The Ministry for the Future

Jevons Paradox proposes that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease.

Many of them were now arguing that all the young people on Earth, and all the generations of humans in the centuries to come, and all their cousin creatures on the planet who could never speak for themselves, especially in court—all these living beings added up to something like a poor and vulnerable developing nation, a huge one, appearing inexora

“Yes. And of the same empire too. It’s funny how England never seemed to pay too much of a price for its crimes.” “No one does. You pay for being the victim, not the criminal.”

was slotted into the bottom classes early on and my life was sealed at that point, on a track to servitude, even though I knew I had real thoughts, real feelings. So the main thing for me in that initial break was to get my ass out of school. Although parenthetically I have to admit that I later on became a teacher.

periods. This is always an act of imagination, which fixes on matters geological (ice ages and extinction events, etc.), technological (the stone age, the bronze age, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution), dynastic (the imperial sequences in China and India, the various rulers in Europe and elsewhere), hegemonic (the Roman empire,

Having debunked the tragedy of the commons, they now were trying to direct our attention to what they called the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and t

“No one is safe until all are secure”

think the principle was set at Nuremberg—you’re wrong to obey orders that are wrong.”

That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.