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Showing posts from May 6, 2012

Tales of Two Earths

...As sheep, that step from forth their fold, by one, Or pairs, or three at once; meanwhile the rest Stand fearfully, bending the eye and nose To ground, and what the foremost does, that do The others, gath'ring round her, if she stops... Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio , Canto 14 Most economists make it all too easy to bash them. When I think of how eerily detached from reality the main stream of economics is, I also recall the situation with corn ethanol in 2005.  Only two U.S. faculty, Dr. David Pimentel and I, went public against the nonsense that was being propagated throughout the society by the ill-informed greens, scientists, lobbyists, economists, venture-capitalists, lawmakers, and almost everyone in the media.  We were both savaged at the time and for a few more years.  Now everybody shrugs their arms and says pretty much what we were saying all along.  Today, Chapter 2 of the same nonsense, or the "second generation biofuels," is being closed at a great