Weekend Economists Kickoff the Season, September 6-8, 2013

[DemReadingDU]

51. Decline of the Empire - The Final Word

9/6/13 The Final Word by Dave Cohen

I want to inform my regular readers that Decline Of The Empire is now officially inactive. There won't be any more open threads. I may publish a longer analysis like I did earlier this week from time to time. Frankly, I don't see much point in doing that. The website will remain on-line indefinitely. You can always peruse the archives. There's a lot to look at.

There are exactly two ways to talk to humans about the longer-term consequences of what they're doing to the Earth's biosphere.

You can tell them they are destroying the biosphere, call them on this, and warn them if they don't change their ways, there will probably be a mass extinction which, eventually, may include them. In this case, they will not listen to you. Usually you won't even be given an opportunity to speak because, let's face it, people don't want to hear it.

Or, you can tell them they are destroying the biosphere, but do it gently, being sure to express plenty of optimism, and then tell them they can do anything if only they set their minds to it, and pump them full of hope. In this case, they will applaud enthusiastically, get up and leave, and resume doing whatever it was they were doing before, which is destroying the biosphere.

You can easily see that the outcome is the same in both cases. The only difference—the crucial difference—is that the optimist gets invited back to talk again.

Thus humans will stumble blindly toward whatever Fate awaits them. There is no changing this.

http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2013/09/the-final-word.html


if interest, the link to the archives for the website Decline of the Empire
http://peakwatch.typepad.com/decline_of_the_empire/archives.html