A Thinking Reed

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

Economy

  • Skeptical of the skeptical environmentalist

    The Washington Post Sunday Outlook section ran a lengthy piece form “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg (based on his new book), arguing that we need to avoid the “extremes” in the climate change debate – those who deny that human-caused climate change exists on one hand and those who see it as an extremely serious and Read more

  • Increasing skepticism about free trade

    60% of Repbulicans polled are skeptical that free trade benefits the U.S. See here (HT)for a good explanation of why dismissing these folks as economically illiterate misses the point. Read more

  • How the meat industry thrives

    Quasi-monopoly, environmental degradation, and third-world style labor practices, according to this piece. Read more

  • Ends and means, again

    E.F. Schumacher on “Buddhist economics”: While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of Read more

  • Schumacher on the poverty of economics

    It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very center of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern socieites. In the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as Read more

  • Political self ID – a Christian humanist?

    This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post. The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a Read more

  • Contra the contrarians

    Bradford Plumer debunks the claims of some of the recent debunkers of conventional wisdom about battling climate change, but concedes that they have a point in that navigating a “green” lifestyle is in fact a tricky thing to do (e.g. eating local food is a good rule of thumb, but there are exceptions). However, he Read more

  • Faith on the farm

    The New York Times looks at a variety of religiously-motivated farmers concened with good stewardship, humane treatment of animals, and fair treatment of farm workers. It’s always tough to know how widespread the phenomena discussed in these kinds of “trend” stories actually are, but it’s heartening to think that “environmentalism” is no longer a dirty Read more

  • CO2 emissions for me, not for thee

    Ross Clark points out that certain high-profile policies in the developed world ostensibly aimed at reducing global warming actually function as a protectionist racket against the developing world. The two most significant that he mentions are the attempt to enforce caps on emissions on countries like China and India without taking per capita emissions into Read more

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises: In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Read more