One narrative about the Yellow Vest protests in France is that politicians should not adopt energy taxes to change behaviors that lead to climate change. In this telling, the political costs of wise energy policy are too high. This is an overly simple reading of the French experience and is a convenient excuse for those […]
In the environmental debates of the 1970s, one common name hurled at environmentalists was to call them “neo-Malthusians.” This dismissive insult was meant to imply that the concern for environmental issues was nothing more than the contemporary application of the failed analysis of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). Malthus was a classical economist in the tradition of […]
In Henry Beston’s eloquent classic of nature writing, The Outermost House, he worried about the decline in birds he was seeing on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Even in the 1920s when he spent his year on the Beach, humans were adversely impacting birds and other parts of nature. Beston identified a “new” danger: […]
Back in January I wondered out loud, Was the Internet a Good Idea? To my way of thinking the information technology (IT) revolution of the past 25 years has been a mixed blessing. It both created amazing tools for doing everyday tasks and introduced whole new means of mindless addiction and criminal opportunities. This IT […]
Economists become famous by winning the Nobel Prize (technically the Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) or becoming public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith or Paul Krugman. But economists do not have to be famous to be important. Significant contributions come in many guises. The most important economist you […]
Robert Gordon’s 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth is a comprehensive history of “the U.S. standard of living since the civil war.” Gordon, a Northwestern University economist, details changes in consumption of food, clothing, shelter, and transport during a period when Americans experienced unprecedented improvement in quality of life. From brutally difficult, […]
I remember clearly my first inkling of something new called the world wide web. I had recently started using email and two colleagues brought me a U.S. Department of Agriculture publication describing a new information system. One would be able to use a computer and software that would “crawl” about looking for information stored on […]
The last 250 years have been most unusual in human history and the time since the end of World War II has been incredible. Our ancestors would not recognize our lives today in their wildest dreams. In my lifetime, the population of humans on the planet has nearly tripled, from 2.6 billion to over 7.1 […]
Cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently told the BBC that most threats to humans now come from science and technology. He surmised that the 21st Century will be the most dangerous for humans because of the very progress we have made in science and technology. There’s irony for you. When I saw this headline, I was reminded […]
Thanksgiving morning we took our traditional hike in Acadia. This year it was more of a walk – the Ocean Path from Sand Beach to Otter Cliffs to Otter Cove and back again. It was a beautiful morning, bright sun shining and an ocean full of Common Eider Ducks and Grebes. Thanksgivings were offered for […]
