Merge pull request #1065 from gabrieltseng/more-small-fixes

Small typo fixes

Author: GlenWeyl

contents/english/3-2-connected-society.md

@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ Three foundational institutions of modern social organization represent this str
 
 #### Property
 
-Simple and familiar forms of private property, with most restrictions and impositions on that right being imposed by governments, are the most common form of ownership in liberal democracies around the world.  Most homes are owned by a single individual or family or by a single landlord who rents to another individual or family.  Most non-governmental collective ownership takes the form of a standard joint stock company governed by the principle of one-share-one-vote and the maximization of shareholder value.  While there are significant restrictions on the rights of private property owners based on community interests, these overwhelmingly take the form of regulations by a small number of governmental levels, such as national, provincial/state and local/city. These practices are in sharp contrast to the property regimes that have prevailed in most human societies throughout most of history, in which individual ownership was rarely absolutely institutionalized and a diversity of "traditional" expectations governed how possessions can rightly be used and exchanged. Such traditional structures were largely erased by modernity and colonialism as they attempted to pattern property into a marketable "commodity", allowing exchange and reuse for a much broad set of purposes than was possible within full social context.[^Polanyi]
+Simple and familiar forms of private property, with most restrictions and impositions on that right being imposed by governments, are the most common form of ownership in liberal democracies around the world.  Most homes are owned by a single individual or family or by a single landlord who rents to another individual or family.  Most non-governmental collective ownership takes the form of a standard joint stock company governed by the principle of one-share-one-vote and the maximization of shareholder value.  While there are significant restrictions on the rights of private property owners based on community interests, these overwhelmingly take the form of regulations by a small number of governmental levels, such as national, provincial/state and local/city. These practices are in sharp contrast to the property regimes that have prevailed in most human societies throughout most of history, in which individual ownership was rarely absolutely institutionalized and a diversity of "traditional" expectations governed how possessions can rightly be used and exchanged. Such traditional structures were largely erased by modernity and colonialism as they attempted to pattern property into a marketable "commodity", allowing exchange and reuse for a much broader set of purposes than was possible within full social context.[^Polanyi]
 
 [^Polanyi]: Karl Polanyi, *The Great Transformation* (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).
 
@@ -144,7 +144,7 @@ Dewey revered democracy as the most fundamental principle of his career; barely
 
 In particular, what it means to say an institution is “democratic” is not just that it involves participation and voting.  Many oligarchies had these forms, but did not include most citizens and thus were not democratic.  Nor would, in Dewey’s mind, a global “democracy” directly managing the affairs of a village count as democratic.  Core to true democracy is the idea that the “relevant public”, the set of people whose lives are actually shaped by the phenomenon in question, manage that challenge.  Because technology is constantly throwing up new forms of interdependence, which will almost never correspond precisely to existing political boundaries, true democracy requires new publics to constantly emerge and reshape existing jurisdictions.
 
-Furthermore, because new forms of interdependence are not easily perceived by most individuals in their everyday lives, Dewey saw a critical role for what he termed “social science experts” but we might with no more abuse of terminology call “entrepreneurs”, “leaders”, “founders”, “pioneer” or, as we prefer, “mirror”.  Just as George Washington's leadership helped the US both perceive itself as a nation and a nation that had to democratically choose its fate after his term in office, the role of such mirrors is to perceive a new form of interdependence (e.g. solidarity among workers, the carbon-to-global-warming chain), explain it to those involved by both word and deed, and thereby empower a new public to come into existence. Historical examples are union leaders, founders of rural electricity cooperatives, and the leaders who founded the United Nations.  Once this emergent public is understood, recognized, and empowered to govern the new interdependence, the role of the mirror fades away, just as Washington returned to Mount Vernon.
+Furthermore, because new forms of interdependence are not easily perceived by most individuals in their everyday lives, Dewey saw a critical role for what he termed “social science experts” but we might with no more abuse of terminology call “entrepreneurs”, “leaders”, “founders”, “pioneers” or, as we prefer, “mirrors”.  Just as George Washington's leadership helped the US both perceive itself as a nation and a nation that had to democratically choose its fate after his term in office, the role of such mirrors is to perceive a new form of interdependence (e.g. solidarity among workers, the carbon-to-global-warming chain), explain it to those involved by both word and deed, and thereby empower a new public to come into existence. Historical examples are union leaders, founders of rural electricity cooperatives, and the leaders who founded the United Nations.  Once this emergent public is understood, recognized, and empowered to govern the new interdependence, the role of the mirror fades away, just as Washington returned to Mount Vernon.
 
 Thus, as the mirror image of Simmel’s philosophy of (in)dividual identity, Dewey’s conception of democracy and emergent publics is at once profoundly democratic and yet challenges and even overturns our usual conception of democracy.  Democracy, in this conception, is not the static system of representation of a nation-state with fixed borders.  It is a process even more dynamic than a market, led by a diverse range of entrepreneurial mirrors, who draw upon the ways they are themselves intersections of unresolved social tensions to renew and re-imagine social institutions.  Standard institutions of nation state-based voting are to such a process as pale a shadow as Newtonian mechanics is of the underlying quantum and relativistic reality. True democracy must be ⿻ and constantly evolving.
 

contents/english/4-1-identity-and-personhood.md

@@ -63,6 +63,7 @@ When most people think of their formal "identity", they are usually referring to
 - Licenses for the use of potentially hazardous tools, such as automobiles or firearms.
 - Unified national identification cards/numbers/databases in some countries.
 - Passports for international travel, which constitute perhaps the widest system of identification given its implicit international federation.
+
 While these systems vary across countries, they generally share several notable features:
 1. They are canonical and highly trusted in a range of settings, to the point where they are often referred to as "legal" or even "true" identities, with all other forms of identity deriving being either "pseudonyms" or deriving their legitimacy from reference to them.
 2. Partly because of 1), they are used for enrollment into other systems in a variety of contexts (e.g. checking age at a bar, registering for a bank account, paying taxes) even when they were/are intended to be purpose or program specific.  A notorious example is the United States Social Security Number (SSN), which was created originally in the 1930s to help manage a new pension system.[^SSNHistory] By the 1960’s it was regularly being requested by many different government and private sector entities. This widespread use meant people’s activities across many different contexts could be profiled. In the late 1960s and early 1970s concerns were raised about these practices[^RightsOfCitizens] and a series of laws were passed limiting the ability of agencies within the federal government to share data between agencies and limited the usage of the SSN in the private sector.[^SSNUsageRestrictions] Since then the federal government has been working to reduce SSN usage and is actively considering alternatives.[^SSNAlternatives]