Cram Sampling Rebels Without a Pause: A Classic Age in Hiphop Music

"Watching the dancers get down every night [in the mid-1970s], [DJ Kool] Herc saw that their limbs were loosest during the 'breaks,' or isolated drum parts, when the band pulled out and gave the drummer some. He wondered: Could you prolong the break? Could you make an endless break? By cutting the record back and forth between two records during the critical drum solo, Herc inadvertantly invented the "breakbeat"-- two seconds of feverish climax looped eternally, the point where Steve Miller turns into Steve Reich, a limitless pulse to make B-boys go ga-ga night after night. This became the foundation of Hip hop music."  

Christopher R. Weingarten, It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (2010) : This book in the 33 1/3 series posits that the album in the title, the 1988 Hiphop album qua album breakthrough, along with De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique (both 1989), represent an album aesthetic peak, a triumvirate, in Hiphop history. One particular relatively early culmination of what DJ Kool Herc started. And, crucially, a brief window of creative cultural opportunity. New relatively cheap sampling technology emerges in the mid-1980s and falls into the hands of urban B-boys like Hank Shocklee, "sound master" in the Bomb Squad; competing and hustling against a bunch of other sound system collectives operating out of the boroughs of NYC since Sugar Hill's "Rapper's Delight" (1979). Increasingly Wild Style sampling experiments like the album classics above ensue. It Takes a Nation crams dozens of samples into a single song, over a hundred samples synthesizing Black soul music into BLM before BLM; a monumentally hard rock funky epic Black Power statement and soundtrack. Performative as a sensationalized "Black CNN." Game changer. Then in '89 the Turtles sued De La Soul for copyright infringement. And, more conclusively, in '91 Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie for ripping off his pop hit "Alone Again (Naturally)" and overnight making albums like It Takes a Nation or 3 Fee High or Paul's Boutique became prohibitively expensive and so practically impossible. It's a good story. Maybe not the whole story in that experimental electronic music based on sampling continues, Wu-Tang, Trip Hop, DJ Shadow, The Avalanches, etc, but cram sampling never has the same populist Black pop chart source and reach as it did between Eric B & Rakim's "You Know You Got Soul" (1987) and De La Soul is Dead (1991). For me, personally, inspired by The Clash's political bombast as a raw youth, It Takes a Nation was the Black punk rock I'd been waiting for. I Felt the Noize. "Armageddon, it's been in effect, go get a late pass. Step." 

Airline Deregulation as the Origin of the Neoliberal Order in the US

"Most people trace the birth of neoliberalism to Ronald Reagan—with the Democrats hopping on board in the 1990s with the election of Bill Clinton. But Clinton merely consolidated neoliberal ideas and turned them into a national agenda. I do not blame Clinton’s successful presidential campaign focus on “It’s the economy, stupid” for kick-starting the party’s fascination with neoliberalism in 1992. I place the birth date of neoliberalism on October 24, 1978, because that is the day that President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act into law.

I will freely admit that the Airline Deregulation Act is something of a pet peeve of mine. It’s a law that makes me irrationally angry, although it is objectively not as important as our antidemocratic voter suppression techniques, nor as vile and racist as our treatment of immigrants. But I believe the law to be a consequential misstep for the entire country. It is the moment when the Democratic Party turned its back on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and instead adopted the language of the free-market, unregulated claptrap pushed by capitalist thugs. It’s a language that has been swallowed whole by the corporate media and now bleeds out into our national conversations about the social safety net, social justice, and even the power of the government to combat the greatest threat of our age, climate change.

I cannot say that the Airline Deregulation Act caused many of the bad laws we still live with today. I can say that if you understand how Democrats passed the Airline Deregulation Act, you will understand nearly every fucking mistake the Democratic Party has made over the last 50 years.

Bork’s theory is that the entire point of laws is to bring about these market efficiencies and lower prices. Not to build a better, more fair society or, you know, stop evildoers, but to increase profits while lowering costs. Bork belonged to a school of thought called law and economics (sometimes scholars will shorthand this to the Chicago School, because a lot of these people were incubated at the University of Chicago School of Law), which holds that just about every law can and should be understood through an economic cost-benefit analysis, and the government should pick the most profitable one. It’s incredibly popular in legal circles, and if you spend any time studying law, you will quickly come across people, both liberal and conservative, who will blithely reduce every legal question—from abortion rights to First Amendment issues to healthcare—to a back-of-the-envelope math equation.

