A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Economy

  • We’re doomed

    I’m not sure what I think about the whole Peak Oil issue, but Georgetown political scientist Patrick Deneen has thought a lot about it and has a – “sobering” is too mild a word; “apocalyptic” maybe? – post up about the relationship between oil and food and the implications that might have for world population. Read more

  • Carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade

    I missed this when it first came out, but this is a good article explaining the debate over the best way to reduce carbon emissions. It’s also heartening to see Reason of all places running articles that take the reality of climate change as a given. I’m not suggesting that some measure of skepticism can’t Read more

  • A food bill, not a farm bill

    Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) writes about the unprecedented amount of attention the farm bill has been getting this year from environmental, health, and international development groups. Unfortunately, he says, the traditional interest groups have largely managed to craft a bill to their liking. They did this by adding on some programs as sops to Read more

  • Greener markets?

    Gristmill ran a rejoinder to the post I linked to last week advocating a localized, greener economy. The author, Ryan Avent, takes issue with the “buy local” mantra, arguing that local economies would reduce standards of living and that international trade and markets are compatible with reducing our ecological footprint. I’m not confident in my Read more

  • Toward a green manufacturing economy

    This is interesting and relevant to some of the stuff I was talking about here. Read more

  • Unresolved questions

    A couple of questions that I continue to turn over and which I’m not at all clear on the answers to: Is it necessary to seriously restrain economic growth for the sake of the environment (and ultimately ourselves) or can growth continue pretty much at present rates but in “sustainable” ways (with the help of Read more

  • October reading notes

    A smattering of theology, philosophy, and even some fiction this month: The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael Northcott. This is part of Cambridge University Press’s “New Studies in Christian Ethics” series. Northcott is (at least at the time of this book’s publication) a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh. This text is Read more

  • Libertarians as social parasites?

    George Monbiot writes a scathing column about a British scientist-turned-businessman who used biological research to argue for laissez-faire but then turned to the gummint for a bailout when his business failed. The charge of hypocrisy seems accurate in this particular case, but applied to libertarians as a whole this column is a cheap shot, especially Read more

  • Economics as master narrative

    Did you know that economists can tell us how much we should care about future generations or how risk averse we ought to be? Yeah, me neither! I’ve recently found myself increasingly irritated at the way economics (or, worse, a popularized version of it) has begun to function as a kind of master narrative among Read more

  • Book review: Small Is Still Beautiful

    Joseph Pearce is a noted English Catholic writer who has written books on G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among others. In Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, Pearce seeks to update the wisdom of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful for the 21st century. Read more