processes and purposive relatedness? Evolutionary relatedness pertains to populations of widely diverse entities and follows principles which lead from the simple to the complex. But evolutionary principles on the scale of the cosmos have given rise to living entities. This adds purposive relatedness to the mix and makes the study of human society much harder. Human beings are purposive entities par excellence; they are consciously goal-directed which is exactly what evolutionary processes are not. Added to the problem is that we are a social species and we organize ourselves in ways shaped by our evolutionary past that we are just beginning to understand. Microsoft may take great pains to adopt a lateral organizational structure, but there is no doubt who is the alpha male. Let me just touch on two themes of this book not usually reviewed and that I find especially powerful. One is Postrel's pervasive appreciation of tacit knowing-of the knowledge that persons possess without necessarily being verbally expressive or even consciously aware in a focused manner of this knowledge. There is no doubt that our language facility is critical to our humanity, but it can be overemphasized-especially by those of us who spend or have spent large amounts of time in academia. Thought comes first, and then it is stabilized and shared via language. The quality of the thought counts more than the eloquence of its verbal expression. Language is the after-thought. Check it out: How often have you known exactly what you wanted to say, with the right word on the tip of your tongue yet tantalizingly out of range? A second core concept of this book that I urge you to consider is Postrel's notion of the "verge." This is closely related to the concept of the boundary, as in the boundary of the self, but it points more to the interface between selves or cultures. It reminds me of Stuart Kauffman's dictum, "Life adapts to the edge of chaos" (The Origins of Order, Oxford, 1993). The edge is the verge. This is the site of interaction and growth. For my money, the introduction of this term alone is worth the price of the book. In short, if the Santa Fe Institute is Mecca to you, read this book. If you admire the work on self-organization and complexity by Ilya Prigogine and his associates (Order Out of Chaos with Isabelle Stengers, for example, or The Evolutionary Vision: Toward a Unifying Paradigm of Physical, Biological, and Sociocultural Evolution, an AAAS Symposium edited by the late Erich Jantsch of Berkeley's Center for Research in Management), read this book. If you belong to the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, or the International Society for Human Ethology, read this book. If your favorite philosopher is Charles Sanders Peirce, read this book. If you subscribe to Wired, read this book. If one of your heroes is Richard Feynman, read this book. What else can I say? Oh yes, I gave away, to my favorite people, twenty copies at Christmas.
Rating: 
Summary: Read in context
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this reader friendly book. It did start to get repetetive in the last third but I adhere to the maxim that repetition is the best form of emphasis (if done with some wit). My title emphasizes "context" as a way to address some of the complaints in other reviews of this book objecting to the perceived "my way or the highway" approach. The dynamist environment requires a competitive marketplace of ideas and techniques. Thus, a truly dynamist environment needs stasist counterpoint to remain truly dynamist... doesn't it? I think the author realizes this. What I found most interesting about this book was the attention Postrel draws to the redefinition of political and philosophical labels, Conservative vs. Liberal etc. which have had almost no coherent meaning for decades. Postrel removes the current labels (conservative, liberal, rightwing, leftwing) and reclassifies the players based on their position relating to the status quo or stasist versus dynamist. Very interesting. This redefinition of the current labelling is also dealt with quite well in another book -- Bobo's in Paradise, by David Brooks. If you want to be truly entertained and enlightened at the same time get the audio version. I laughed, I cried, I pondered -- all while driving in my car!
Rating:
Summary: A must read for those who love freedom. Big, elegant ideas.
Review: Do you worry when you hear, "We're from the government and we're here to help you"? This wonderful book is for you. The author elegantly explains how bargaining away our freedom and allowing big government to run our lives is not only wrong, but how terribly destructive it is to society. This is an important book. The lines between GOP'ers and Dem's have blurred. Postrel brings us a new and more useful distinction: "dynamists" who understand that freedom creates the future through a chaotic process of failure and success, allowing those almost magical, random leaps of human creativity and inspiration that drive progress... and the bad guys, anti-progressive "statists" who disallow both failure and success and all hope for advancement, innovation, and human betterment. Yes the future is both promising in its potential and frightening in its uncertainty -- but who would bargain away its promise for the false security of the present? Want to climb the mountain and see what America and Americans could be? Read this book. See the future. You'll get a tingle. And be a better, freer person. I'm giving out copies to friends right and left.
