A very detailed walkthrough of the big new left economic idea. Modern Monetary Theory is having a moment. The theory, in brief, argues that countries that issue their own currencies can never “run out of money” the way people or businesses can. But what was once an obscure “heterodox” branch of economics has now become a major topic […]
The Earth’s carrying capacity for human life is not fixed
Viewing humans in the same way that we view single-celled organisms or insects risks treating them that way. Malthus argued against Poor Laws, in the belief that they only incentivised the poor to reproduce. Ehrlich argued against food aid for poor countries for similar reasons, and inspired population-control measures of enormous cruelty. Today, demands to […]
Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated?
We are ignoring the gains that balance the losses. If you want to measure how the state of the world is changing, and that’s a valuable thing to do, you need some kind of reference point. It’s natural we take some past point and monitor things into the future. But when you reference back to […]
Lake Lazarus: the strange rebirth of a Californian ecosystem
Amy Maxmen lauds a study of the bold project to rescue Owens Lake – Adaptation and Survival California’s Owens Lake, once one of the largest inland bodies of water in the U.S., shrank to nearly nothing in early 20th century. At the start of the twentieth century, Owens Lake in southern California […]
A moral map for AI cars – reveal that moral choices are not universal
The Moral Machine Experiment – Survey maps global variations in ethics for programming autonomous vehicles. How do different cultures value human life? To find out, researchers created a viral online experiment to gather data from millions of participants across the world. Some values generalised across cultures, but others came as a surprise. When a driver […]