Neoliberalism eventually took over the Democratic Party, capped off by Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign. Bill and Hillary Clinton both studied under Bork at Yale Law School, which is a fact I often think about when contemplating why the Democratic Party sometimes looks like an uncanny valley version of the Republican Party. Clinton would go on to appoint Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court in 1994, giving neoliberals key footholds in all three branches of government. In 1996, Clinton declared in a State of the Union address, “The era of big government is over,” to the thunderous applause of both houses of Congress."

Ellie Mystal @ The Nation

As I've shown before I get defensive when people try to blame Neoliberalism on Carter; probably, principally, because he was the first potus that I got to vote for. He lost, of course. I responded to Carter, knowing practically nothing at the time, as sympathetically populist; more obviously for the people, the many, than the other guy. 

But my betters have worn me down. There is no gainsaying Carter making Paul Volcker head of the Fed, the monetary system.Volcker's animus for labor unions and working class people was legendary. And I admit Carter got the deregulation craze going, in airlines, trucking, etc, undeniably. 

I'll only maintain that while in retrospect Carter was crucial to the pre-history of Neoliberalism the official Neoliberal Order still did not take over until 1980, the Reagan Revolution, when conservative Neoliberal economics icon Milton Friedman joined the government and tax cuts for the rich and deregulation and hostility to labor unions and government programs became official policy. 

I also get defensive when people try to blame Neoliberalism's successful anti-Big Government takeover on Ralph Nader, a case I first encountered in Paul Sabin's Public Citizens (2021). The relevant case here is that Nader supported the deregulation of the airlines and maybe trucking too. These appear as mistaken positions (deregulated industries turned against unions) in retrospect but they didn't mean Nader was opposed to all government regulations or Big Gov. Establishing government safety regulations on the automobile industry was his first big consumer crusade after all. It's important to note that Nader opposed the industry capture of the regulatory departments of government. This was a big part of the whole Public Citizen thing. Nader's likely hope in the case of the airlines was that the labor unions could negotiate fairer contracts with the airline industry without the meddling of a captured government regulatory agency. He was wrong. But Public Citizen harbored no illusions about industry, the central conceit of the Neoliberal anti-Big Government position. Nader's fatal flaw, if you ask me, and this is what Yale Professor of History Sabin's book drove home for me, was Nader's Humpty-Dumpty attitude about the two major parties, failing to find some kind of compromise with the Democrats and failing to see the Republicans were a far bigger threat to his consumer protection interests.   

Beyond these quibbles, maybe every word here by Nation writer Elie Mystal is right on. My take on Clinton's role is more or less the same, he consolidated Neoliberalism as the national agenda (Rubin, Summers, etc) but he didn't start it. 

And, again, another story putting a spotlight on Bork as a monumental baddie. Bork was utterly foundational to the Neoliberal takeover with his "economics and law" doctrine. Bork was portrayed as something of a villain on TV in his failed bid to sit on SCOTUS during the Reagan administration. But I had no idea the depth of his villainy back then. Basically, over the past half century Bork's teaching at Yale bent the entire legal system into supporting profit seeking efficiencies over basic human rights and community welfare; in short, turning the courts away from any consideration of social justice. He wasn't entirely successful but he's a dominant intellectual figure on the libertarian right and amongst conservatives and the Federalist Society; and even an important influence on Neolib civil rights hybrid Dem pols like Clinton and Obama. There is more good stuff on Bork's terrible legacy in Matt Stoller's Goliath (2019). 

Anyway, Mystal, Harvard law grad, critic journalist, makes the personal case for Carter's deregulation of the airlines in 1978 as ground zero for the Neoliberal Order in the US. Still debatable but Mystal's style of debate, which actually reminds me of super smart second generation rock criticism, populist ripostes to the elite condescension of the 1960s Tom Wolfe prototype, concise, penetrating, captious, and funny but, unlike Wolfe, pugnaciously liberal and endlessly polemical. I always enjoy his stuff, even when I know he's exaggerating.  

