This essay by Jared Diamond is a quarter of a century old, but it’s still worth pondering, particularly as we now know much more about just how bad for our health grains are. I think, though, that he misses a key benefit of agriculture — the fact that it has allowed us to produce billions of people. Minds are a resource, even if we poorly utilize most of them. The more people we have, the likelier we are to come up with new true advances. I’m pretty sure that absent agriculture, technology would not have advanced much, and we’d be nowhere near the position we’re in now — about to finally expand off the planet, and attain the capability of preventing a species-destroying event.
Category Archives: Economics
Trains To Nowhere Over Rocket Ships
California expresses its preference. My thoughts on XCOR’s Texas move, over at PJMedia.
Promises, Promises
The president has a lot to be held to account for:
The problem for Obama is that his predictions were not only wrong; they were terribly wide of the mark. For example, since the president was sworn in, America has suffered a net decline of roughly half a million jobs. According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average annual premium for family health coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011—an increase of 9 percent, or $1,303, over the previous year. The 9 percent increase in family premiums between 2010 and 2011 followed an increase of 3 percent between 2009 and 2010. Under Obama, the number of foreclosures was the worst in history. In addition, last year was the worst sales year on record for housing, while home values are nearly 35 percent lower than they were five years ago.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate has been above 8 percent for 41 consecutive months. The deficit was around $1.3 trillion the day Obama took office in the midst of the financial crisis; according to the Congressional Budget Office, in the current 2012 budget year, the deficit will be around $1.25 trillion. And a record 46 million Americans are now living in poverty.
In addition, during the Obama years we’ve experienced the weakest economic recovery on record. America’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time in our history. The standard of living for Americans fell more steeply than at any time since the government began recording it five decades ago. Income for American families has actually declined more following the economic recession than it did during the official recession itself.
Change!
[Update a few minutes later]
The Real Health-Care Solution
Medical innovation and real cures.
Big Business
The free-market case against it. It’s crony socialism.
“Twilight Creeps Too Slowly”
Some thoughts on being a slow-boiled frog.
This Is What Pseudoscience Looks Like
My thoughts on the latest attempts of the warm mongers to hijack the weather to advance their political agenda, over at PJMedia.
[Update a few minutes later]
June 2012 temperatures are not that remarkable.
[Update a while later]
Well, this is disappointing. Joel Achenbach has fallen prey to the myth.
Political Particle Physics
Iowahawk reports on a new pseudoscientific breakthough:
The landmark experiment in Quantum Rhetoric began early this week after legal particle cosmologist John Roberts published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Tortured Logic that solved the long-debated Pelosi’s Paradox in Universal Health Care Theory.
“Pelosi’s Paradox states that in order to find out what is in a health care bill, it would have to be passed,” explained physicist Steven Hawking. “But in order to be a law it would have to be constitutional, which means someone would have to know what was in it, which would mean it couldn’t have been a bill in the first place. Think of Schroedinger’s Cat, except with a lobotomy.”
Actually, I don’t think that Nancy Pelosi has the requisite equipment for a lobotomy.
Post-Credentialism
Some thoughts on the higher-education mess from Phil Bowermaster.
So Much For Peak Oil
This is an amazing chart. Not that it makes sense economically, but we can be “energy independent” any time we decide to be.