{"id":2197,"date":"2016-07-21T08:13:13","date_gmt":"2016-07-21T15:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=2197"},"modified":"2016-07-21T08:17:35","modified_gmt":"2016-07-21T15:17:35","slug":"understanding-nathan-lewis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=2197","title":{"rendered":"Understanding Nathan Lewis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It took me a while to figure out what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newworldeconomics.com\/\">this guy<\/a> is about. The home page of his site is full of all sorts of gold bug stuff, yet when you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newworldeconomics.com\/archives\/tradcityarchive.html\">dig a bit<\/a> you find all sorts of urbanist and ecological articles that are not what one would expect from the typical gold bug (who tends to be a fairly garden variety right-winger).<\/p>\n<p>But Lewis is <em>not<\/em> a garden-variety right-winger. He seems to be what can best be characterized, without prejudice, as a reactionary: he generally admires earlier ways of doing things, be they building cities or establishing a monetary system, and wants to return to them.<\/p>\n<p>In the case of cities, he has something of a point; many of the recent innovations in architecture and urban design have been pretty stupid. As someone who\u2019s never traveled outside of North America (I think I should do a post on that soon), it was something of a revelation to me that <em>every<\/em> city I have experience with, with the possible exception of inner Santa Fe or Boston, is in a sense an example of dysfunctional modernist design.<\/p>\n<p>With respect to the gold standard, not so much. Money is not an easy thing to get right, but I can\u2019t see how that justifies a childlike faith that the amount of easily-mineable gold the Earth\u2019s crust happened to be formed with is magically the correct amount of an exchange medium for an economy whose size keeps changing.<\/p>\n<p>Just for openers, in the face of a growing economy a gold standard will simply reward and strengthen the social pathology of the class hierarchy; as money gets more relatively scarce, it gets more comparatively valuable, so those who already have a lot of it will get richer by doing nothing more than sitting around and watching their gold get more valuable. Why create and reward a class or rich idlers?<\/p>\n<p>But still, some of the guy\u2019s urbanist ideas are worth a read, at least if like me you don&#8217;t personally have experience with Old World cities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It took me a while to figure out what this guy is about. The home page of his site is full of all sorts of gold bug stuff, yet when you dig a bit you find all sorts of urbanist and ecological articles that are not what one would expect from the typical gold bug [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}