You hear, in order, from Heather Hurlburt, Bill Scher, Matt Lewis, Sarah Posner, Robert Farley, Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, John McWhorter, John Horgan, Michelle Goldberg, David Frum, Glenn Loury, George Johnson, and — last — me:
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62 comments:
No more war. Just no more. No more boys dying alone, scared. Just no more.
Anything after that is gray.
Althouse is hopeless! Oh no.
That was an eye opener. The first 9 had learned nothing more than their first ideas, which it seems were right all along. That was scary since those are the one who interact with other smart people all the time.
Brer Professor, she lay low and don't say nothin.
The display of ignorance and weak sentiment was depressing. Yglesias? WTF?
You were better not saying anythinhg
Only McWhorter and Frum gave big answers [Fix Muslim extremism and Increase birth rate in 1st World countries]. The rest meh.
Shows ideas are dead in Librul world and they could use a new class of pundits?
Who resisted the question the most? You, by denying any interest in hope for the future.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all - ~ Emily Dickinson
What is hell, but the total absence of hope? ~ the demon Ken in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. The episode title is "Anne."
My greatest hope is that technology advances rapidly, in that potable water is available to every human on the planet.
We all would be shocked by 80,000 humans (Americans even) being wiped-out in a thermal nuclear blast, but we think nothing of 80,000 humans dying of dysentery and starvation.
My town has provided us with water barrels to attach to our gutters, so that we will use that to water our lawns and gardens. I've attached a drip-irrigation to my barrel, and it is wonderful.
In the UK they call them water butts
I guess because they give you a butt-load of water!
When I see places like Phoenix expanding, with no source of water, I think water should be everyone's hope.
Nobody asked me, but, if I may:
1. The spread of capitalism in Africa, Asia, South America.
2. The Spread of Christianity in Africa, Asia, South America
How's that?
My greatest hope for the next ten years is that the editorial board of The New Yorker all take a collective high colonic. My second-greatest hope: world peace.
If any of the people who talked about climate change knew the personal hit that their lifestyle would take to simply stop increasing atmospheric CO2, they would immediately become climate change skeptics.
Most horseshit answer was last, as it should have been.
I watched each one. Oh boy -- these are the intellectual masters of the Universe? Oy vey, I say.
Althouse punted -- but I found only one that had any coherence or moral insight: John McWhorter on Islam.
Actually, Andrew Sullivan was pretty good.
David Frum kinda sorta started out good, but then started yapping about fossil fuels.
Hell, if these talking heads are the best and the brightest, I'm already feelin' much better about myself:)
That question is easy. Technology needs to advance a lot. I hope we're much further along the road towards a truly post scarcity world. A fully robotized and automated planet with massive amounts of clean energy. A world where food, water, shelter, and medical care are effectively infinite and excellent. A world where people live centuries instead of decades with an extremely high quality of life. Where true human misery (famine, disease, war) is virtually non-existent.
In short, a true golden age. I don't expect it to happen in ten years time of course, but I hope we as a species step it up.
Ten years...isn't that the authorized Nuclear weapons breakout date for the nerw Iranian Empire, assuming they don't already have them and the whole rigamarol for the last 4 years was a cover to stop Israel from attacking their bete noire and Obama/Jarrett's BFF.
Even in the fairly recent past, say, the early 1800s, most people, even in the West, were poor and illiterate. Less than a century ago, in Eastern Europe, owning a mule or a donkey made you the envy of your neighbors.
This kind of poverty is unimaginable today.
What made the difference between the poverty and ignorance of the early 1800s and today is not greater inclusion and a more progressive tax system. What made the difference is free market economics, because it places more importance on economic growth than on abstractions like economic justice. None of the bloggers in the video, with the exception of Frum, talked about economic growth as a cure for the social ills of poverty and ignorance.
Mostly they seemed to think the way to make the world a better place is to put people who think like them in charge of it.
This is not progressive. It is not imaginative. It isn't even interesting.
Greatest potential advances: Robotics, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing have the capacity to end scarcity, eliminate poverty, and solve the aging problem (the problem of not enough workers to support the retirees).
The greatest threats are the birthrate in the Muslim world and the hostility in the liberal community to defending the Western cultural values that enable and drive progress.
Robiotics with weapons that are smarter than their mere human caretakers. What's not to love about that. The biggest one is Bill Gates 999 and he carries a lifetime battery charge...for your lifetime that is.
I have hope, I just don't have hopes of different sizes from which I can pick the biggest.
If you want less hatred, don't show any yourself. Do not react to hatred. Lead by example.
I would agree with Yglesias with respect to pollution and environmental contamination. Less of that please.
I want my children to be happy. That's my chief hope. I'm selfish that way.
I'd like to see fewer handsets on bloggingheads. Stop holding a phone to your head!
"Technology needs to advance a lot."
