These are two of the more important essays I've read this year. I got tired of tweeting them separately, so this post will make it easier to distribute them as a pair. I urge you to read them both because they each offer a fresh perspective on the root causes of our growing global socio–political dysfunction. Flying cars may always have been a fantasy, or they may simply not be something our plutocracy run amok cares much about. 

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

by David Graeber (co-founder of Occupy Wall Street)

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

And a response to it… 

Jetpacks versus Power Point Decks 

by @root_e  (armchair economic thinker and all-around smart dude.)

David Graeber wrote the first old school left wing essay I have seen in years and it makes the flabby, stale quality of much of what passes for left-wing analysis all the more apparent. Graeber asks what happened to the optimism, the technical ferment, the rapid changes and extensions of prosperity that people in the first world used to assume were inevitable:

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