While I’m not an economist by training, I’ve grown fond of contemplating and simplifying complex economic concepts so as they make sense to me. As I consider how to understand the scale of our economy (or of any economy, for that matter), I’ve realized that the answer is the product of three simple variables: working-age…
I’m nearly 50 years old. Some people live 100 years or more. With that in mind, I contend that so-called “history” is a lot more recent than we may have realized as students, especially for a very young country such as the United States. • Only 244 years ago, until Congress voted to declare independence…
How often has the majority been wrong? Let’s look at what the majority of people accepted ~50, ~100, and ~150 years ago that now sound staggeringly shameful. It wasn’t much beyond 50 years ago that a majority still believed it was OK to discriminate against people based on their race, religion, or country of origin…
The Context As a child, one of the topics I frequently pondered and discussed with my parents was the scale of the universe. I became accustomed to the line of reasoning with which we’ve all become familiar: if the universe is finite, what’s outside that limit? Like many, I’ve never felt completely comfortable with that…
This is another installment in a series of brief posts about facts I find interesting and/or surprising. The intent is to keep these posts brief but to provide links to detailed references for those interested in researching the topic further. As crazy as it sounds, recent research has revealed that our ancestors’ frightful or traumatic…
This is the second in a series of brief posts about facts I find interesting and/or surprising. The intent is to keep these posts brief but to provide links to detailed references for those interested in researching the topic further. The human population of earth is roughly 7.0 billion and is growing at 1% annually;…
This is the first in a series of brief posts about facts I find interesting and/or surprising. The intent is to keep these posts brief but to provide links to detailed references for those interested in researching the topic further. Prior to the 19th century, estimates for the age of the earth and, indeed, the…
Against the Herd 