Something for the weekend #75

Welcome. This is the 75th edition of my newsletter which offers a round-up of the week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus links to discussion of the optimism/pessimism gap, and debunking of optimism/pessimism.

* From a variety of sources. In the UK, “UK wage growth hits 11-year high” … “The UK jobs market has remained resilient with the strongest earnings growth in 11 years and robust employment creation” … “Excluding volatile bonuses, annual pay growth reached 3.9%” in the UK. Over in Germany… “continuing employment growth and rising incomes in Germany”. In July the… “USA added a solid 164,000 jobs to an economy that appears poised to extend its decade-long expansion” while “The tech talent labor pool in the U.S. grew by 16 percent in the past five years” and tech employment growth is spilling over to reach beyond the usual hotspot cities. Over in Israeli, tightly linked to the US tech scene, their Innovation Authority has just reported that… “Israel’s hi-tech employment rate rises to 8.7% of entire workforce”, up from 8.3% in the previous year.

* A recent EconTalk podcast was an in-depth interview with “Tyler Cowen on Big Business”, in which some robust and cogent defences were made of the role of larger American businesses in our lives. Note that there’s a big chunk in the middle of the podcast where the show veers off-topic, but the first and final thirds are well worth your time.

* In the Financial Times ($) this week… “Africa poised ‘to play a major role in the world’”… “Despite massive problems, the vast continent is faring better than many people imagine” as it steers a course between economic and population growth.

* In the West, the latest City Journal suggests we “Cool the Recession Talk”… “Economic indicators point to continued, moderate growth, despite the prognostications of the pundit class”.

* Cool the climate talk, say a large chunk of Italy’s scientists. The Italian Climate Petition in full.

* Spiked magazine debunks “The myth of ecocide” in the corporate media… “So many lies are being told about the Amazon fires.”

* “Ascension Island has committed to making a fertile Atlantic ‘Galapagos’, by designating all their waters a large-scale Marine Protected Area”. That’s 170,000 square miles, and this move is being backed up by major new funding and hi-tech monitoring from the British government.

* The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) talks have just concluded. The main new export protections are: increased protection on wild elephants and giraffes caught for export (if there’s “no real conservation benefit”); general protection for “18 more shark species”; and wood from “all Latin American species of cedar” trees will now require export permits. After previous CITES export restrictions on rosewood back-fired, CITES will now once again permit its use in musical instruments such as guitars.

* World’s Tiniest Engine Created. At present this is only a working prototype atomic-scale motor, but it’s claimed this… “ushers in a new era for the investigation of the energetics of technologies based on quantum theory”.

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Something for the weekend #74

Welcome. This is an edition of my newsletter which offers a round-up of the week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus links to discussion of the optimism/pessimism gap, and debunking of either optimism or pessimism.

Another low-volume newsletter this week, as the corporate media’s usual silly-season descends into outright blatant lying by activists and journalists desperate for click-bait.

* “Researchers at Harvard University have developed a mathematical framework that can turn any sheet of material into any prescribed shape, inspired by the Japanese paper craft kirigami.” reports the IET. “Finding kirigami tessellations that can convert a square to a circle, or a flat sheet into a poncho is just the start. We think that this is just the beginning of a class of new ways to engineer shape in the digital age using geometry, topology, and computation,” said [the lead researcher] Mahadevan.”

* A new AEI podcast asks… “How did the ancient Greeks think about technology? Were they techno-optimists or pessimists?”.

* It’s cheering to hear that nine “texts” of a young man’s gay life in the Paris of the 1890s are set to overcome more than a century of censorship. They were cut from Marcel Proust’s Pleasures and Days (1896). The 2019 publisher bills them vaguely, though, as being a… “diverse collection of previously unpublished novellas and texts”. These will somehow fit into a book of just 180-pages, and with facsimile facing pages too. I’d like to see just one novella that could fit into those 90 pages. Thus I suspect that clueless silly-season journalists are being gulled into expecting “nine new stories”. Yet the long-delayed publication will be welcome, all the same, whatever they turn out to be.

