Apocalypse no. 2

 Part of a semi-regular series. The first part is here.

Albrecht Dürer
The Four Horsemen, from The Apocalypse
via Wikimedia

You've probably encountered people saying we don't need vaccines because "who gets measles now anyway?" and "when was the last time smallpox was an issue?".

You get why that's a problem, right?

We don't see measles moving through our population because almost everyone has been vaccinated against it, and we're in the middle of getting to see what happens when you drop that rate from 95% to 80%.

This is the paradox of vaccine success. They work so well, we forget that they do anything at all.

What if we had this attitude towards the way society as a whole works?

Government is a convenient whipping boy: a target for our frustrations with how our lives are going. And it's easy to find things that government does wrong, could do better, or makes worse.

Unfortunately, it's even easier to overlook the basic things that government does well which enable the day to day lives we've come to expect.

For a quick and morbid example, it's illegal to sell baby cribs with bars too far apart. If you're a manufacturer of baby cribs, you might find this annoying. If you're a parent of an infant, you might appreciate that the government has made it impossible for your baby to get its head stuck between the bars of its crib and strangle itself. But you also might be unaware that such a rule exists. All babies - including yours - are now safe from getting their heads stuck between crib bars and strangling themselves to death, and people don't realize that it was government action that removed that risk.

For a longer example, and one that hits home given where I live, we need an outline understanding of how a rural economy works.

The one economic field in which rural areas have a natural advantage is resource extraction.

Apocalypse no. 1

 Part of an occasional series

Albert Goodwin, Apocalypse
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apocalypse-Albert_Goodwin.jpg

You could say I'm doomer adjacent.

I have friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who are full-on doomer, and I understand their arguments.

On one side, there's what we're doing to the natural systems that support us. At the broadest level, global warming of course, but we're pushing at ecosystems and resources in lots of other ways as well. This is a problem of having too much access to fossil fuels for our own good.

On the other side, the idea of peak oil raises the possibility that we don't have enough easy access to fossil fuel to maintain the way of life we've come to take for granted.

Too much and not enough at the same time. I understand the argument, and I can't prove it's wrong.

I used to be full doomer myself, and in 2008-09, I expected that's what we were seeing. I was clearly wrong, so I've learned to be more cautious about forecasts.

Understanding the deep forces beneath a situation is useful, but does little to help you predict the details of how things will unfold.