A Gen Z Guide to American Political Economy

 The most dangerous thing about climate change is that it has the potential to destabilize numerous systems in our world. If left unchecked, it could completely upend weather systems and patterns, food production, oceans, economies, disease patterns, wildlife migration patterns, global trade, governments, and mental health. When poorer countries are slammed by climate disasters it can easily turn their precarious existence from poor to desperate, causing widespread hopelessness, anger and desperation. This becomes fertile ground for climate terrorism. Climate terrorism is when a few people in a country deeply affected by climate change commit an act of violence in retaliation for climicide. Climicide occurs when a small group of wealthy oil executives in rich countries continue pumping out fossil fuels despite knowing the devastating effects. Climicide is such a disturbing phenomenon because fossil fuel companies like Shell, Exxon, BP and Chevron have known all along exactly what t...

The United States failed spectacularly in its response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, due to a lack of political leadership. A similar lack of leadership happened during the last global pandemic in 1918, when an outbreak of bird flu occurred during WWI. We know the effect the pandemic had on the public; less well-understood is the effect the pandemic had on American politics and international affairs. Not only did the virus incapacitate President Woodrow Wilson, causing him to concede to French Premier Georges Clemenceau on the Versaille Treaty and setting up the perfect political and economic conditions for Hitler’s rise, I hypothesize it also caused the death of President Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt became ill after his son Quentin died in combat in France in the summer of 1918, just after the first wave of the pandemic. Then on January 6, 1919, during the third wave, his butler woke up to the former President’s labored breathing, and watched as he passed away. His doctors susp...

Environmentalists are empathetic and compassionate, passionate and perseverant. They are also undervalued. But they have trouble with strategic communication. As I mentioned in my first science communicator blog post, people who care about the environment need to be more tactical. Rather than try to convince voters to protect the environment for the greater good, they need to appeal to more selfish, individualistic concerns. Instead of helping voters understand the more impactful ecosystem services that nature provides, they focus on clean air and water, which most Americans already have. That’s not entirely wrong, clean air and water are still under threat from the modern Republican Party. The Supreme Court recently repealed essential water protections for millions of Americans. It will forever be important to maintain environmental victories already gained, but the biggest fights are for the future. And in order to win those fights, the arguments of environmentalists have to shift an...

When most people think of an environmentalist, they think of a Greenpeace activist in a kayak, blocking an oil crew from leaving a harbor. Or they think of a literal tree-hugger. This misperception is the main weakness of environmentalists. There needs to be a revamping of the stereotype. That way, even if someone is an outright climate denier, an activist may yet be able to get their vote on conservation bills. One key to being strategic is to retire moral arguments when explaining why everyone should care about nature. People from different political and social groups are brought up differently and have different values. You’re not going to change their moral DNA.   Appealing to our desire for clean air and water won’t be enough to convince folks of the importance of conservation either. That’s because, in the United States, the majority of communities already have clean air and water. The key is to appeal to their self-interest. Everyone in the country, whether or not they have ...

As mentioned in the last post, economics is surprisingly malleable and spontaneous. However, during gilded ages economics tends to get stuck. Since our current political economic system is based upon inequality, the rich having massive amounts of political influence and the environment upon which we all depend being sucked dry, change has to come. Interestingly, economics had not developed a model for a sustainable economy until now. Kate Raworth, a Cambridge educated economist, came up with a marvelous framework called Doughnut Economics. The main idea is that humanity should not deplete resources faster than the earth can regenerate them. Society should exist in the doughnut, where humanity has what it needs to thrive, not in the doughnut hole, which signifies us not having enough of what we need. We should also not go past the doughnut’s outer edge, which stands for humankind taking more than it needs. This fits within the positive understanding of capitalism that Adam Smith concept...

Economics is more malleable and spontaneous than Americans realize. Students are taught that the Great Depression was caused by the stock market crash. That’s oversimplified and incorrect. Ben Bernanke won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2022 for pinpointing that it was in rural America where things started to unravel. When President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill against the advice of many economists, it decreased the amount of crops farmers could sell globally. Needing cash to pay their bills, so many farmers went to their banks to take out their money that rural banks were forced to close. Coupled with the rural bank closures, the economy had been strained since WWI. Average people used credit to buy new products like cars and radios, but they ended up not having enough money to fully pay. There was no real middle class, so the economy wasn’t anchored by a large population of people with stable incomes. There were no controls on the stock market, no Securities and Exchan...