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Notes -
Rationalists, as intelligent and agentic cosmopolitans, naturally have a blindspot labelled "social capital deterioration" given their underexposure. Likewise their brand of "mistake-informed high modernism" still privileges more easily priceable values, leaving the more difficult to price vulnerable to apathetic destruction. Compare: man in the mountains would die for his family, his community, his faith, even his country. He possesses at least four things he considers of worth beyond price. I know many people who make more monetary income in a month than he will in his life, but given I don't think any of them possesses something they would die for, it seems to lose significant information to call them objectively "richer" in a well considered sense. Something I think is correct but wouldn't usually say, for how it would typically be interpreted, is that there is probably a (practically unidentifiable) steelman account of degrowth, insofar as there is some material threshold necessary for general human flourishing, but that threshold was reached some time in the 20th century - human contentedness past that threshold is near-exclusively rendered socially, by the thymic desire for interpersonal recognition. This all leads me to thinking there should be a greater place for communitarian institutions, social conservatism, and religiosity. But until someone actually figures out the causes of, answers to, and prices the externalities within Putnam's decline of civic life, making people generally richer should take center stage. I spoke to a few more things upthread.
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