The Economic Way of Thinking

Polar Bears For Global Warming?

A controversy is, once again, heating up in Alaska over the federal government's effort to expand polar bear protection.  Like Sarah Palin before him, Alaska's new governor, Sean Parnell, intends to sue.  According to the Associated Press, his legal team will protest the science behind polar bears being listed as an Endangered Species:

Alaska's lawyers will argue that the research was flawed, that federal officials looked too far into the future and that modeling is uncertain. Especially troublesome, Alaska Attorney General Dan Sullivan says, is that for the first time, the federal government listed a species with high population numbers — 20,000 to 25,000 worldwide, up from 8,000 to 10,000 in the 1960s.

"Never before has a species been listed when the population of that species is at its highest, most robust," Sullivan said. "It's at all-time historical highs."

As the world has supposedly gotten warmer, here'e what appears to be happening to the polar bear population (the link with the relevant citations can be found here):

 

Of course, all of the disagreement surrounds the future direction of these lines. 

Undesigned Orders: Darwin And Smith

Darwin’s debt to the political economists is considerable. In his last year at Cambridge in 1829, he reported in a letter, ‘My studies consist in Adam Smith and Locke’. At Maer, his uncle Josiah Wedgwood’s house in Staffordshire, he often met the lawyer and laissez-faire politician Sir James Mackintosh (whose daughter married Darwin’s brother-in-law and had an affair with his brother). On the Beagle, he read the naturalist Henri Milne-Edwards, who took Adam Smith’s notion of the division of labour and applied it to the organs of the body. Darwin promptly re-applied it to the division of labour among specialised species in an ecosystem: ‘The advantage of diversification in the inhabitants of the same region is, in fact, the same as that of the physiological division of labour in the organs of the same individual body — a subject so well elucidated by Milne-Edwards.’

That's from Matt Ridley's The Natural Order of Things.

HT:  Walter Grinder

The Market Is An Ecological System

I often hear somebody complain "Why are there so many different cereals in the grocery isle?  We don't need all that!"

My response:

True.  In fact, we don't need any cereal.  And do we really need all the different birds above our heads, too?  Who needs that variety of trees we see in parks and woods?  Who needs all the different grasses, flowers, weeds?  And so on.