   

Rowdy Party Boy Girl Talk

 I can easily see how this might be scoffed at by serious record hounds, which I maybe aspired to once upon a time but haven't been for decades, as too obvious, the samples too popular. Unoriginal: 'Where are the esoteric DJ Shadow samples that nobody knows but me and my cool friends?' But as post-hiphop Frat Rock, witty party music, the copyright vandalism of Girl Talk is absolutely exhilarating dancefloor fodder. It's like Gregg Michael Gillis', aka Girl Talk, loves hiphop, sees a crossover rap and hard rock song like maybe RunDMC/Aerosmith's "Walk This Way (1986) as a fountainhead event in a new electronic hybrid genre, and sets out to produce club mix versions for all his 1990s and 2000s rap favorites. This is about as populist rock & roll in the original 'it's got a good beat and you can dance to it' sense as I've found in the 21st century. The Kids Are Alright, if oversexed as the 16-24 set will tend to be. In short, this is sweaty hot party music. For the excitable of all ages, but with a big parental advisory label. Okie-dokie?  

All Day (2010)

Night Ripper (2006)

Feed the Animals (2008) 

How Originalism Killed the Constitution

Historian Jill Lepore in The Atlantic: 

"The philosophy of amendment is foundational to modern constitutionalism. It has structured American constitutional and political development for more than two centuries. It has done so in a distinctive, halting pattern of progression and regression: Constitutional change by way of formal amendment has alternated with judicial interpretation, in the form of opinions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court, as a means of constitutional revision.

This pattern has many times provided political stability, with formal amendment and judicial interpretation as the warp and weft of a sturdily woven if by now fraying and faded constitutional fabric. But the pattern, which features, at regular intervals, the perception by half the country that the Supreme Court has usurped the power of amendment, has also led to the underdevelopment of the Constitution, weakened the idea of representative government, and increased the polarization of American politics—ultimately contributing, most lately, to the rise of a political style that can only be called insurrectionary.

The U.S. Constitution has one of the lowest amendment rates in the world. Some 12,000 amendments have been formally introduced on the floor of Congress; only 27 have ever been ratified, and there has been no significant amendment in more than 50 years. That is not because Americans are opposed to amending constitutions. Since 1789, Americans have submitted at least 10,000 petitions and countless letters, postcards, and phone and email messages to Congress regarding constitutional amendments, and they have introduced and agitated for thousands more amendments in the pages of newspapers and pamphlets, from pulpits, at political rallies, on websites, and all over social media. Every state has its own constitution, and all of them have been frequently revised and replaced.

Article V, the amendment provision of the U.S. Constitution, is a sleeping giant. It sleeps until it wakes. War is, very often, what wakes it up. And then it roars. In 1789, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Congress passed 12 amendments, 10 of which, later known as the Bill of Rights, were ratified by the states by 1791. A federal amendment requires a double supermajority to become law: It must pass by a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress (or be proposed by two-thirds of the states), and then it must be ratified by three-quarters of the states (either in legislatures or at conventions). No amendments were ratified in the 61 years from 1804 to 1865, and then, at the end of the Civil War, three were ratified in five years. What became the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolishing slavery, had first been proposed decades earlier. No amendments were ratified in the 43 years from 1870 to 1913, and then, around the time of the First World War, four were ratified in seven years. The Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote and first called for in 1848, was ratified in 1920, after a 72-year moral crusade.

Again, the giant slept. In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt largely abandoned constitutional amendment in favor of applying pressure on the Supreme Court.... 

Between 1980 and 2020, members of Congress proposed more than 2,100 constitutional amendments. Congress, more divided with each passing year, approved none of them. 

&&&&&&&&&

The full story is about how the legal theory known as Originalism undermines the evolutionary balance in the US Constitution. Lepore, American historian at Harvard, longtime NY-er journalist, traces an outline of evolutionary balance in US history that includes periods of popular pressures demanding democratizing reforms, Amendments to the Constitution, usually following the cataclysm of wars, alternating with periods of judicial interpretation and review, reconciling democratic pressures with existing Constitutional precedents and the foundational values of the framers. 

