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| 2021 publication from the outstanding science journalist |
In 1952, while acknowledging he had no meaningful evidence to support his proposition, Ancel Keys suggested Americans should eat one-third less fat than they were at the time if they wanted to avoid heart disease. In 1970, still without hard clinical trial evidence, the American Heart Association recommended low-fat diets for everyone in America literally old enough to walk.
[Ernst] Cassirer wanted to make a clear profession of faith, a philosophical celebration of the origin of the Renaissance as a milestone in self-liberation and the reshaping of the world. The essential impulses of this immense event were overshadowed, from the seventeenth century onward, by the abstraction-fixated, anti-corporeal, consciousness-obsessed modern age of René Descartes and his methodical successors—with profound consequences well into the philosophy of the 1920s.
WHAT MADE WITTGENSTEIN’S TREATISE [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] so incredibly difficult for its first readers (and would continue to do so for decades after) was his decision to express his thoughts through two modes of language that are so different as to seem mutually exclusive. One is the language of mathematical logic, with its entirely abstract symbols, the other a poetic language rich in imagery, concepts, allegory, and paradoxical aphorism.
Modern Monetary Theory was in some ways a re-introduction of Keynesian economics into the climate crisis. Its foundational axiom was that the economy works for humans, not humans for the economy; this implied that full employment should be the policy goal of the governments that made and enforced the economic laws. So a job guarantee (JG) was central to MMT’s ideas of good governance. Anyone who wanted a job could get one from the government, “the employer of last resort,” and all these public workers were to be paid a living wage, which would have the effect of raising the private wage floor also to that level, in order to remain competitive for workers.
We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.
