I recently read Javier Blas and Jack Farchy’s The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources (Oxford University Press, 2021). This fascinating book reads like a novel, almost a page turner. What will the traders do next? They chronicle the history of commodity traders of oil, grain, metals, and […]
I recently finished James Suzman’s fascinating book Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (Penguin Press, 2021). He chronicles humans’ work practices over many millennia. The meaning of work has changed dramatically over this period. Perspectives that we take for granted emerged much more recently than one might have […]
When we last saw Uncle Donny, he was focused on making Monopoly great again, with rather mixed results. Donny and Uncle Vladmir were mainly focused on making Monopoly great for them. Neither of them is ever concerned with making things great for anybody else. Uncle Donny, it seems, lives on golf courses. The picnic was […]
It is typical to think about change in terms of intentions and consequences. We intend to exercise more or eat better to achieve the consequences of weight loss and improved fitness. The President intends to move the country towards greater use of renewable energy sources to achieve the consequences of greater energy independence and decreased […]
Last August, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Douglas W. Elmendorf, sent a letter to Congress informing them that most preventative health interventions tend to expand utilization of services with costs that far exceed the eventual cost savings due to avoiding disease or detecting it earlier. In other words, he reported that prevention […]
Starting with the overarching objective of a healthy, educated, and productive population that is competitive in the global marketplace, what should be done? Let’s work through this piece by piece. Start with healthy. We are facing an epidemic of chronic disease, driven in part by an epidemic of obesity. The eventual financial costs of diabetes […]
