Stuart Staniford

Temporary recession or the end of growth?

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Everyone agrees: our economy is sick. The inescapable symptoms include declines in consumer spending and consumer confidence, together with a contraction of international trade and available credit. Add a collapse in real estate values and carnage in the automotive and airline industries and the picture looks grim indeed.

Good hoes/bad hoes

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On the good hoe, the angle of blade to handle is more acute, so that when the hoer chops down, the blade meets the earth at a slicing angle— more easily skims through weeds or soil surface. The muscular effort involved is appreciably less. The old hoe makers knew a thing or two about hoeing that has evidently become lost to new hoe makers.

Wealth, wellbeing and change

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Tony Judt has died. In his important last book, Ill Fares The Land, dictated under the impact of his fatal motor-neurone illness, he reflects on why social democracy has failed to offer effective resistance to the onslaught of late 20th century capitalism, let alone organise an alternative to it. In a striking section he argues that in the late 18th century the revolution had already been won as enlightenment arguments changed the language and terms of debate in which society was conceived.

Matthew Simmons: a tribute

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Energy Investment banker and leading peak oil proponent Matthew Simmons died suddenly on Sunday [Aug. 8], following an apparent heart attack. While Simmons did not come up with the idea of peak oil – geophysicist M King Hubbert first published the theory in the 1950s — he arguably did more than anyone to publicize it. It was Simmons’ 2005 classic Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, that turned discussion of peak oil from a fringe environmental concern into something with business pages credibility.

The law of civilization and decay

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It just so happened that I’ve been reading Christopher Lasch’s The True And Only Heaven: Progress and It’s Critics when a friend sent me Philip Mirowski’s The Great Mortification Economist’s Responses to the Crisis of 2007-(and counting). This latter article led me to James K. Galbraith’s Who Are These Economists, Anyway?…I will go a small but significant way toward answering this question today in the first of a series of essays on where we stand in the Modern Age. I can only touch on the main concepts today.

Past disasters offer lessons on legacy of deepwater spill

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The Gulf of Mexico’s capacity to recover from previous environmental assaults — especially the 1979 Ixtoc explosion — provides encouragement about the prospects for its post-Deepwater future. But scientists remain worried about the BP spill’s long-term effects on the health of the Gulf and its sea life.

Lester Brown on rising temperatures and rising food prices

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Prices for basic farm commodities – wheat, corn, and soybeans – are actually somewhat higher in August of this year than they were in August of 2007 at the start of the record-breaking 2007-08 run-up in grain prices that led to food protests and riots in some 30 countries. Meanwhile, it is estimated that Russia could lose nearly 30 million tons of grain this summer.