January 2013

When your car loses control on the black ice and is sliding toward the railing beyond which is the canyon, time seems to slow down. It seems to take you ever so long to get to the railing, to break through and start falling. Everybody knows the sensation. It even happens to whole societies in periods immediately prior to wars. Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities about Vienna in the year before the beginning of World War I is a masterpiece on this subject.

But there's a practical lesson in those stats on why it's smart to hit the books: The estimated median annual earnings for someone with a bachelor's degree is around $50,846, almost double the $26,834 of someone with a high school diploma. -- Merced Sun-Star editorial board, 1-12-13.

This article represents a lapse of taste in a newspaper that is usually smarter than the ones that surround it in the northern San Joaquin Valley.

It's about the happy little, well, not quite so little, Cardoza family of Anapolis MD. Father Cardoza quit his seat as the region's representative in the House last summer. Gathered around the fire at Yuletide watcdhed CSPAN, Dr. Mama Cardoza asks the Great Man, "Aren't you glad you're not there?"

As has been said with increasing force in the American economy by responsible critics for the last 40 years: THERE ARE LIMITS!
Badlands Journal editorial board

1-24-13
Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy

Nature’s Capital Is The Limiting Resource

Life will perish as the environment perishes
21st century ecological economist

--from Ecological Rift, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clrk, and Richard York, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p. 101.
The ecological blinders of neoclassical economics, which serves to exclude the planet from its preanalytic vision, are well illustrated by a debate that took place within the World Bank, related by ecological economist Herman Daly. As Daly tells the story, in 1992 (when Summers was chief economist of the World Bank and Daly worked for the Bank) the annual World Development Report was to focus on the theme Development and the Environment: