Back in Madison, and things are getting busy already. The course that I started on Monday is going to be a fair bit of work, since it’s most of a semester’s material compressed into 3 weeks.
The basic question: is democracy equipped to manage an environment in conditions of relative scarcity, as opposed to abundance — or does democracy, as some have suggested, in fact depend on the existence of sufficient surplus to ensure a content and relatively “equal” middle class of voters? Does democracy produce technically good decisions, or have our failures simply been masked by abundance, and now increasinly exposed as we reach, or exceed, the limits of our resources?
heh. In other news, it looks like I’m going to be doing a bit of pro-bono work (read: internship) with Mid-America Planning Services, a local planning firm. It should be interesting to see what happens…
PS: Believe it or not, the Buzzcocks are playing here tonight!
