The premise of the current financial regulatory reform is that the
establishment missed the last bubble and, therefore, more power should
be vested in the establishment to foresee and prevent the next one.
reasonable. It would force derivative trading out into the open. It
would create a structure so the government could break down failing
firms in an orderly manner. But the bill doesn’t solve the basic
epistemic problem, which is that members of the establishment herd are
always the last to know when something unexpected happens. If this were a movie, everybody would learn the obvious lessons. The
folks in the big investment banks would learn that it’s valuable to
have an ethical culture, in which traders’ behavior is restricted by
something other than the desire to find the next sucker. The folks in
Washington would learn that centralized decision-making is often
unimaginative decision-making, and that decentralized markets are
often better at anticipating the future. But, again, this is not a Hollywood movie. Those lessons are not being
learned. I can’t wait for the sequel.
At a conference on digital media at the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI
attacked the idea of transparency in the Internet age, warning that
digital transparency exacerbates tensions between nations and within
nations themselves and increases the 'dangers of ...intellectual and
moral relativism,' which can lead to multiple forms of degradation and
humiliation' of the essence of a person, and to the 'pollution of the
spirit.' All in all, it seemed a pretty grim view of the wide-open
communication environment being demanded by the Internet age."
Very specifically, my focus is riveted on the skyrocketing growth of
absolute global human population and recent evidence from Hopfenberg
and Pimentel that the size of the human population on Earth is a
function of food availability. More food for human consumption equals
more people; less food needed to sustain life equals less people; and
no food, no people. This is to say, the population dynamics of the
human species is essentially common to, not different from, the
population dynamics of other living things.
absolute global human population and recent evidence from Hopfenberg
and Pimentel that the size of the human population on Earth is a
function of food availability. More food for human consumption equals
more people; less food needed to sustain life equals less people; and
no food, no people. This is to say, the population dynamics of the
human species is essentially common to, not different from, the
population dynamics of other living things.