This post has been precipitated by the following question Christoph Becker asked rhetorically in a comment to Part VI : " Is education in our situation still of any use or is it just depressing, unwanted or even dangerous? " Mike Haywood, of course, found this cartoon that illustrates so well the fundamental quandary of the Green New Deal: Economic growth we got accustomed to will stop, and with it the global Ponzi scheme, which is a synonym for the global economy, will crumble. My short answer to Christoph was that good education would always be necessary for a functioning democracy. We see great examples of this requirement in Denmark, Finland, Holland, Norway, Sweden and Germany, for example. Education is the necessary condition for a thriving democracy, but it alone is woefully insufficient. Democracy must also be antifragile in the sense of Nassim Taleb . That is, any perturbation that attempts to blow up an antifragile democracy, will only make it stronger...
In this blog, I continue to write about the environment, ecology, energy, complexity, and humans. Of particular interest to me are human self-delusions and mad stampedes to nowhere.