Rating:
Summary: Pop Hayek
Review: This book promises a new way to think about otherwize puzzling phenomena. It doesn't disappoint. I enjoyed the book immensely, and thought its pronouncements on the bizarre alliances between "right" and "left" quite enlightening. The book's central theme involves a conflict between what Postrel calls "stasism" and "dynamism," where the former view involves a blend of both reactionaries (whose primary value is social stability) and technocrats (whose primary value is control - "one best way for everyone"). This analysis enables us to understand the weird overlaps between reactionary environmentalists, who think that the only threat ecosystems face is human-caused instability, and conservatives, who fear cultural instability ("I refuse to let you affect my life.") Then there are the technocrats, who, as Postrel ably describes, think that if one day care center has an in-house play area, then all of them should. Postrel quotes with merry abandon, laying bare the code in which technocrats talk (they love phrases like "national standards," "comprehensive plans," etc.). These then are the future's enemies, and they tend to share either a distrust or ignorance of what Postrel, following F.A. Hayek, calls "localized" or "tacit" knowledge. Hayek described such knowledge as "the knowledge of specific circumstances, time, and place" -- that is, the sort of knowledge no technocrat in Washington could ever master, no matter how big his computer. The existence of this sort of knowledge is the reason why large-scale plans foisted on everyone, regardless of circumstances, tend to fail, and why markets, with their endless ability to customize and tailor products to even the most obscure of needs, tend to succeed. Hayek wrote of these things many years ago, but even he disparaged his own writing skills. (Nonetheless, I am hard-pressed to think of a greater social thinker in the 20th century than Hayek.) It is a good thing that there are people like Postrel to take up the banner.
Rating: 
Summary: She's right, but it's round-about.
Review: I was a little disappointed - I'd heard such great things about Postrel. The whole book runs around a "new" term - Dynamism. I don't think we really needed another word to describe flexibility and change. Specifically what bothered me, was her observation that Dynamism exists in all areas (government and private) but she only believes it's really needed in government, while she admits McDonald's and Disney World do well without it. And that's certainly true, I must say I agree with her politics and business observations here. But then isn't the book really only concerned with Dynamism in government, if we're to be honest about it? The whole booked is marred by the fact that she doesn't want to come out and say this is a book of mainly politics that just happens to employ popular cultural as a means of explanation. Certainly the virtues of Dynamism are seen in many different areas, but the main point is that it's needed in government. And Dynamism in governement is simply called laissez faire capitalism. She makes the connection a few times, but I don't see why Capitalism isn't the term of choice. This entire book seems a little soft and compromising because of the terms used and the round about arguments. If you have 288 pages to make your point, why not make the real point? Certainly the issues, like the negative effects of a technocracy, are very important, but often the clearest points are quotations from Hayek. For a straight forward, though admittedly more righteous-sounding and maybe even over the top view, read Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I'm not going to fault this book too much -- the ideas, if round-about, really are sound.
Rating:
Summary: An Attractive Manifesto
Review: Virginia Postrel has written a book that deserves all the attention lavished on "Reinventing Government" a few years ago. She makes the case for an essentially libertarian view of the world better than any author I've ever read. Her basic point is that social evolution through simple trial and error produces vastly superior outcomes to the central planning the twentieth century embraced through Communism, Socialism, and the New Deal. She also does a wonderful job of showing the world is not divided purely into the standard left and right political types, but also into camps she labels "stasists" and "dynamists". Stasists resist change and can accept it only when it is carefully planned. Dynamists embrace the unpredictable process of spontaneous change that arises from individuals pursuing their own ideas. "The Future and Its Enemies" is that rare public policy volume that actually contributes something new to the discussion. It deserves to be read and widely recommended, even by those who disagree with its central thesis.
