Everyone wants to preserve nature – but that nobody wants to do it at the expense of their children going cold or hungry. For quite a lot of the world’s remaining poor, planting trees isn’t their main priority – and shouldn’t be.
Panicked markets, eye-popping declines, and inept public policy are, in some unfortunate sense, a human universal. And all public officials, it seems, imitate one another, no matter how mad, impotent, or harmful the policy.
Statistically, there are usually only a handful of ways that a prediction can come true – but a myriad, even infinite, ways that it can go wrong. We should almost never expect a particular prediction to hold true.
The world is dynamic, not static; it is equilibrating and adjusting, not mechanical. The economic way of thinking teaches us that.
Various schemes have turned rhinos and other scenic African animals from victims of the tragedy of the commons to valuable commodities that hunters and farmers and former poachers sustain, in no small part thanks to ecotourism.
All moneys and valuable items are pyramid schemes, and all holders of money and valuable items hope that the next person in line will pay more for them. That’s how monetary balances work. No big deal.
It is highly doubtful that having a central bank selectively buy outstanding debt with green labels would in any meaningful way contribute to a greening of the economy.
We live better lives today than the aristocracy and the richest of our forefathers did in the past. But in some ways, we also live better lives than the wizards and witches of J. K. Rowlings’ wonderful world.
Yes, statistics can deceive — think Mark Twain’s apocryphal claim about lies and damned lies — but statistics can also give nuance to our worldviews.
Bitcoin’s monetary dreamworld does look rather fanciful and full of strange beliefs: a land of fairies, castles and – I imagine – princesses, a land, writes Jemina Kelly at Financial Times, “where bunk and baloney thrive.”