Originalism, spearheaded by controversial jurist Robert Bork (what Malthus was to free market capitalist early-19th c myth Bork is to Neoliberal technocratic capitalist late-20th c myth), and championed by iconic conservative justice Antonin Scalia, has undermined this evolutionary balance of the Constitution. Killing the Constitution. 

Originalism opposes this idea of a give-and-take evolutionary balance in the Constitution as a "living constitution." "It's dead. Dead, dead, dead," scoffs Scalia in public speeches. Jurists extending civil rights to groups unidentified in the Constitution, women, Blacks, etc, are "activist judges" and very bad. Liberal judicial review submits to democratic pressures, Amendments, and a changing evolutionary Constitution and is disparaged as "bleeding-heart liberalism." Originalism insists on strict, limited, readings of the framers original constitutional intentions. 

Originalism strikes me as really embarrassingly crackpot stuff for a national institution like the judiciary. Lepore calls Originalism radical but it holds tremendous sway within the conservative mainstream of The Federalist Society; the source of all the conservative justices on SCOTUS and the conservative legal establishment. 

Lepore's main case is how for an idea rooted in the importance of history, precedents, and the original framers intentions, the Originalists sure peddle a lot of bad history. Her historical takedown of Scalia's crowning achievement, his 2008 Second Amendment gift to Gun Rights enthusiasts, District of Columbia vs Heller, is like Lisa Simpson doing a touchdown dance with her saxophone. Love it. 

(I'd also recommend her podcast X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.) 

In my amateur take I'd lump Originalism with Neoliberalism and Social Darwinism as kind of obvious intellectual frauds that really only exist as propaganda to protect the rich, wealth, Billionaires, and market fundamentalists from democracy and the rule of law. Labor rights, expanding civil rights, environmental protections, public infrastructure, taxes, regulations, anything that gets in the way of their profit seeking and private wealth hoarding is verboten. That people otherwise sympathetic to working class rights should embrace these ideas as expressions of heroic machismo is one of the tragic conundrums of our day.  

"Mind Playing Tricks on Me," Geto Boys (1991)

Sometimes the lasting value or allure of a pop song is how it nails a time and/or place. In this case, the crack era gangster life and its milieu in the Dirty South and urban Trap housing in cities more or less everywhere in the 1990s. The Wire TV drama, trying to document the same, never quite gets it as perfectly as "Mind Playing Tricks on Me." The song reached 23 on the Hot 100 in 1991. The Stax sound gives soulfulness to a crude, funny, wildly paranoid Robert Altman Short Cuts-like take on the crack era, busted drug deals, paranoid Halloween fantasies, living with the relentless threat of stress and violence that can turn desperately touching: "Goddam Homie, My mind is playing tricks on me." 

 Big sample source behind this one is Isaac Hayes' instrumental "Hung Up On My Baby" (1974): 

On Limits: How Wrong Was Malthus?

"Democracy is at odds with capitalism, because capitalism's imperative to expand cannot be questioned. Capitalism's "pseudo-mastery" of nature can never be fulfilled, [Cornelius] Castoriadis* argues, pointing to the unintended consequences of technology. We thought we were mastering nature with fossil fuels, but climate change is the reckoning. This mastery is also "pseudo-rational" because its source is not rational. It stems from a theological duty to subdue nature, which evokes what we saw with Malthus." -Giorgos Kallis, Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and environmentalists should care (2019).

Thomas Malthus, English economist, hugely influential on the study of demography or population growth and so the development of the environmental sciences, emerges increasingly as a supervillain in the origins of modern free market economic fundamentalism. Or the myth of the free market: a religious faith in market growth, wealth accumulation, unimpeded by government regulations and taxes. 

Malthus thought that there will never be enough because of the limitless drive of humans to procreate, mostly because he was a 40-year old virgin himself. But, regardless, his thinly veiled contempt for the procreative vitality of the impoverished masses was immediately a very popular idea with the educated landholding elites in England in the dawn light of the Industrial Revolution's "Satanic Mills." 

Population growth will always push up against the limits of food production, Malthus contended. And so conditions of natural scarcity should rule economic production. 

