A Thinking Reed

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

Economy

  • Eating with civility

    I imagine this will be of interest to some readers: “Civil Eats,” a site dedicated to “critical thought about sustainable agriculture and food systems as part of building economically and socially just communities.” This post, by Paul Shapiro on big ag’s counterattack against animal welfare measures is worth checking out. Read more

  • Wanted: a new American dream

    William Greider recommends some changes to our economic system aimed at recovering some of the intangibles that get lost in the cash nexus. His argument dovetails with some of the “happiness research” that suggests a fairly fixed point of diminishing returns on income in terms of happiness. Bill McKibben makes use of a similar line Read more

  • Global warming, food shortages, and … civilizational collapse?

    I got to hear a talk the other day by Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute. He talked, among other things, about the relationship between global warming, food scarcity, and the geo-political instability that could result. Scary stuff. This article provides a summary of his ideas. Read more

  • “it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist”

    Via John Schwenkler, Rod Dreher interviews James McWilliams, who Dreher calls a “contrarian agrarian.” He is a fierce critic of our system of industrial agriculture, but he also slaughters some sacred cows (pardon the expression) of the organic food and locavore movements. He has some kind words for GMOs and particularly questions the sustainability of Read more

  • Singer and Cowen on poverty

    Interesting “diavlog” between Peter Singer and libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, focusing mostly on Singer’s new book The Life You Can Save. (I mentioned the book here; I still haven’t read it, though I do have a request in at the library.) more about "Singer Cowen", posted with vodpod I think at one point Cowen gets Read more

  • Schwenkler vs. Larison on trade

    There’s a spirited and high-quality debate about free trade between John Schwenkler and Daniel Larison at Larison’s site here. I’ll admit that I’ve swung more into the protectionist camp in recent years, or at least I think the benefits of free trade have been greatly overblown. But old-time protectionism that benefits certain well-connected interests at Read more

  • “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts”

    Joseph Romm on our global economic Ponzi scheme. Sobering stuff. Read more

  • Faith and economics

    A conservative evangelical questions his uncritical embrace of laissez-faire economics. When you think about it, the marriage between evangelicalism and free market capitalism is downright odd, and, as far as I can tell, largely confined to the U.S. (British evangelicals, for instance, seem quite a bit more left-wing on economics than their American counterparts). I’m Read more

  • Our future: skyscraper farms?

    Paul Roberts (author of The End of Oil, The End of Food–you get the idea) writes that creating a sustainable food system will require more than “buy local” or “buy organic.” In some cases, he says, these can be misleading and oversimplifying labels for a much more complex reality. For instance, how food is produced Read more

  • The helicopter vs. the airplane

    I’m not sure I have anything particularly insightful to say about it, but I wanted to link to this essay by ecological economist Herman Daly on a steady state economy versus what he calls a “failed growth” one. In the scramble to give a Keynesian boost to our economy the assumption that continued growth is Read more