Daily Goods

I'm importing a feature from sibling blog Liberal Hyperbole which I already called "Daily Goods" there, and it seems especially fitting a name for an economics blog. Here's the explanation from there:

Starting today, I'm going to be doing daily posts when appropriate merely consisting of links to comments I've made on other blogs, and perhaps sometimes even to posts on other blogs where I haven't commented on. The main reason for this is to show a bit more of my thinking than my somewhat sporadic posting here reveals, and incidentally to give myself a handy reference wherein I can find those comments I've left elsewhere but forgotten just where. Secondarily, it's a way to indicate others' posts that I find interesting enough to comment on (although often, that interest is merely that it conjures up a "witty" joke that I just can't pass up, so quality is not assured).

In doing this, I'll be modifying my general rule of never editing a post without noting it (usually with "Update:", "Added:", or "Edit:"). These I'll be adding to over the day (or however long) as I make comments, or find interesting articles. This way, I won't fall into the Eschaton trap of posting a dozen or two one-sentence links to articles in one day. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just not my style.

And here's the Daily Good for today, so far:

• Angry Bear — On The Limits of Growth, zero growth, and Malthusian thought. The comments are pretty good too, and introduced me to a term for one of the ideas that's been rattling around in my head for a while now: Steady state economy.

  Afterthought 2008-03-10: One point in particular I like to make on this theme, in response to those who would say, "but they've been predicting doom for us since [Malthus, 1970s, 1990s, pick any], and none of that has happened yet! Therefore they must be wrong at all times!" Based on that kind of reasoning, I can sleep soundly in the knowledge that I will live forever, because I've never died yet. And, if they would respond that we have evidence of other people dying around us, so presumably we will too? I'd point out that the same goes for other species than H. sapiens; the vast majority of them have died off in the past (and now at an ever-increasing rate, for good measure).