Yes. Its stuck though.
The only economically significant advance in 50 years is relatively low tech gas and oil fracking, and it wasn't technology itself that was critical there (just the good old usual engineering blood sweat and tears), but the rebellious cowboy-insurgency that bypassed and monkey-wrenched the DOE and EPA and the usual BANANA crowd.
Computers and telecoms don't come into it. Its well known and notorious that, outside certain manufacturing applications, all that hasn't budged real productivity.
The go-to read on all this is Schumpeter. All the tech in the universe will go nowhere in Schumpeter's world. And that's depressing.
My greatest hope is that we just survive the next ten years.
I can't get the video to open.
For the record, I have no hope. There are way too many shoes yet to drop, too many contradictions getting worse, too many troubles piled up. There is no way all this doesn't end ugly.
After us the deluge.
The kids can swim pretty well, and good luck to them.
More of the same.
My only hopes:
May you be well
May you be happy
May you be free from suffering
May you be at peace.
I have a dream that within the next decade there will be a reconciliation of individual dignity, intrinsic value, and natural imperatives.
Well, either that, or progressive corruption, confusion, and correctness will be first-order causes of a catastrophic anthropogenic dysfunctional convergence.
Not "lastly me"?
These things are only interesting in hindsight when wishes can't substitute for wisdom.
Where's the one they did 10 years ago?
So when is the swimsuit competition?
Climate change? Seriously? What is wrong with those people? It's a scam!
My biggest hope for the world in the next ten years?
1. That people figure out that climate change is a scam and all that money wasted on tax credits and conferences is put to productive use.
2. The Sunni v Shia war ends.
Not optimistic either will happen. Too many entrenched interests and people are too dumb.
MadisonMan
"I would agree with Yglesias with respect to pollution and environmental contamination. Less of that please."
I've been to Madison. Looked great to me. So does Omaha. The United States is clean. China and the rest of the world can fix themselves.
10 years out no one can predict, I'm just hoping today's stock market performance is a signal that maybe we're beginning a 4 to 6 month rally in stocks per an optimistic market analyst.
More support for the war of the sexes.
coupe said...
My town has provided us with water barrels to attach to our gutters, so that we will use that to water our lawns and gardens.
CO has the opposite approach:
Rooftop Precipitation Collection
"Although it is permissible to direct your residential property roof downspouts toward landscaped areas, unless you own a specific type of exempt well permit, you cannot collect rainwater in any other manner, such as storage in a cistern or tank, for later use."
I just turned 65. I'm hoping to pee.
"....2. The Sunni v Shia war ends.
My biggest hope is that it continues and resolves itself in mutual annihilation.
"MadisonMan said...
I would agree with Yglesias with respect to pollution and environmental contamination. Less of that please."
He didn't talk about either. His goal was to see more international cooperation and governance in solving climate change and other issue like epidemics.
Maybe you watched a video from his brother Bob Yglesias or something?
I get all my household water, including drinking water, from rooftop collection. Not because I am a greenie (I'm not), but because I have to. I wish I had county water.
One of the problems with roof top collection is that rainwater is slightly acidic. People prefer it slightly base. So you have to treat it.
Another problem is that rain water is usually free of contaminants -- until it hits your roof. What's in your gutters? You want to drink that? Birds defecate indiscriminately on roof tops. Wanna drink that?
I have a UV sterilization system (~$1500 install, ~$100/year to replace the UV light, and the 70W light is on all of the time). I have a 10u sediment filter and a 5u carbon filter. I replace both monthly: cost ~$350/year.
Plus I have an unsightly 10,000 gallon tank about 20 feet from the house.
Rain water ain't free.
Big Mike said...
"I can't get the video to open."
Well I certainly do hope that changes.
Also, when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, Big Mike...
I hope you dance.
So none of the Bloggingheads regulars have any concerns about the US and/or global economy. How many of their dreams would be met or negated by a more prosperous US and world--Muslim radicalization, problems facing African-Americans, armed conflict, an expanded safety net, the second coming of FDR (although that was supposed to be Obama with the Democrat House and Senate. . .maybe they want a third).
Being a warrior, and entering my 70th year of life, I would like to fight in one more war within the next 10 years. This time I don't want to go half way around the world to do it. It would be nice if it is fought right here in the USofA. I'd like to go out and fight, then return home for supper. Knowing things don't go according to plan, before I left home I'd pack a lunch. Just in case.
Hillary in leg irons.
I would hope that in 10 years we make "Free to Choose" required reading.
God, how shallow most of those comments were! Althouse was right not to play.
I grew up reading science fiction in the '50's. Don't you think that Heinlein and Asimov and Clark and Dick and all the others could have imagined something more intersting than this for a mere 10 years into the future?
