For all the carping on The Substance of Style I've been doing, one would think that I have some sort of weird dislike for Virginia Postrel herself.   Nothing could be farther from the truth - she's still a personal rockstar of mine and her contribution to the modern Classical Liberal / libertarian movement was and continues to be worthy of accolades.  

In fact, I criticize the work because I expected so much of it given my previous familiarity with the author.   It's tough love. 

Interestingly, her blog - on my daily reading list - contains the following criticism of Easterbrook's Progress Paradox:

Many, though by no means all, of the book's problems stem from its lack of concern with "how life gets better," as opposed to the mere fact that life gets better. There are lots of statistics, but very little connection to specific human enterprise, experiments, or experience. The few anecdotes are memorable, because they're so rare.

Hmm...  Major deja vu.  Sounds a lot like my earlier criticism of TSOS:

Now I know enough about our current understanding of human psych to not expect deep answers on what is aesthetic but I did strongly expect a human-nature model that explains why people have what Postrel calls the aesthetic imperative. Postrel, unfortunately, doesn't go there and simply provides ample evidence that the aesthetic imperative exists

Clearly, Postrel has some expectation that publishing a series of socio-political observations also calls for standing up & providing a socio-political theory to explain it.   Too bad she didn't follow this prescription in TSOS.