Optimization Prime is a new group blog. The pun in the title, presumably due to Justin Gundlach should be self-explanatory to members of Gen Y and their parents- the members of the group are all in the former category, I think. My biggest criticism is that comments don’t appear to have been implemented yet, though this should be easy in what looks like a Movable Type set.
Among some interesting posts, Maggie McConnell cites a report that Hallmark is developing a line of greeting cards for gay weddings. This raises a more general point about capitalism as a solvent of traditional social order, going back at least to Schumpeter, which I’ll try to develop some other time.
John Quiggin 
Oh Lord! Surely the more important message from the advent of the Hallmark gay wedding card is that tackiness is universal.
“going back at least to Schumpeter”
You’re kidding surely – precisely the effect of capitalism on transforming the social order is almost the characteristic doctrine of the young Marx. Not to mention Bourke’s less direct ponderings on the same topic.
In one form or another it goes back to Plato, I suppose. Should you indeed return to this theme, John, you might care to glance at The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, by Jerry Muller. One character Muller devotes a lot of space to is Justus Moser, an 18th Century German conservative whose verdict on capitalist transformation was unreservedly negative.
A quick visit to http://www.marx.org reveals that, as one might expect, Marx had nothing but praise for Moser, whose ‘Patriotische Phantasien…are distinguished by the fact that they never for one moment leave the staunch, petty-bourgeois, “Home-baked”, ordinary, narrow-minded horizon of the philistine, and, yet still, remain pure fantasy.’