///Rational or irrational?///

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil."
-Sheikh Yamani, Saudi oil minister
Gabriel 12:09 AM

Monday, November 22, 2004

As usual, Spiked-online cuts right to the chase in an article on eco-economics:
"Environmentalism can be seen as a counterattack against a key premise of the Enlightenment: that a central part of progress consists of increasing human control over nature. Instead, environmentalists argue that humans should accept their place as a mere subsidiary of the natural world. In practice this means reconciling humanity to poverty, disease and natural disasters."
Wow!

People are afraid to say it out loud, but the environmental movement is fundamentally Luddite. This has not gone unnoticed in the Third World, where many have the suspicion that the limits-to-growth ideas promulgated in the developed world are a sneaky way to keep the Third World down. Though not a fan of conspiracy theories, I can see how they might feel that way in the developing world. After all, we already have the goodies. Limits to growth means they get to remain in poverty. For us, it just means fewer toys and a slightly less convenient life. For them, it means death and misery.

Why is it that economists get it, while others do not? The irony of this is that Malthusian predictions turned out to be wrong, but, as the article notes, resulted in economics becoming the dismal science. Why these disproven ideas have been exhumed by the Greens is incomprehsible. Actually, what is incomprehensible is why they caught on. All the empircal evidence points in the opposite direction: that resources become less scarce with time, not more.

http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA750.htm
Gabriel 9:05 AM