Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Do not, then, my friend, keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play" - Plato anticipates gamification in education :)

"[Arithmetic] should be prescribed by our law and that we should induce those who are to share the highest functions of state to enter upon that study of calculation" - what would Platoon made of Statistics, I wonder.

"The recreational rationale for wilderness preservation had finally achieved equal legal recognition with more practical arguments." 1891

"Never before had wilderness values withstood such a direct confrontation with civilization" 1885?

Nash argues that in both Yellows tone National Park and the Adirondacks "Forest Preserve" wilderness was preserved unintentionally. I'm not convinced, his argument is similar to the one that the Civil War was not about slavery."

"Civilization could expand unimpeded "in regions better suited for it...Let is go where labor will garner a richer harvest..." In this roundabout way Hammond (1847) justified wilderness preservation without gainsaying the values of civilization" - when I realised how little topsoil there was in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Has the conservation of wilderness in the US has always making a virtue of necessity?

"This wilderness, they agreed was doomed. Cattle would soon replace the buffalo and farms transform the range of the wolf, bear and Indian....Returning in 1873 Parkman added... Not only farms but "cities...hotels and gambling houses" had invaded the Rockies"

"This wilderness, they agreed was doomed. Cattle would soon replace the buffalo and farms transform the range of the wolf, bear and Indian....Returning in 1873 Parkman added... Not only farms but "cities...hotels and gambling houses" had invaded the Rockies"

"[Thoreau] rejoiced in the extremes and, by keeping a foot in each, believed he could extract the best of both worlds."

"England, for instance, was effete, sterile, and moribund because 'the wild man in her became extinct."

"By mid-century American life had acquired a bustling tempo and materialistic tone that left Thoreau and his contemporaries vaguely disturbed and insecure."

"Simple nature is not quite sufficient. We want human interest, incident and action complete."

"Wild forests and plains, as Cooper both knew and imagined them, dominate the action and determine the plots of these novels."

"And if, as many suspected, wilderness was the medium through which God spoke most clearly, then America had a distinct moral advantage over Europe, where centuries of civilisation had deposited a layer of artificiality over His works."

"In the early nineteenth century, for the first time in American history, it was possible to live and even to travel widely without coming into contact with wild country."

"It's a bitch of a thing when you realise that though you are the only one who didn't go to a top-class school and foreign college, you is the only man in the room with any sense." - nearly 400 pages before an interesting character emerges :(

"In fact, the original journal, the so-called "Secret History" did not contain the passages celebrating the wild mountains."

"The literary gentleman wielding a pen, not a pioneer with his axe, made the first gestures of resistance against the strong currents of antipathy [towards wilderness]"

"...in the region of the known the last thing to be seen is the idea of the good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light..." - this was more pithily expressed in the Bible.

"But surely, said I, the occurrence of one such is enough, if he has a state which obeys him, to realize all that now seems so incredible" - Plato anticipates the coming of Harry Potter.

"Rather than pursuing an unattainable utopia, we should identify where free markets have the greatest potential to diverge from social optimality and design public policies in response."

"There are no perfect markets, and there can be no perfect planner."

"A totally relaxed attitude to private credit creation produced; and a total prohibition on fiat money creation has made recovery weaker than it could have been. Absolute beliefs and simple rules are dangerous."

"[The ISLM model] failed to specify how people's behaviour was determined by expectations about the future, why they held particular expectations, and how those expectations would evolve in the light of changing circumstances and public policies."

"But underlying these specific failings was also a methodological and philosophical bias - a preference for mathematical precision and elegance at the expense of realism and a desire at certain answers that made possible unchanging public policy rules."

"Pre-crisis macroeconomic orthodoxy combined total anathema against money finance with an almost totally relaxed attitude to private credit creation." - shouldn't both be anathema?

increasing longevity can increase savings - how much 'deleveraging' is this responsible for in Japan? This is also happening in the buy-to-let phenomena in the UK.

For the euro, monetary finance is banned because of the political problems Turner highlights. The longterm solution is federalism: well, that's the plan anyway, isn't it?

"...the precise use of the [fiat] money would in itself have implications for the stimulative impact, fiscal and monetary authorities would need to discuss optimal policy design." - uh oh, planning!