The terrible implications for the welfare of communities in his teachings are hard to overstate. To Malthus "poor laws," British state welfare programs (mostly ran through churches), tax the productive to subsidize the unproductive. He articulated a creed of Social Darwinism before Darwin, arguing strenuously against English welfare programs as destructive to the natural order. He was a prophet of libertarianism, as a rationale for Christian nationalism and white supremacy and class privilege, and his ideas about scarcity were absolutely elemental to free market, Laissez-faire, neoliberal economic theory.   

Malthusian limits, or conditions of scarcity, are today a foundational principle of modern economics and environmental science. Industry produces goods and services with scarce resources, to maximize profits and minimize the costs of production. In environmental science when population growth exceeds the carrying capacity of a living environment, it generates the degrading conditions of overshoot and overpopulation. 

Malthus was one of the first scholars to raise the question of environmental limits, which it has turned out is a subject we now know should not be ignored, but was wrong in several important ways. 

Foremost, Malthus' conception of food production was too reliant on wheat or staple grain crops. He fails to anticipate the agricultural revolution that grew out of the industrial revolution he saw in its startup infancy: synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, new farm machinery, and bigger irrigation systems would change the game. He also couldn't imagine dietary variety beyond the grain based gruel 95% of the poor peasant populations of England and Europe had lived off for the previous millennia. 

But, let's remember, the industrial and technological development of the 19th century caught many off guard. In world history terms, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, compresses into a hundred or two hundred years, depending on how deep into it you want to go, radical changes in living the original Agricultural Revolution that began maybe twelve thousand years ago took thousands of years, millennia, to spread around the world. 

So the exponential population growth Malthus observed in the early 19th century was not perpetual but more a feature of the explosive industrial revolution going on in England at that time. As modernizing developments spread around the world after Malthus, women eventually gain individual rights, education, and access to safe forms of birth control and they on average don't start having children until they're a little older and rarely choose to have more than two children. This is known as the demographic transition model, and explains why population growth began to level off in developed countries by the last quarter of the 20th century. 

So Malthus wasn't a prophet but he was absolutely one of the chief architects of scarcity economics. Behind his number crunching graphs was his contemptuous class sympathies: the notion that productive capitalists, landholders, and English nobility, via "free markets" controlled by industrial and financial giants, should absolutely define the limits of the unproductive peasantry and non-Christian foreigners, who Malthus regards with uncomprehending disgust.  

My takeaway from this book by Kallis, who turns out is one of the founding "degrowth" people. I only stumbled onto the book in my Mr. Magoo investigation into books about Malthus. Anyway, Giorgos Kallis credits Malthus for being one of the first to study environmental limits but recognizes all the stupid classist bigotry in his arguments. But he also wants us to look at more than environmental "limits" and create visions of "abundant" environments. Ai yi yi, now I'm finding Abundance content everywhere! 

Kallis relies historically a lot on the gist of Marshall Sahlin's "The Original Affluent Society" (1974). In many primitive societies nature is viewed as abundant, not scarce; Sahlin estimates many groups lived happily working only 10-15 hours a week. These cultures are organized to achieve shared abundance; they adapt to their environmental limit conditions to generate shared abundance or enough for everybody. By contrast, in Malthusian terms, in capitalist societies capital attempts to monopolize scarce resources and profit growth (or abundance), sequestering itself safely away from the grubby rabble and nuisance laws, and imposing conditions of austerity limits on the rest of the economy. 

Anyway, Kallis is interesting. Out of grad school with degrees in Chemistry, and Environmental Engineering and an added Master's in Economics, he's an outsider with the mainstream macro financial economics academic crowd. He was first into the Coevolution thing, which I know very little about. I know Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), usually dismissed as anarchist rantings, is really about how coevolutionary patterns of mutual aid in animal species are more common and very likely more important than the conflict and violence that "survival of the fittest" free market Social Darwinists profess. And there is more recent environmental science about coevolution in forests, essential cooperation between trees and plants, that I picked up in Richard Power's novel The Overstory (2018). 

So I'm sympathetic to economic perspectives that emphasize cooperation over competition but what is this Degrowth economics, anyway? Kallis defines it as a process of change that reduces energy and resource consumption while improving the quality of life. I'm certainly open to critiques of economic growth statistics and the poverty they ignore or even stigmatize as criminal. But from what I got out of Wikipedia this sounds a little more like another small is beautiful fad as partisan politics. The real trick in bending the economy towards sustainability will be reducing the production and consumption of carbon energy while at the same time increasing job and living wage growth. Kallis, reportedly, supports Green New Deal legislation but insists it can't be successful without denouncing the tyranny of growth economics and embracing Degrowth, whatever that would exactly mean. It sounds like more "agony of the left" factional fighting over winning political sloganeering. Wears me out fast. 