* One particularly mawkish form of blind optimism is often to be heard from dog-lovers. It takes the form of sentiments such as… “Oh, but my Mr. Wuffles wouldn’t hurt a fly! It’s the other dogs that are the problem.” That’s usually easy to debunk, by pointing out the way that simple dog-walking scares much bird-life out of an area, without any barking or chasing being involved. One can also consider the vast amount of stuff they eat and need, with all the consequent impacts. The eco-worriers will be coming to take your Mr. Wuffles away in due course, mark my words. But for now, it’s only safe to talk about such things in the context of the third-world. A new article does just that, “How dogs are becoming one of the world’s most harmful predators” and it finds that domestic dogs are especially damaging to wildlife in tropical forests. I guess we could frame this as another form of ‘the invasive species problem’.

* Another debunking of blind optimism, this being the belief that anything the UK does on reducing emissions is going to matter. Matter in a meaningful way, when measured at the global scale. The UK’s The Spectator magazine this week reminds us that… “The UK emits a whole giant 1 per cent of global carbon.” While.. “emissions in the US and EU [which, for now, includes the UK] are steadily coming down.”

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Something for the weekend #73

Welcome. This is an edition of my newsletter which offers a round-up of the week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus links to discussion of the optimism/pessimism gap, and debunking of optimism/pessimism.

Another ‘lightweight’ newsletter this week, as we’re in the ‘silly-season’ for news.

* On this week’s Forbes podcast Matt Ridley: Optimism In The Face Of The “Bad News Industry”… “Matt Ridley, world renowned author of The Rational Optimist and other global best sellers, makes the airtight case that contrary to the unending stream of downbeat news and gloomy predictions about the future, the Earth has never been a better place in which to live than it is today.”

* Spiked magazine debunks “The junk science behind the anti-birth movement”. This refers to the fashion, largely among celebrity couples it seems, to grab some headlines by declaring that they’re ‘not having any kids’ to ‘save the planet’.

* Reason magazine’s podcast debunks media hysteria in the USA, in “There Is No Evidence of an ‘Epidemic of Mass Shootings”… “The nation’s leading scholar of mass shootings explains how media coverage of horrific events such as El Paso and Dayton stoke unwarranted fear and anxiety.”

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Something for the weekend #72

Welcome. This is an edition of my newsletter which offers a round-up of the week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus links to discussion of the optimism/pessimism gap, and debunking of optimism/pessimism. It’s another light-than-usual posting, due to the usual late-summer “real news” drought.

* The World Fertilizer trade magazine ($ paywall) reports that… “the solubility of solid fertilizers (including granules and powders) produced by traditional fertilizers in water has been increased by nearly 30%” thanks to recent research in China. “The success of this research will enable drip irrigation equipment to be used for fertilization in arid and semi-arid agricultural planting areas.”

* Meanwhile, the Farming Today trade magazine ($ paywall) reports… “A breakthrough by scientists on nitrogen-fixing cereal crops. The research conducted by Oxford and Cambridge universities created a “molecular dialogue” between plants and the bacteria around their roots, which could be a vital step towards engineering nitrogen-fixing symbiosis in non-legume crops such as wheat and maize. Such a development could have enormous global potential for raising crop yields in nutrient-poor soils and reducing chemical fertiliser use.”

* New satellite mapping shows that Brazil’s most ravaged biome, the huge Atlantic Forest, is re-growing significantly in its previously logged areas. Its… “heavily deforested areas have nearly 10 percent more forest cover than previous years”. Other reports state that the whole region is now protected by the ‘MapBiomas Alerta’ – high-resolution real-time satellite surveillance of logging, embedded in “a cutting-edge system” which leads to rapid local alerts of damage. Around 10 to 12 percent of the original Atlantic Forest is still intact today, compared to circa 1600. What remains is mostly in “mountainous terrain” and thus “very little deforestation occurs”, according to local experts. With de-forestation effectively ended on a mass scale and confined now to a few states, and with the MapBiomas Alerta monitoring in place, serious re-forestation can begin. The Atlantic Forest Restoration Project is already underway and expects to… “restore 15 million hectares of the Atlantic Forest biome by 2050” of the current 40,000 square miles of forest, mostly by connecting fragmented habitats and creating 3 million local jobs in the process. Commentators on this restoration plan are reported to be “cautiously optimistic”.

* The American Enterprise Institute debunks alarmist claims that… “too many people are holding two or three jobs in order to make ends meet”. Contrary to the claims of microphone-grabbing socialists, “the long-run multiple jobholding rate is declining [and these] declines are persistent across different demographics”.

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