I imagine the Islamification of Europe in 10 years. I imagine the completion of the elimination of poverty in the US. I imagine the birth of real democracy and free enterprise in South America. I imagine the collapse of the post-colonial states in Africa and the beginning of a long new beginning based on tribal loyalties. I imagine the fall of the communist regime in China and its replacement by a fractured regional system that will succeed in some places and fail in others. I imagine the restoration of the imperial system in Russia.
"I imagine the Islamification of Europe in 10 years."
Kratman - "Caliphate" - Not great, but a decent enough swashbuckler
"I imagine the completion of the elimination of poverty in the US."
Fred Pohl "The Midas Plague"
Whoa! That was a lot of twits in one sitting!
A few thoughts:
1. Anthropogenic climate change is the new religion, and it is a creed open to all, as long as you believe that government action solves problems. Personally, I prefer Christianity because I learned more about man and his relation to the Universe in Sunday school than these red hot and medium cool climatistas have garnered (that word!) in their years on earth.
2. As someone said here the other day, I am glad I am old.
3. Well done, professor.
4. My big hope: in ten years, politics will become less important, because government will play a smaller role in all our lives. (Well, a man can dream...)
Freedom not mentioned once by a single person. Completely utterly and totally unimpressed. I find myself wondering where the heck I live nowadays and what ever happened to the ideal of freedom, the idea of questioning authority (wether there is a D or an R after their name) the beautiful concept of Liberty. Meanwhile many of them seemed t long for more laws, more rules, more regulation, more Gov't programs and World flipping Gov't. If that's what passes for the intelligentsia today, I'm sure glad I don't teach college anymore. Pitiful
@Meade, it's tough to dance on artificial knees.
BTW, do you know MadMan? Is he some young whippersnapper who wasn't around when Lake Erie routinely caught on fire? (Okay, it was the Cuyahoga River where it flowed into Lake Erie, but yes, it really did burn. You dumb punk kids can go look it up.)
As most of you know, we host foreign exchange students each year..
Hope come in several sizes. Global? Good for you. (turns head and spits) This is just "signaling." Personal? I've had my shots, and will do my best for my wife and me. So I have no hopes. My hopes are for my children, all twelve of them. Anyone who zays otherwise is either childless or lying in my estimation.
From west to east, their countries are Germany, Italy(2), Albania , Macedonia, Hungary(2), Poland, Egypt, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia (siberia). Most of those countries would love to think global warming was the biggest threat they faced.
A huge worldwide Christian Revivial.
A reimbracing of personal freedom and subsequent elimination of the welfare and nannystates.
To ski with my grandchildren.
buwaya - The situation is hopeless, but it's not serious. [Doug Casey, quoting Robert Friedland]
I hope (and pray) to Olaf for Peace, Social Justice, Economic Equality, And Eco-Balance.
Who's Olaf, you ask?
Just the pansexual humanist spirit alive in all things.
Bringer Of One-World Government, Destroyer of Nationalism, The Deus Et Machina in Global Financial Systems and The Slayer Of Carbon.
We spent hours last night discussing whether Olaf was more a Bonapartist Revolutionary (manifesting as the Great Man In History's River) or if he would manifest as a mild dirigiste-type social reformer.
The Traveler Has Come!
I hope we finally come to our senses and stop letting women vote.
"I have hope, I just don't have hopes of different sizes from which I can pick the biggest."
Althouse is funny. I wonder if, after seeing how other folks responded, she realized that it's a little Asperger's-ish/lawprof-ish to feel confined by the literal parameters of the question. It's no wonder that she had to take a pass when she was asked to jabber about the meaning of life.
And, folks should remember that she has taken a vow of marriage and, presumably, a vow of anti-hope to atone for her Hopy-Changy vote.
I'm seventy three. All my life the smart people have been telling me that civilization was going to collapse. Some preached nuclear winter or acid rain or the crisis of capitalism or dumb people having too many kids, but it was always something. And the smart people were the only ones smart enough to read the writing on the wall. You would think that with all these centuries of making the wrong call, the smart people would be a liitle more hesitant in their hopes and predictions. I predict that the world will last another ten years and that most people--at least those not living in the Caliphate--will have better lives.......Myself, I'm hoping for sufficient advances in medical technology that will allow me to live for another ten years. The advances in virtual reality also look promising, especially in the field of pornography.
Virtual reality would also be a boon to those who want world peace and racial harmony.
Aside from the responses from Prof. Althouse and Michele Goldberg, the rest were uniformly banal, as...how could they not be? One always hopes,, but reality will unfold as it will. Also, many of the things "hoped for" for the next 10 years have been intractable problems for the past 10 and 20 and 30 years or more, so, why expect change in the next 10?
I hope in the next ten years somebody on the Supreme Court will say a baby is a person with a right to life. And apply the equal protection clause to the abortion controversy.
Maybe in 20 years, five people will say it.
But first you got to have one.
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