I've cancelled the paper 3 times this year, & it still arrives. So there's no point in threatening to cancel it again over the drivel in Parade. But really, when you call an article What Should You Worry About?
OK, we should know the limits of Parade.
Is it a sign that Parade still sells Amish Mantles & the exact same "Don't Delay" coin scam they were pushing in 2005?
Maybe. News has to sell ads. The Globe isn't going to sell many pages to Filenes & Jordans with Filenes a hole in the ground and Jordans long gone. And I do rather like reading stale celebrity gossip & Howard Huge.
But Parade has dropped below the floor. They started the article* with a nice leadin about shark attacks and risk assessment. So, just as I'm settling in to get some basic data about relative risks, what happens?
Fear sometimes distorts our thinking to the point where we become convinced that certain threats are so enormous as to be unstoppable. Every generation has at least one such problem—the plague, polio. Today, it's global warming.
Arrrrgh! They got me, Coach! Bait & Switch!
And sure enough, its the same old horse manure:
Like, well, horse manure. As urban populations exploded in the 19th century, horses were put to work in countless ways, from pulling streetcars and coaches to powering manufacturing equipment. Our cities became filled with horses—for example, in 1900, New York City was home to some 200,000 of them, or one for every 17 people.
Zombie attacks! That's the real threat. And bears, of course.
And then the problem vanished. The horse was kicked to the curb by the electric streetcar and the automobile.
Virtually every unsolvable problem we've faced in the past has turned out to be quite solvable, and the script has nearly always been the same: A band of clever, motivated people—s cientists usually—find an answer. With polio, it was the creation of a vaccine. If the best minds in the world focus their attention on global warming, hopefully we can handle that, too.
The idiocy of this should be obvious. As history, it's bogus - horse droppings were just a nuisance, and one that people had been dealing with for thousands of years. As an analogy, it fails - the substituted problems were much worse. As writing it sucks - we've all read it before. But, even if somebody told a better story, so what? There is no reason that one problem having a solution means another unrelated one will.
What really galls me about this stuff is its dominance. The whole "Don't worry, somebody will solve it" faith, as a substitute for actually dealing with problems, is a societal suicide pact. But how often have you heard it?
8 years ago, when the 1990s oil glut was ending, people who should have known better were saying stuff like "Oh, we'll just have to drill deeper". Oil can't exist more than 3 miles underground. Except in a few undersea locations, the heat would destroy it.
We haven't yet faced a major crisis brought on by sunny side stupidity. There have been some warmups. Hurricane Katrina was a pretty good warning of what a refusal to prepare looks like.
*This is apparently a book extract from some fatuous fools who apparently have enough influence that Krugman has felt it necessary to respond.
ETA : Balloon Juice on these morans.