mortiz059

I'm taking a short break from posting this week. I expect to post again on Sunday, January 7.

In 2002 when soon-to-be-dismissed U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill warned then Vice President Dick Cheney that the Bush administration's tax cuts would drive up deficits and threaten the health of the economy, Cheney famously answered : "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter." In the wake of the recently approved federal tax cut ,voices concerned about the damage that deficits will do are rising again. What's curious is that since Cheney's rebuke of O'Neill, growing federal government deficits seem not to have mattered. In fact, the largest deficits ever boosted the economy after the 2008-09 recession, exceeding $1 trillion annually for four years . All of this suggests that the federal government has for a long time been operating under an unspoken monetary theory, namely, that government spending does not need to be backed by revenues and that the debt issued to fill the gap between spending and revenues will have little effect now or...

Are we wrong to believe that competitiveness must and always will be the central animating principle of human action? Media studies scholar Michael Karlberg thinks so. In fact, he believes that another animating principle, mutualism , is both central to human interaction and necessary to aid human society in meeting the myriad challenges it faces regarding climate change, inequality, governance, education and many other issues. I saw Karlberg speak recently at a private gathering in Washington, D.C. He is measured in his tone, clear in his delivery and compelling in his logic. He poses the following question: If nearly all of our institutions are premised on competition (commerce, politics, education, recreation and many others), is it any wonder that our competitive instincts are honed and expanded while our cooperative ones atrophy? Karlberg is not naive enough to believe that all this can be changed overnight. But he does make a convincing case that competitiveness is as much a pro...

I'm taking a short break from posting this week. I expect to post again on Sunday, December 17.

Some people claim that certain humans—called breatharians —can live on air alone. Others claim we can have economic growth without increasing our resource use, so-called decoupling. Neither claim withstands scrutiny though here I am only going to deal with the second one. Hidden beneath the claim of decoupling is the assertion that human well-being and economic growth are synonymous. But, human well-being is far from a one-dimensional economic variable linked unalterably to more income and consumption. So, saying that economic growth must at some point come to an end to maintain the habitability of the planet is not the same as saying that human well-being must also stop improving. On the contrary, a stable society in harmony with the workings of the natural world in a way that maintains the habitability of the biosphere for humans would seem to be an essential characteristic of a society which offers a high degree of well-being to humans. Destroying that habitability through endless...

In a conversation over the holiday I posited to a friend that the modern worldview which guides human action practically worldwide has all the hallmarks of a religion . I contended that this "religion" is at the root of our ecological predicament and that changing the current perilous trajectory of humankind would entail the adoption of an ecologically sound religion to replace it. When I say religion, I mean "worldview," and I believe the two are synonymous. Even if one has a supposedly secular worldview that relies on economics, psychology, biology or any other field for an explanation of how the world works, it will inevitably look like a religion since such worldviews have unquestioned (and often unquestionable!) premises and may make claims to explain all the social and/or physical phenomena we experience. These secular worldviews tend to be reductionist, describing the interactions of humans with one another and the physical world as nothing but a product of ...

There is a notion afoot that our agricultural production can simply migrate toward the poles in the face of climate change as areas in lower latitudes overheat and dry up. Few people contemplate what such a move would entail and whether it would actually be feasible. One assumption behind this falsely reassuring idea is that soil quality is somehow roughly uniform across the planet. But, of course, this is completely false. Soil quality and composition vary widely, often within walking distance on the same farm. Farmers simply moving north (or south in the Southern Hemisphere) in response to climate change will not automatically encounter soil suitable for farming. We must also consider that lands not previously farmed may very well be forested. Knocking down the trees and clearing the stumps might make such lands arable. But the loss of carbon storage that trees represent would only make climate change worse. Quite often we think of rural areas as being undeveloped. But nothing could...