The author has the right idea, but the wrong target. The problem is not that we have top-down planning; as he notes, that goes back as far as the beginnings of civilization itself. The problem is that, due to technology and the increasing concentration of wealth, top-down can now encompass vast scales that it could not in the past. A human-planted forest isn't a big deal when it's a handful of people planting a few acres. The tree mono-culture in the small patch gets absorbed over time in to the greater, more heterogeneous whole. But now one corporate entity can transform millions of acres in a short time. Corporations can blanket thousands of cities with scooters, release a new food product that instantly appears in millions of stores, or pepper the landscape with identical franchises virtually overnight. It this kind of massive centralization of power that should be drawing the author's criticism, not the mere notion of top-down planning.