A Thinking Reed

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

Economy

  • My only post on the financial crisis

    I hope you do not, dear reader, come here looking for informed commentary on economics and high finance. But, for what it’s worth, I’ve found Andrew Leonard’s column at Salon essential reading in recent days. It seems we have a plan, but with many of the details left to be revealed. Last night–again for what Read more

  • Tragedy of the commons

    I picked up this little primer on climate policy at the library and it offers a very lucid, and surprisingly substantial given its length, introduction to the various tools for responding to climate change (carbon tax, cap-and-trade, renewable energy investment, etc.), their pros and cons, and which players support or oppose which policies. He convinced Read more

  • Myths we live by

    There’s been a lot of loose talk from both parties about “energy independence,” so I thought it’d be worth linking to this piece from Paul “The End of Oil” Roberts that appeared in Mother Jones a couple of months back: The Seven Myths of Energy Independence. Read more

  • The “empire of consumption” and Obamanomics

    John Wiener interviews Andrew Bacevich on our “empire of consumption” and the limits of Obama: But he’s not one of those radicals who argue there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. “I call myself an Obama-con, Bacevich says, “a conservative who will vote for Obama – because of the Iraq war. He Read more

  • The end of (cheap) meat

    I’m agnostic, because under-informed, about whether “free-range” meat would result in higher meat prices than the factory farmed variety once you’ve taken into account all the hidden costs. But Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil and The End of Food, contends that, even under the best circumstances, making the (necessary) switch to free-range Read more

  • Libertarian Leninism

    Do libertarians really hate environmentalism so much that they’ll soft-pedal Chinese authoritarianism just to stick a thumb in the eye of the Green Menace for the sake of the shiny capitalist utopia? (The idea seems to be that eventually, in the far-flung future, everyone will be rich, so we shouldn’t worry too much about the Read more

  • Consumerism and social justice

    Gaius makes a fair point: cries against “consumerism” can ring hollow when there are people who are genuniely struggling, even in the land of overstuffed plenty. But this doesn’t solve the problem, that, given resource and environmental constraints, an economy devoted to ever-expanding consumption is unsustainable. And “we the people” bear some responsibility for it. Read more

  • Consumerism, simplicity, and sin

    If Andrew Bacevich is right that our consumptive habits are the cause, not only of resource depletion and environmental degradation, but of our far-flung military adventurism, then the unpleasant conclusion seems to be that we need to start consuming less. Here’s an article (via Book Forum) about, among other things, a professor in Western Pennsylvania Read more

  • What’s a social capitalist anyway?

    The limits of Internet political quizzes aside, my economic philosophy is a bricolage of bits from Wilhelm Roepke’s “humane economy,” E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful,” stray pieces of Catholic social thought, some Bill McKibben, and a dash of Hayek. Market economies are the best mechanism we have for producing and distributing goods, but that they Read more

  • The (carbon) taxman cameth

    Spurred in part by this post from John, I was thinking a bit about carbon taxes vs. cap-and-trade as methods to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Googling around a bit I found this article from the New York Times on the different experiences of countries that have actually implemented a carbon tax: But a carbon tax Read more