Lecturing, guilt-tripping, or trying to scare farmers into sustainable practices will not work and is likely to invite resistance - especially in the US, where there’s already a lot of bad blood between the farming community and environmental activists. Forcing farmers to change their ways with new laws and regulations could very well backfire come the next election cycle. Nope, advancing the cause of sustainable agriculture requires an attitude of respect and a solid understanding of farmer priorities, constraints, and concerns. And that requires getting answers to a bunch of questions, such as…
Why is self-efficacy so important to how we approach the challenge of climate change? Because self-efficacy is associated with persistence, tolerance of uncertainty and risk, creativity, resourcefulness, and resilience. Qualities we all could use in the coming decades.
The study authors applied a new model to calculate the global land area below high tide lines this century. Based on this model, they estimated 110 million people already occupy land lower than current high tide lines and that somewhere between 150 - 630 million people currently occupy land that would be lower than the high tide lines in 2100, depending on the emissions scenario.
Wasteful spending on health care is not a trivial problem. It represents resources that could be redirected to, say, higher wages, R & D budgets, affordable housing, or climate change adaptation. Yet it is a problem the political class has pretty much downplayed or ignored, probably because serious spending reform would anger a lot of voters, especially the healthcare workers who lose their jobs or get their pay cut as a result of reform. Luckily, the media and some politicians are finally beginning to grapple with the issue
…global beef consumption will continue to rise due to increasing demand outside the US. Beef consumption destroys carbon-storing habitats and contributes to climate change. However, much of the damage done by beef consumption happens outside the US. If Americans ate less beef, there would be more beef available to export. If the US exported more beef, fewer forests and wetlands abroad would be cleared for cattle.
This is not an argument against ideology. Ideals, grand narratives, and stubborn persistence can all feed the engine of positive change. What tips ideology into a force for awful is the concentration of power and silencing of other voices.
Money holds the promise of future satisfaction. Purchases hold the promise of fading excitement. So at least in some contexts, money may be worth more than what you can buy with it. Which doesn’t mean the economists are wrong. Only that intuitions sometimes speak to truths that economists don’t care much about.
The challenge of housing the chronically homeless is how to do it without breaking the bank, distorting the local housing market, or incentivizing dependency.
I put this snapshot together, because the original report goes on and on, making it hard to see the forest through the trees. Part of solving a problem is organizing your information into relevant facts. One of the problems I’d like to solve is how to fix chronic homelessness without creating serious problems elsewhere. This is a beginning of that project.
Researchers and zookeepers know their animal charges need enriching environments to be happy in their species-typical way. Per Wild Welfare, enrichment is about “creating choices for animals so they feel more in control of their environment.”
“The problem with free speech is that it’s hard, and self-censorship is the path of least resistance. But once you learn to keep yourself from voicing unwelcome thoughts, you forget how to think them – how to think freely at all – and ideas perish at conception.” George Packer, Mute Button /The New Yorker.
Responsive government is like a doctor treating a patient: sometimes 'wait and see' is the way to go and sometimes active intervention. Either way, the best doctors know how long to give the current approach a chance and when to cut one's losses and try something else. Above all else, the best doctors are not burdened by ego, former convictions, or the tyranny of past investment. They let go.
Free speech is essential for moving closer to the truth of things. That’s enough for me, but I’ll add that free speech is also good for problem-solving, good governance, and democracy. Apparently, that’s not enough for some people. It’s not so much that these folks have fully articulated arguments for limiting the right to speech. It’s more that they have ways of thinking that minimize its value and justify restricting speech. Here are a few examples: …
The inspiration for these thoughts was a recent paper, “Techno-Optimism and Farmers’ Attitudes Toward Climate Change Adaptation”, in which the authors initially define techno-optimism as “the belief [in industrialized societies] that human ingenuity, through improved science and technology, will ultimately provide remedies to most current and future threats to human well-being”.
Psychology is implicated in everything humans do, think and feel - as in all humans…. But “psychology” is not independent of reality. Things are rarely “in our heads” or “in the world”. Pointing out that a belief serves a psychological need (a “use-value”) says nothing about whether that belief is correct (it’s “truth-value”).
Being at the mercy of another person means feeling one cannot get away from them, because they have something one wants badly and that something is not readily available elsewhere.
Opportunity quickens desire and power creates opportunities. And so the dream of absolute power continues to beckon.
To simplify the authors’ argument:
“There are a few standard explanations for unequal outcomes. But those explanations do not explain all the variance in outcomes. Therefore, unobservable facts reflecting systemic barriers explain the rest and they are the ultimate cause of injustice. Elimination of these barriers will require fundamental change in the nature of our society.”
Categorizing and calculating healthcare waste is an excellent first step to fixing the problem of waste. The next step is figuring out who’s responsible, and why.
In 2017, US health care spending reached $3.5 trillion, or $10,739 per person, in 2017 - 17.9% of the US gross domestic product (GDP). Per the JAMA study, as much as $935 billion of that spending was wasted.