Andrew Martin

“In the late nineteenth century, the American population was growing by 30% every decade, and the number of “subjects of inquiry” in the US Census had gone from just five in 1870 to more than two hundred in 1880. The tabulation of the 1880 census took eight years—just barely finishing by the time the 1890 census began.”
― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

“To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in which it shows what it might become. America - this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes - needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.”
― Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform

“Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created.

Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream