7 billion reasons to consider 7 billion

In the three minutes it takes to view this excellent National Geographic video on the rapidly increasing numbers of people, earth's population will increase by 170 people. That explosive growth has real life ramifications that will affect our quality of life: I applaud the willingness of National Geographic to discuss this critically important issue. Many people and organizations shy away from the topic of the earth's carrying capacity. Another organization dedicated to making sure that we don't shy away from the topic is Global Population Speak Out (GPSO). Here is GPSO mission statement:

The Population Institute, based in Washington DC, is seeking prominent scientists, scholars, and other concerned citizens to participate in this international program of action. The mission is to raise awareness in the global community about the current size and growth of the human population on Earth -- and to highlight the challenges this size and growth present as we attempt to achieve planet-scale ecological sustainability.

I am proud to say that I am Pledger #36.

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Scalia’s Problem

Recently, Justice Antonin Scalia shot his mouth off about another bit of “social” judicial opinion and managed to be correct to a fault again. Here is the article. Basically, he is of the opinion that if a specific term or phrase does not appear in the Constitution, then that subject is simply not covered. Most famously, this goes to the continuing argument over privacy. There is, by Scalia’s reasoning (and I must add he is by no means alone in this—it is not merely his private opinion), no Constitutionally-protected right to privacy. As far as it goes, this is correct, but beside the point. The word “private” certainly appears, in the Fifth Amendment, and it would seem absurd to suggest the framers had no thought for what that word meant. It refers here to private property, of course, but just that opens the debate to the fact that there is a concept of privacy underlying it. The modern debate over privacy concerns contraception and the first case where matters of privacy are discussed is Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965. That case concerned the right of a married couple to purchase and use contraception, which was against the law in that state (and others). The Court had to define an arena of privacy within which people enjoy a presumed right of autonomous decision-making and into which the state had no brief to interfere. Prior to this, the Court relied on a “freedom of contract” concept to define protected areas of conduct. Notice, we’re back in the realm of property law here. People who insist that there is no “right to privacy” that is Constitutionally protected seem intent on dismissing any concept of privacy with which they disagree, but no doubt would squeal should their own self-defined concept be violated. Therein lies the problem, one we continue to struggle with. But it does, at least in Court tradition, come down to some variation of ownership rights—which is what has made the abortion debate so difficult, since implicit in it is the question of whether or not a woman “owns” her body and may therefore, in some construction of freedom of contract, determine its use under any and all circumstances. [More . . . ]

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Doing what is right rather than what is profitable

Barry Schwartz (on whom I’ve posted before) says it’s clear that “we need to rein in the bankers.” What is the solution indifferent, uncaring and selfish individuals and institutions? More rules? More incentives? Barry Schwartz says rules and incentives are not long-term solutions because they de-moralize us. They create large populations of people who do everything for incentives. We become addicted to incentives. Further, there is no set of rules that will effectively get us what we need. Bankers are smart and they will find cracks in any rules. They will find a new way to bring the financial system, once again, to the point of collapse. What we really need is virtue and character --- “we need people who want to do the right thing.” We need “practical wisdom,” the moral will and skill to figure out what the right thing is, and then to do it. Aristotle studied carpenters and other crafts-people who appreciated that you often need to bend the rules to get the job done. Dealing with other people demands flexibility improvisation, and wise people understand this. Wise people do this rule-bending “in the service of the right aims.” We need to do this rule bending in the service of others, not merely ourselves. This is “practical wisdom” in a nutshell. [More . . . ]

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The secret powers of time (animated)

I've previously posted on Philip Zimbardo's excellent discussion regarding the "Secret Powers of Time." He has convinced me that one's perception of time (or even a nation's overall perception of time) affects one's character (or the nation's character) in profound ways. It certainly affects the pace of life. Tonight, I stumbled upon a ten-minute cleverly animated version of Zimbardo's presentation. Citing the work of Robert Levine, Zimbardo indicates that you can identify countries and cities by their pace of life. In those places with the highest pace of life, "men have the most coronary problems." He proposes that the basic purpose of schools is to take present-oriented children (which he defines as our natural state - see 5:30 of the talk) and attempt to turn them into future-oriented children. In American, a child drops out of school every 9 seconds, and it's often a boy and a minority student. Here's the context. By the time a boy is 21 years old, he has spent 10,000 hours playing video games, and many more hours watching shows, including pornography, which they tend to do alone. This means that many hours are not being spent developing social skills. These children thus live in a world they create. Bottom line is that they will never fit into a traditional classroom, which is analogue--it is incredibly boring to them. The commonly-heard cure for our educational ills--that we need more classroom time reading, writing and arithmetic is thus a recipe for disaster for these present-oriented students. Traditional classrooms offer the lack of control and delay of gratification; this is not at all interesting compared to life in front of a video screen. Zimbardo argues that we are "under-estimating the power of technology in re-wiring young people's brains." They get upset even waiting an extra minute or two booting up their computers or downloading files. We bark at our kids to avoid hedonistic addictive activities, but they are already aware of the consequences, but they are not future-oriented kids, so there is no feedback loop to alter their behavior. Bottom line: Many of the disputes we have with other people are due to our differences in the perception of time.

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William K. Black notes the lack of prosecutions regarding financial fraud, and offers a solution

William K. Black previously worked as an investigator of financial institutions during the S&L crisis. In a detailed article at Huffpo, Black laments the almost total lack of criminal prosecutions related to our recent financial meltdown. Here's the problem in a nutshell: "What has gone so catastrophically wrong with DOJ, and why has it continued so long? The fundamental flaw is that DOJ's senior leadership cannot conceive of elite bankers as criminals." Here's what we need to do about it:

Our best bet is to continue to win the scholarly disputes and to continue to push media representatives to take fraud seriously. If the media demands for prosecution of the elite banking frauds expand there is a chance to create a bipartisan coalition in Congress and the administration supporting prosecutions. In the S&L debacle, Representative Annunzio was one of the leading opponents of reregulation and leading supporters of Charles Keating. After we brought several hundred successful prosecutions he began wearing a huge button: "Jail the S&L Crooks!" Bringing many hundreds of enforcement actions, civil suits, and prosecutions causes huge changes in the way a crisis is perceived. It makes tens of thousands of documents detailing the frauds public. It generates thousands of national and local news stories discussing the nature of the frauds and how wealthy the senior officers became through the frauds. All of this increases the saliency of fraud and increases demands for serious reforms, adequate resources for the regulators and criminal justice bodies, and makes clear that elite fraud poses a severe danger. Collectively, this creates the political space for real reform, vigorous regulators, and real prosecutors.

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