Tadit,

       You've hit the proverbial tip of the iceberg. People who promote 
mercury light bulbs powered by chemical stew transformers to save energy. 
The whole "environmental foot print" phenomenon, which lays a guilt trip on 
people instead of focusing on corporate promotion of fossil fuel use. I 
could go on for pages and pages.

Regards
Jonathan
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tadit" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 4:24 PM
Subject: Re: Cultural evolution


> Okay, as long as we sem to be drifting a bit on this topic......  There is 
> problem in the definition of economic demand and elasicity of demand that 
> will have strong influence upon the ability of the nominal homo "not so' 
> sapiens relative to adapting to rapidly changing economic conditions. One 
> popular choice has been to choose inelasticity and finding a scapegoat 
> population (do I really need to give an example here?) To put in slightly 
> different terms how does culture get adapted to environment as opposed to 
> the more familiar adaptation of adaptation of the environment to 
> expectations, until the inelasticity of the environment strikes back, eg 
> collapsing fishery stocks, dead zones from pollution, or more mundanely 
> shifting from a car culture to high density occupancy. It seems as much to 
> do the principles and vocabulary of economism(note spelling, ie not 
> "economics"). Another variety is political reformism. I went to a grand 
> confabulation of MoveOn.org here recently and they had four top issues and 
> then a a whole elaborate concept of generating a lobbying organization. 
> Trouble is, as one example, in the advocacy of "Clean Energy" they didn't 
> have a clue as to what they were advocating for and what the real choices 
> are, other than a very nebulous "restoring democracy" (doesn't anyone real 
> political and economic history at all?), In the lobbying process they 
> seemed uncommonly tilted toward specious speculations about bio-ethanol or 
> nuclear as an acceptable risk. The more particular response was that I was 
> way ahead of them. It all seems to be more about being caught in a certain 
> set of demand assumptions, and refusing to adapt to the 'environmental' 
> details. It seems to bode very poorly for the hand axe equivalents over 
> pther possibilities.  Comments general and specific, please, Tadit
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:37:24 -0500, Michael H Goldhaber <[log in to unmask]> 
> wrote:
>
>> The discussion of cultural evolution reminded me of something I wrote
>> a while ago  in an early effort at a blog. See http://
>> mhgoldhaber.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_mhgoldhaber_archive.html
>>
>> It is titled "Acheulean Hand Axes Ought to Tell Us Something, But
>> What? "
>>
>> Best,
>> Michael
>>
>