Sean Meriwether's Blog: The Green Economist

Now Departing from Gate…

NY Dispatch: Two weeks ago I did something that I wasn’t sure I was going to do for a long time. I got on a plane. A short vacation that was timed in the trough between the summer wave of COVID-19 cases and the tsunami that is cresting as we head into winter. It was going to be now or much, much later.

It took some time to figure out where to go since so many countries have barred entry to Americans; our rate of infection is completely out of control. There are only a handful of places left, ...

You can’t stay here…

NY Dispatch: As they say when the bars close, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. This is the message US voters gave to the future ex-president, ending the 4th season of his White House Reality Show. President-elect Joe Biden has secured a comfortable margin of electoral votes, ensuring a pathway to become the 46th president of the United States. True to form the 45th president has refused to concede, which he does not legally have to do. No matter how he tries to stall he will be...

The Lying Game

NY Dispatch: The president is ending his cancelled series of The Apprentice at the White House the same way he began it, with finger-pointing, half-truths, and dangerous lies. Last night he delivered a deranged 17-minute diatribe that was so full of brazen lies about the election that many of the major networks felt a responsibility to not just fact check him, but cut away from his paranoid ramblings. My question is, what took them so long? For 5 and a half years various media channels have prov...

The Waiting Game

NY Dispatch: It seems that there are only two things going on in the world today, but that is hardly the case. Hurricane Eta is lashing Central America and headed for the Caribbean and South Florida. Massive protests are continuing in Poland to support women’s rights and in Belarus against a stolen election. Uighur Muslims are still being held in concentration camps in China and immigrant children are still being held in detention centers apart from their parents. The US formally withdrew from t...

Inching to the Finish

NY Dispatch: Last night the world watched anxiously as the results came in, state by state, their outlines colored red, pink, light blue, dark blue, and gray. Pundits opined breathlessly about what it all meant, slicing and dicing our population into bitesize demographics. They assigned a herd mentality to groups divided by age, gender, and race. As the early results came in, it was a flashback to 2016 when our enthusiasm eroded into dismay and then despair. Last night we thought we were waking ...

November 3rd

NY Dispatch: It seems like a lifetime ago, but we started talking about the 2020 election before the 2016 election was decided. The president started to fund his reelection campaign immediately after moving into the White House, giddy that people were throwing money at him when banks refused to loan him money because of the risk of nonpayment. It feels like the longest four years are about to come to an end, but this is only the beginning of the next chapter. Will it be a rerun of alternative re...

Home Grown

NY Dispatch: On Sunday the 18th a ‘rona car rally in support of the president invaded my town. They drove up and down Main Street in their pickups and SUVs, shouting, honking, and waving the flag of their leader. I learned later that they circulated around Westchester making a general nuisance of themselves. At the time I was concerned that they had a larger agenda of voter intimidation, especially since their parade was a week before early voting started in New York. So it came as no surprise t...

Día de Muertos

NY Dispatch: A lifetime ago in 2019 my husband and I were on the Lower East side celebrating Halloween with friends who travel off the beaten path. They took us to an Eastern European costume party where the music was fantastic, a mélange of 80s hits and Balkan tunes, and the crowd was eager to party. Later we paraded around the East Village with hundreds of others in costume, moving from one bar to another, running into people they knew along the way. It was a warm, exciting night full of adven...

Blessed Samhain

NY Dispatch: Like many of our modern traditions, the origins of Halloween can be traced back millennia to pagan rituals. Celtic-speaking countries held fall celebrations to mark the end of the harvest and the transition into winter. These traditions may stem back to ancient Roman feasts and festivals for the dead, known as Parentalia, which became more commonly known as Samhain, an old Irish word that means “summer’s end.” Samhain was one of the most important holidays in the Gaelic calendar in ...

Science over Superstition

NY Dispatch: Imagine that when you were in school you told your teacher that you didn’t believe in what you were taught and to defend your rights you were not going to take any exams. Perhaps you may have been seen as a rebel, but you would have failed, maybe flunked out of school. Your career options would have been limited and it is unlikely that you would become the president of the United States. However, that is our reality today. The student who didn’t believe in facts is running his reali...