This is the second entry of a series on the parallels of misinformation locally and nationally that led me to write Systems out of Balance. The new millennium came in for me with a little bit of the old same ol’, and that was a good thing. I was still a graduate student, as I [...]
Yesterday the news broke that the Yale Farm Golf Course applicants were withdrawing their applications for a world class golf course in a rural area of northwest Connecticut. For the last two years I thought this moment would come; but for many years the safer bet would have been that the golf course would get [...]
Continue reading about Yale Farm Golf Course – Hold the Presses!
Economics is about resource distribution. Laissez faire folks like to say it is about scarce resource distribution, to which I beg to differ, but I’m not a grand economic scholar. Over the past few months I have shown a series of graphs that showed resource distribution in various sectors, as represented by income in those [...]
Continue reading about Our Resource Distribution Has Changed. So What?
I wish this person would include his real name and address. The person is clever, witty and knowledgeable, and could provide a great foil for future discussions. I will cut and paste the most recent comment here again, but this will have to be the last time. I’m only enabling him/her to remain anonymous in [...]
If you want ultimate fixes to a problem, you should be focused on ultimate causes. The only economists apparently in this pursuit are behavioral economists, as they have been revealing for us just how unnatural greed is. The rest, even the “good guys” from a middle class perspective (hint, not laissez faire economists), are busy [...]
In Systems out of Balance I often point out the similarities between economics and ecology. Both disciplines look at resource distribution; ecology focuses on natural systems of resource distribution, economics on cultural systems. In particular I draw parallels between the survival strategies of organisms and the survival strategies of economic systems. Our own economic system [...]
This past weekend I saw this on the back of a young man’s shirt: Learning Is Natural School Is Optional Had I designed the shirt I might have expanded the quote with: Learning from Experience Is Natural for Survival School Is an Optional Tool for Learning from Experience Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t [...]
Continue reading about Learning, School … and a Think Tank Metaphor
I get email alerts from The Heritage Foundation called The Morning Bell. I used to report on the misinformation in these alerts on The Middle Class Forum, but had stopped reading them for awhile. Wading through their cesspools of misinformation got too frustrating. Yet something possessed me to give a couple of recent alerts a [...]
Continue reading about What Is The Heritage Foundation Omitting about Taxes?
I’ve been doing a series on misinformation metaphors. I would like to continue with some other types of metaphors, but before I do that I would like to first dwell a little further on misinformation. I was recently called to task for referencing a Powell Cabal that did not exist in the literal sense, and [...]
In the last entry I commented on a clever comment. Someone called me to task for claiming there is a Powell Cabal. No such cabal exists in the literal sense, but I explained the meaning of the Powell Cabal in the metaphoric sense and thanked whoever the commenter was for prodding me to be explicit [...]