Author: Marc Jampole

Earlier this week I proposed that by limiting everyone to one child each, in less than a century we could bring the world population down to 500 million, thereby ending both environmental and economic problems. One reader asked quite aptly how I propose to do it. As the Burt Reynolds’ character says in “Semi-Tough,” Michael […]

Read More… from Is reducing the world population without war, disease or famine just a pipedream?

Today let’s go big picture and look at some pressing global problems and my conceptually simple solution to them: As Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the U.S. and worldwide, we face an excess of productive capacity that presses wages downward everywhere.  Lower wages means that owners and investors keep more of the […]

Read More… from The real challenge of the 21st century is to reduce world population without massive famine, disease or war.

A lot of wishful thinking goes on in articles that purport to be news.  I’m talking about the kind of article that speculates that a trend is forming that will be positive to the interests of the U.S.  But when you read the article carefully, you see that it’s built on a series of conjectures […]

Read More… from Another example of wishful “it’s so because we say it’s so” news reporting.

Parade Magazine’s new chef, Bobby Flay, from the Food Channel, is thin and buff, very photogenic.  He must not be eating the Superbowl party menu he is proposing in last Sunday’s Parade, which as a Sunday magazine supplement is delivered to more people than any other publication in the United States. In Bobby’s first monthly […]

Read More… from Parade Magazine’s new chef serves up a Superbowl party feast that’s more than 1,300 calories before the beer.

Business Week’s Venessa Wong has written an article about a new study that shows that Texas leads in number of high-growth cities, those places that are seeing population increases and rising prices for houses. Here are the leading high-growth areas across the country, according to this new piece of research: Braselton, Georgia (Atlanta suburb) Atascocita, […]

Read More… from Another survey serves as a platform for praising suburbs, automobiles, malls and segregation.

Someone in the Obama administration has leaked the main findings of a government ethics report about the Bush II attorneys who wrote and published the memos that in various places stated the legal justification behind the following views: 1) waterboarding is not torture; 2) that the legal definition of tortured permitted a number of techniques […]

Read More… from Why did we impeach a President for lying about an affair, but won’t prosecute those who created our torture gulag?

The New York Times continued its campaign to get the average Jane-and-Joe to adopt the questionable ethics of investment or mortgage bankers this weekend with an article by Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago wondering why more of the millions of homeowners who owe more on their homes than the places are worth […]

Read More… from The default of Stuyvesant Town gives consumers another reason to walk away from underwater homes.