“It’s a counterintuitive notion and a difficult thing to wrap one’s head around, that the world can both be better and is still in many respects bad. We do nobody any favors, least of all our children, by exaggerating one while forgetting how far we’ve come.” ~ Joakim Book
“Journalists keep talking about a future without ice, about ice-free summers in the Arctic, and casually throwing in ‘sea level rise if x were to melt completely’ as if x was in any danger of melting away entirely over anything but geological time frames. This places the completely wrong ideas in their readers’ heads and…
“Dartnell’s lesson isn’t that geography determines, but that geography shapes. It set the ground rules for how the climate behaves, how the currents run and the winds blow, and along those rules all human history progressed. ‘The Earth,’ he appropriately ends, ‘shaped our history.'” ~ Joakim Book
“If we widen our scope, large companies have long donated funds to support causes they think are important or channel the values they wish to portray, often entirely detached from their business. A twenty-first century age of patronage is here. Perhaps it will support the foundation for a twenty-first century Enlightenment too.” ~ Joakim Book
“In the 1990s New Zealand pioneered inflation targeting, an approach that every major country followed for the next three decades. In a few years we might look back at this fleeting Kiwi attempt at incorporating asset markets into monetary policy with the same admiring eyes that we now see their move to inflation targeting. Where…
“Maybe this time is different, and perhaps this is the turning point – for MMT or for inflation. More likely, the fears and the ebullient promises will converge in a middle-of-the-way third option similar to what we saw after 2008: Politicians, pundits, economists, and central bankers talk, yet nothing much happens.” ~ Joakim Book
“For all the revolutionary creed that surrounds the emerging monetary commodity that is bitcoin, it seems that its future more and more resembles the past it tried to escape. Happy times for us monetary nerds.” ~ Joakim Book