Reading Time: 3 minutes Climate change is the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. It will last for centuries, and fighting it will be hard. To address climate change, policy makers must deal with a complex array of players, make difficult trade-offs and think in new ways. People often ask economists to help with these sorts of decisions, because […]
Thinking about Climate Change Read More »
Reading Time: 2 minutes Happiness matters greatly in both philosophy and economics. Aristotle said that happiness is the supreme good, the end to which everything else is a means. However, he defined happiness quite differently than economists do today. In Aristotle’s view, happiness was not a matter of pleasure but a matter of morality. The moral person was happy.
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Reading Time: 2 minutes Martin Luther King Jr. said “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope!” Geologists have a habit of thinking that a million years is a short time – and in a sense it is. After all, the earth has existed for about 4,500 million years. For four-fifths of that time, single-celled organisms ruled
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope! Read More »
