December 11th, 2006 by zen

A MANIFESTO FOR THE MARKET-STATE?

Dr. Richard Florida of The Creativity Exchange has put out a ” Creative Compact“, a social contract of sorts, for the knowledge-based, increasingly networked and open-source age. It struck me as fitting the mold of an attempt to hypothesize a social contract for Philip Bobbitt’s emergent ” Market-State” by helping to guarantee a maximization of opportunity, one that does not neatly fit into a partisan column.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 comments

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  1. Anonymous:

    December 12th, 2006 at 12:23 am

    You know, I think Bush is the first real market-state president. Reagan may have been the first to attack the nation-state, but Bush really sought to bring its policies to fruition. The “ownership society”, deregulation, tax cuts, school vouchers, all geared at removing the promises of the nation-state while increasing the opportunities in the market-state. Unfortunately as it turned out, 9-11 happened and his entire domestic agenda was rested on a set of foreign policy challenges that he could confront more than adequately, but was not capable of seeing through.

    I regret this, because to meet the threats of tomorrow, indeed today, the nation-state must pass and be superseded by the market-state. But with a limited administration and an even more limited and dysfunctional opposition party we squandered the great historical opportunity in 9-11, an opportunity to reshape the American political order and by doing so take a large first step in reshaping the international order.

  2. mark:

    December 12th, 2006 at 2:48 am

    hi Andrew,

    I think you are correct that Bush probably had a theme of privatization ( not quite the same as being a free marketeer)that might have made him a pivotal figure in that transition to a Market-State.

    The Bush administration had the prescience to identify a range of threats but not the wherewithal to maintain the momentum on anything.The Bush administration could ” swarm” a priority to a narrow victory, after which they sank into lassitude.

  3. Lexington Green:

    December 16th, 2006 at 5:26 am

    Joel Kotkin, in addition to the many other ways he is great, has spent a fair amount of time dishing it to Richard Florida, e.g. in this piece. I don’t know much about market-states. But I do know that what makes a city function is the basics, and Florida’s theories are not well-supported by the evidence.