Still, some Vaclav Smil book I read awhile back raised this interesting question (but didn't really answer it): Is Japan a positive model of a really existing Degrowth economy? I'd still like to know more about that. 

*Cornelius Castoriades, Greek-French philosopher I've never read. Wrote a book provocatively titled The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), which makes me think of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983). In that book imagined communities are nationalism or the development of national feelings about geographic locations. What are the origins and what makes the nation operational and effective as a form of political organization? Maybe significant that Castoriadis uses the singular "institution," and might be curious how his "imagined society" compares with Anderson's plural "imagined communities." Anyway, Castoriades appears to be one of Kallis's key go-to intellectual guides. 

Fernand Braudel on The Structures of Everyday Life between the 15th and 18th centuries, 1400-1800: 

"Luxury then can take on many guises, depending on the period, the country or the civilization. What does not change, by contrast, is the unending social drama of which luxury is both the prize and the theme, a choice spectacle for sociologist, psychologist, economist and historian. A certain amount of connivance is of course required between the privileged and the onlookers-- the watching masses. Luxury does not only represent rarity and vanity, but also social success, fascination, the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor, and in so doing immediately loses its old glamour. Not long ago a medical historian wrote: 'When food that has been rare and long desired finally arrives within reach of the masses, consumption rises sharply, as if a long-repressed appetite had exploded. Once popularised [in both senses of the word - becoming "less exclusive" and "more widespread"] the food quickly loses its attraction... The appetite becomes stated.' The rich are thus doomed to prepare the future life of the poor. It is, after all, their justification: they try out the pleasures that the masses will sooner or later grasp. 

The moral is not surprising: every luxury dates and goes out of fashion. But luxury is reborn from its own ashes and from its very defeats. It is really the reflection of a difference in social levels that nothing can compensate for and that every movement creates. An eternal 'class struggle.' 

In short, as Marcel Mauss wrote: 'it was not in production that society found its driving force: luxury is the great stimulus'." from The Structures of Everyday Life, 1979-1981.  

************

Does this mean we can expect the masses will soon all be owning yachts? Or boats? Or at least vacation getaways? 

Luxuries are things that set the rich or elites apart but also tantalize ambitions in the poor. It's possible with a generous reading to imagine in this social relationship some possibilities for progress, and not just the dreary treadmill of the "eternal class struggle," IF so many actually existing rich were not such cold stingy misers. 

This is also a capsule chunk of an argument economic anthropology has with formal economic science. Econ 101 assumes production is the driving force in social development. Anthropology, Mauss and Braudel, say the pursuit of luxury, this eternal class struggle, is the driving force in social development. Although not "class struggle" like Marx, a dialectic struggle that will eventually resolve itself with armed revolution and then some fully-automated communist Kumbaya utopia. But eternal struggle like there will always be rich and poor and the latter will always desire the exclusive privileges of the former; a cultural social hierarchy in constant state of tension and flux. 

World building, or politics, from this anthropology angle then, Mauss, Braudel, Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, might concern negotiating some sustainable peaceful balance between those that would rather defend existing inequality and property relations by force, conservatives, Republicans, police state fascists, and those that would rather liberate the poor from the predations of the rich. Braudel's sympathies are obvious and appreciated; if too CRT for the present. 

Liberal in the sense of government protections for individual human rights. Governments, communities, investing in progressively reducing the hardships of poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, lack of health care, education, etc. Not neoliberal in the sense of protecting wealth and markets from democracy and basic human rights. 

 

Coalbrooke by Night by Phillippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1801)

In response to Malthus:

"Nature is bountiful, not mean, and leads inevitably upward towards its creator, not down into misery and penury. Those enmired in the selfishness of calculation are precisely those who create the world in which charity is undermined, social bonds are broken, urban manufactures thrive, and poverty blights the countryside." 

- William Wordsworth, from "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" (1798), found in Giorgos Kallis Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. (2019)