Concise Thoughts

Will Wilkinson is great at concisely characterizing complex ideas (and apparently I'm good at alliteration). Here's a quote from his latest Marketplace Morning Report commentary:

The corollary of "eat local" is "don't eat Mexican," so to speak.

It's true, of course, and it exposes an unfriendly reality of the local food movement.

Here's another quote from Will about competition between various world cultures, particularly the general "liberal" culture (think classical liberalism as opposed to modern American liberalism) and the general "conservative" culture (think "resistance to change" as opposed to modern American conservatism):

There is fairly rapid cultural selection going on, and it has been very friendly to broad liberalization and very unfriendly to conservative norms.

This perfectly captures and clarifies a murky idea I've had for a while, which is that as time->infinity, freedom and liberty increase (along a non-linear path, of course). I think "cultural selection" is the perfect phrase for characterizing how and why this is the case.