Joakim Book
How to Be a Green Economist, Nordhaus-Style
“Is there a way to be a concerned environmentalist without falling prey to the ‘It’s all a scam’ on one side and ‘It’s the apocalypse’ on the other? I believe so; deep down, I believe Professor Nordhaus does so too. The Spirit of Green shows it, but you need to dig a bit to find…
The Rise of the Erudite Technocrats
“The expert, as ushered into politics by people like Jan Tinbergen’s brand of highly capable and motivated scientists, has been here for a long time. Whether they’re here to stay is a different matter.” ~ Joakim Book
The Race to Win Covidfinity
“It doesn’t much matter what the future ‘threat’ will look like, or how damaging the Delta or Epsilon variants currently seem. I’m afraid of Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Though, I don’t think it’ll be a string of a pretty lame coronavirus, but something considerably worse.” ~ Joakim Book
The Asymmetry of Bitcoin Scams Is All Very Sad
“When losses come from risk-taking for which you stood to benefit, it’s not sad if you happened to lose. That was a possible outcome, and whether you properly understood it or not is beside the point. With Skin in the Game, there’s nothing sad about making losses.” ~ Joakim Book
No Science Is Ever Settled
“If you think science is when people of authority agree, you’re not just naïve but heavily deluded. Stop venerating science in the singular and start embracing its core, plural, and contentious ethos: that plenty of people are wrong about almost everything, all the time. Even – perhaps especially – those with lots to lose.” ~…
Icelandic Study Suggests Government Workers Are Unnecessary
“A lie can get around the world faster than truth can get its pants on, according to the adage apocryphally connected to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill (or Jonathan Swift). In a terrible ‘study,’ Iceland showed that we can reduce the hours worked by public officials without any meaningful negative outcome to society. Shocking, I…
How History Moves Forward
“History is the messy sum outcome of millions and millions of people’s incentives, desires, biases, and actions. An iconic quote from Jurassic Park is ‘Life finds a way,’ uttered by the cynical chaos-theory chanting character Ian Malcolm. History, it would seem, does too.” ~ Joakim Book
The Business of Time is to Tick, Tick, Tick…
“Time, its measurements, and what they have given rise to in the form of navigation and information, is clearly much more than the routine moving of hands across the dials of an old grandfather clock. Rooney shows us how.” ~ Joakim Book
The Will to Power and the Specter of Hubris
“Every intellectual and moral superior, from the Catholic Church half a millennium ago to the New York Times army of woke, preferred-pronoun-revealing editorial writers have thought themselves arrived at the final state of affairs. If you dare deviate, if you dare question the intellectually supreme class, if you dare utter those revealing words (‘hang on…
The Times May Be A-Changing, But Which Times Changed the Most?
“Ultimately, Mortimer opts for the twentieth century as the century when the West saw the greatest change. This is a defensible conclusion, but it doesn’t matter much: the value of his intellectual exercise isn’t his closing note, but the meandering path he takes to get there.” ~ Joakim Book
