A friend wrote yesterday:

The cooperative/competitive discussion is going in a great direction. Love your application of it to education. And your flat-out declaration that it doesn’t prepare for work – which I agree with.

First of all, thanks for the feedback, DB.  I try to pay attention to every bit of feedback.

I think the tack of doing case studies from various institutions — family, school, workplace, government — works well for this chapter.   A lot of interesting anecdotes flow out of this, and it’s a nice framework for thinking about the dichotomy Cooperation/Competition.

I was disappointed as usual with the amount of vomitout I got done this week, but I’m holding myself in check on that until I finish all 7 of the problems and see if the overall project has helped forward the book.  I kind of think it has.

David Graeber’s books on bullshit jobs and the joys of bureaucracy were great serendipitous arrivals this week.  I immediately pressed Bullshit Jobs into service for the vomitout, and intend to do the same with Utopia of Rules once I read it.  Graeber is amazing IMHO.

I was able to get some stuff down on paper about hyper-partisanship as a form of failure on Cooperation/Competition but I’d also like to have more of a theory of “why hyperpartisanship now?”  I expect it has at least something to do with technological advances in both audience segmentation and soundbite-ology which are hastening a “normal” corrosion of democracy as we slide downhill toward… the death of the Republic?

On that cheerful note…