Rating:
Summary: Postrel applied on a semi-socialist state
Review: As a citizen of Sweden Postrels book gets a special meaning. As a liberal politician in Sweden even more so. Sweden can be classified as a semi-socialist state. On one hand Sweden is modern and liberal when it comes to all the standard human rights issues. On another there is a very deeply rooted, and dominant, culture of social engineering and socialization. Virtually everything, and I really mean everything, is in some manner under direct political influence. As everything in this country is politics, everything is also subject to thorough planning, scheduling and political debate. From my point of view, Sweden is a "stasist" state with very little room for any kind of dynamist influenses. This book has given me, beeing an anti-socialist in a semi-socialist society, new hope. Maybe there are other ways to break the stale mate in our country, when it comes to analyzing politics. I'll apply the dynamist-stasist dimension here, and see what happens.
Rating: 
Summary: Silliness
Review: The theory that left and right are outmoded concepts is not new, and Virginia Postrel certainly didn't invent it. What she has done is attempted to realign the political spectrum along her own personal biases. If you are knee-jerk pro-technology, and welcome the thought of, say, injectable microchip identifiers, a cashless society, biometric hand scanners, or a competing market in privately owned nuclear power plants, then you are part of Postrel's pet ideology, a "dynamist". Nearly everybody else, many of whom have nothing to do with each other, falls into the "stasist" category. Postrel's thesis: Dynamism good, stasism bad. Thus, Pat Buchanan, Al Gore, Jeremy Rifkin, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Nader...basically anybody who might have misgivings about any aspect of Postrel's knee-jerk technophilia...are all lumped together as "enemies" of progress. Virginia Postrel is, of course, the editor of Reason magazine, which was at one time a libertarian magazine but in the past 15 years has drifted into the Forbes Magazine camp and out of libertarianism altogether (defending, among other things, the Gulf War, NAFTA, and forced dosing of the public with the toxic drug fluoride through the water supply, all of which would be anathema to genuine libertarians). Unfortunately because of her magazine's past libertarian credentials, this book is taken seriously and has had a poisonous effect in those circles, steering them in directions which will lead to a totalitarian Big Brother society run amok if followed to their logical ends. Thus does libertarianism become its polar opposite. Earlier I mentioned implantable microchip IDs and biometric scanners. It shouldn't take too much thought to realize that this is exactly where Virginia Postrel's extreme technophilia - her "dynamism" - leads. A better alternative: Embrace some emerging technologies, but oppose and reject those which pose a very real threat to freedom and privacy. Postrel would denounce this as "stasism". I would call it practical and realistic. Postrel, from her extremist viewpoint, is unable to distinguish this selective approach to emerging technologies with the approach of somebody like the Unabomber who wants to completely undo the Industrial Revolution. To her, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, Al Gore, and Jerry Falwell are all ideological fellow travelers of the Unabomber. Her my-way-or-the-highway approach is what makes this book's thesis just plain silly.
Rating:
Summary: Freedom without Restraint--Please Don't Eat the Daisies
Review:
This is a quick read, in part because it is a series of essays that are loosely connected. It is a reasoned attack on both government regulation and imposed technical standards. To the extent that it seems to deny the value of any standards, any oversight, any structure, it is unreasonable.
Indeed, while I whole-heartedly agreed that government regulation has gotten completely out of control, I am much more concerned about corporate corruption (Enron simply being the latest case), and so I would say this book is valuable and worth reading but it is missing the bridge chapter to "what next?" However, I like the book and I recommend it. Its value was driven home to me by an unrelated anecdote, the tales from South Korea of my data recovery expert. Bottom line: they are so far ahead of the United States, with 92% wireless penetration in urban areas, and free-flowing video and television on every hand-held communications-computing device, in part because they have not screwed up the bandwidth allocations and reservations as badly as we have. I was especially inspired by the thought that we should no longer reserve entire swaths of bandwidth for the exclusive use of the military or other government functions--let them learn how to operate in the real world rather than their artificial construct of reserved preference. The book is well footnoted but the index is marginal--largely an index of names rather than ideas.
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