An Economic Blog

Monday again                                                                                                     and the snow…                                                                                                                      mercifully has fallen

and my my the arts have died.

In a Democracy

the master slave relationship is less obvious

but more congruent with a winner take all mentality…

we are the government…

i believe we vote for our leaders

and they who are wise

in our opinion

will lead us humbly

in servitude…

for the greater good…  

Yet

strangely many people do not vote

and some say if it mattered

it would be illegal…

my democracy.

(i know no leaders personally

and i have never voted.)

Progress

  the building

of this nation

has spawned

a better world

of shopping,

of health

technology

efficiency…and

at universities 

“there is a terror,”

says an unnamed professor

“a culture of fear emerging

within the university. We are in a

boom economy for solution driven research

and a famine economy for

arts, humanities and social sciences”

The Bet

the solution is the problem

the driven research at the academies of higher learning is fuelled at least partly in Alberta by oil companies, who are concerned about the possible environmental impact, of their mining activities…

they are well financed…

…

and in first worlds

the water is clean

the police are in charge

we have lots of food

and we control most

of the resources 

since the beginning 

of the industrial revolution

say the 1500’s 

mother nature is about a 10th

of what  she was ..

call it five hundred years…

of course

this a rough number…

but consider that 12% of the lands worldwide are protected

one tenth of one percent of the ocean is fully protected…

Based on History as reported in books like

the history of progress we have

a tendency to hunt to extinction…

who wants to live this life…

amazingly technology has allowed us to fish at depth…

we found a new species deep in the ocean

and until 1970 they were never fished…

too deep… some 2.5 kilometers down

…but we found a away…

now statistically speaking 

99.7% for the onion eye

and 100% for the round nose

are dead.

we fished to extinction

in under fifty years

my we’re efficient

and we believe more efficiency

is going to solve the problems

created by being too efficient.

this is not idealism

if we didn’t know how to fish at depth

those fish would still be alive…and so would we…

Money

When you lose 90% 

900% gain to get back to even

i.e.

1.00 down to a dime  (minus 90%)

A dime to a dollar  (plus 900%)

that would mean nature

would be nine times

what she is today…

to go back to preindustrial times

but that won’t happen…

on the contrary it keeps getting worse…

“the punishment pollutes more than the crime” (N)

what responsibility do you have?

i gave up a long time ago

         at the urging of my good friend

                                             Shawn…the black swan…

or as the great people’s poet

Charles Bukowski said

many times “Don’t Try.”

But

“a culture of fear emerging within the university. We are in a boom economy for solution driven research and a famine economy for arts, humanities and social sciences.”

It’s like we don’t want to know better…

and of course poetry will not make you any filthy lucre…

but the arts, humanities and social sciences are suppose to provide moral and ethical support for all of these advancements and for the business world…

a business world with out ethics is as dangerous as unfettered progress with out morals…right is right…wrong is wrong…when unlimited growth is the economic model…90% disappears pretty quick…

maybe we’ll just keep figuring out ways to make things better…

mainstream 

and i include counter culture

the arts have died…

or at least are in a famine economy…

though i have noticed intelligentsia…

is starting to ask why?

which isn’t  a great question.

Fuck it     

It is Monday and this in an economic blog.

many of these facts come from the magazine The Walrus “A Ten Percent World” by J.B. MacKinnon who won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction for his first book, “Dead Man in Paradise” published September 2010 and from the article

Office of the President

The University of Alberta’s Indira Samarasekera has learned that when a nations prosperity is linked inextricably to the quality of its post secondary education and research, running a university is an exercise in risk management.

by Gordon Laird