Charting a Bubble

An insightful article, written by Anna Manzo, appeared in the New Haven Register last Saturday entitled “America, Smitten with Financial Sector, Must Build True Wealth.” The article is available here. Manzo leads into her article by citing unemployment data and then asks: “Could it be that jobs are disappearing because society values money and profits [...]

El Camino Real

Canada’s highways are superbly maintained, tidy, and barely disturb the land. They draw their lines modestly through the vast, rolling Nordic landscape, and the landscape dominates. Human structures appear and fall behind, and over it all vast clouds observe, the rain falls, the sun breaks through the clouds—and all this proceeds in a kind of [...]

Quasi-Scientific Debates

Two examples of such debates are peak oil and global warming. Both have their roots in science, but passions rage around them unrelated to the facts. A genuine scientific debate still surrounds ice ages: how they began and how they ended. The same is true of any scientific issue that deals with climate changes that occurred before, say, 1000 [...]

The Trouble with Big Abstractions

Let’s suppose that you are asked a question. And let’s suppose further, by way of evoking science fiction, that the question comes from a fluently English-speaking alien from another planet. Watching what now calls itself the SyFy Channel, I am persuaded that (1) all habitable planets have an atmosphere 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent [...]

TFR. Never Heard Of It? Read On.

If in their child-bearing years (15-44) 1,000 women produce 2,100 babies—and this ratio holds true for the entire nation—the total fertility rate (TFR) will be at replacement level. This ratio, calculated by demographers, is used all over the world, and it takes into account the fact that a small proportion of the population does not [...]

Don’t Blame the Old…

… and don’t use us as foils either. If we want to discover the core problem behind the health care debacle we should look to the Untouchables, namely our health care providers. They have produced the expensive system that we have.
Our expenditures on healthcare are the highest in the world (15.3% of our GDP in 2005). The medical [...]

A Steady-State Economy

Our current modes of thought are based on a model that, if we project its consequences far enough in time, it produces absurd results. Our idea is that everything must grow, and grow continuously. People say, believing it as a truth not worthy of challenge, that if something isn’t growing, it is most definitely in [...]

National Opinion: Modern Augury

Let’s first look at what constitutes a decent, representative national sample. A Harvard national survey, focused on opinions about swine flu, was based on talking to 1,823 people aged 18 or over. In July 2009, there were 232.7 million people aged 18 or over. Thus this sample represented 0.0008 percent of the population. Another way [...]

Straws in the Wind?

Two recent events suggest that eventually the Internet sphere will also be ruled by a semblance of rationality. One was the announcement by Rupert Murdoch that his properties on the web will charge for content in the future. Murdoch represents a sizeable-enough chunk of “content” so that his leadership may lead to emulation by his [...]

Agriculture: The Rock and the Hard Place

Many years ago now I remember reading an article about the American Plains Indians. The article focused on basics, how they sustained themselves. They hunted the buffalo, grew maize and pumpkins, and supplemented this production by gathering fruits and nuts and hunting small game. The point the authors tried to make was that the American [...]