2 parallel movements in our societies. One, the invention of an ‘economy’ as a political weapon to strip away…

2 parallel movements in our societies. One, the invention of an ‘economy’ as a political weapon to strip away democratic reform of the past 150-200 years. That’s often a depressing story. But the other parallel movement isn’t. Hans (RIP) helps there. /1 https://t.co/dqrrEf1kQA

Look at the phenomenal improvement in both health and prosperity, globally, in the past 200 years. Hans stunned audiences with this data, they usually had no idea of the scale of the changes. So how do these two parallel movements manage to coexist? /2 https://t.co/dqrrEf1kQA

They don’t really, and that’s the other thing I Tweet about. The modern populist shift in politics, which has us focused every day on the team sports of politicians and parties, completely ignoring the real driver of societies now. Engineering. /3 https://t.co/2Y7M7zJb5o

The unprecedented socio-technical complexity of modern life. All the hot air of modern populist politicians doesn’t even touch this complexity, one reason I’m scathing about even having elections. There is not one way using popularity as a measure will ever be adequate to…/4

…the task of managing these socio-technical marvels, our modern societies. Hans calls the birth of these the ‘Industrial Revolution’, as many scholars do. It’ll do as a label. No matter how many ideologies and fanaticisms our elected windbags bring to the table, none will…/5

…ever come close to understanding or managing the actual running of a society in 2023. Those ideologies are the great barrier we need to sweep away. Get rid of all the nonsense about Left and Right and capitalism and socialism and libertarianism, and refocus politics. /6

On basic, operational problems to be solved. That doesn’t mean we will all agree, but our disagreements will be focused on the practical, operational detail of what needs doing. Not sterile centuries-old political debates using concepts that have zero relevance today. /7

Hans shows us the good news. That what appears a total catastrophe in modern life, is really the tiniest handful of blowhards with their zealous ideologies, getting in the way They can’t resist the operational underpinnings of society though. /8 https://t.co/dqrrEf1kQA

And we individually need to drag ourselves away from the team sports, high school culture-driven spectacle of daily politics. What’s happened in the past 200 years is near miraculous, and all that rubbish obscures the view. /end