Well now I don't know but I been told the streets in recovery are paved with gold, or some say, anyway, that they are. And so they're saying go out and buy gold and get ready for the big economic cataclysm that has struck.
Then others say that it's just little-bigger-than-usual correction, and that it'll all pass over and we'll be back to normal in a few months or a year. And that the President's plans will work and we'll all be back in high cotton by this time next year.
But it's too much for me to figure out, so I'm giving up on economics for a while, 'til I see which way the wind blows.
Been reading a little about science, though, lately. And the global warming controversy. Some say it's not a controversy at all--that it's a foregone conclusion, and this planet is heating up and we're all headed for hell in a handbasket. And it does seem that things are warmin' up a bit-- with Katrina flooding New Orleans a few years ago just because of one little ole hurricane, and the North and South poles breaking up. And I also remember the time I stood in the vestibule of the church of San Marco in Venice, and it was flooded...seemed a l little odd to me. Maybe there is something to this global warming thing.
But the question is: is human actiivtiy causing it? Well, yes, I think it is to some extent, but what the hell can we do about it. It's probably already too late(says one side of my mind.) Nevertheless, I'm willing to join the effort to turn this excess of carbon emissions around. I just don't think we need to sacrifice human rights and freedoms on the altar of environmental correctiveness to do it.
It could be that the human trashing of the planet just happens to coincide with some much larger and wider geological and meteorlogical trends on our planet. Maybe there really is not much we can do about global warming. Nevertheless, I'm willing, as I said before, to do my part, but I don't want to see human freedoms limited or withdrawn for the sake of implementing some unproven, politically-correct oppressions just for the sake of theoretically curbing carbon emissions.
And I've made a few notes lately in some science reading that I've undertaken. Scientists are taking a look at the causes of global warming, as well as other environmental problems. But these are not discussions that can be resolved quickly. So we don't need to get too excited about it all. But we need to pay attention. We need to take a hard look at Al Gore's findings, but also, for instance, at Willie Soon's studies.
Science conclusions are made at a slower rate than economic ones. Scientific facts need to be tested and proven.
Did you know that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both figured out what calculus was, working independently of each other, back in the 1600s? There's a lot going on in the world of research and knowledge--always has been.
And a hundred or so years later an Englishman, Joseph Priestly, and a Frenchman, Antoine Lavoisier, both of them, were trying to figure what oxygen was. And Lavoisier figured it out because he founded the modern scientific method in the process, and that scientific process later confirmed his work, and so his work endured while Priestley's withered on the vine because he couldn't get some old phlogiston ideas out of his head.
And after another hundred years later, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace embarked on the same principles about natural selection in nature--discoveries that later turned the world of bioligical research upside down, but Darwin got all the glory because, well, he just did. I don't know why. Help me out here.
And then another hundred or so years later Watson and Crick were trying to figure out the structure of the DNA molcule, while Linus Pauling was doing the same thing in California, but Watson/Crick made the big breakthrough because they were visionaries who could act on a hunch, making a highly educated guess based on Rosalind Franklin's enigmatic photographs.
The point is that this scientific research is multifaceted, and it's complicated. And it's always going on somewhere. Somewhere in the world today, some guys and gals are close to a breakthrough in Parkinsons disease or multiple sclerosis, or even cancer.
And somewhere in the world today there are practitoners of economics, the quasi-science, who are making breakthroughs of all kinds, busting up credit bubbles left and right. Back in the day, Karl Marx figured a few things out about capitalism and then look what happened. At the same time that he was crunching theories in the reading room of the British Museum, across the big pond Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller were conducting economic experiments of a different--and much more pragmatic, kind--experiments that spread the dinner tables in thousands of Michigan households and homesteads all the way to California and beyond. And look what happened. And now all those 19th-century infrastructures are falling into obsolescence and rust-belt lethargy and look what happened. The times they are a changing, always have.
And now we are gathered here with this great economic catastrophe, and as if that weren't bad enough a global warming crisis right on top of it, and even Iran going nuclear with Israel getting nervous about it. So the lesson is: people have got to be careful with quasi-science. Lenin and Stalin took Marx's stuff and ran with it, but look what happened in the real world.
Germans and Americans and Russians and humans took Einstein's discoveries and applied them to uranium and plutonium and look what happened--good stuff and bad stuff. No way around it. Gotta be careful. Roosevelt and Johnson and Obama took Keynes' pump-priming, deficit-spending, crap-shootin, spendin'-stimulatin' stimuli and applied them to the downhill-racing, brake-failing economies of the world and, well, let's see what happens.
O my God, it's enough to turn a fellow back to believing in something besides human nature. May God help us. And Be sure and keep an eye out for your neighbor, while doing whatever's best for you and your loved ones.
Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full
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