By the way, I see only one episode in human history in which the Principle of Growth was clearly and unambiguously applied, and that is in the East Asian economic miracles, which includes Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China (with a caveat for sustainability in the case of China). These histories are normally thought of as big economic successes, and of course they are, but there’s more to it than that: they also represent the highest manifestation of the ethical good in human history to date. Whereas Hegel saw the nineteenth-century Prussian state as a manifestation of
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