Inspired by the acclaimed book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt takes audiences on a satirically comedic, yet illuminating ride into the heart of conjuring American spin. Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on a secretive group of highly charismatic, silver-tongued pundits-for-hire who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities – yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied public threats ranging from toxic chemicals to pharmaceuticals to climate change.
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An Honest Liar is a feature documentary about the world-famous magician, escape artist, and world-renowned enemy of deception, James ‘The Amazing’ Randi. The film brings to life Randi’s intricate investigations that publicly exposed psychics, faith healers, and con-artists with quasi-religious fervor. A master deceiver who came out of the closet at the age of 81, Randi created fictional characters, fake psychics, and even turned his partner of 25 years, the artist Jose Alvarez, into a sham guru named Carlos. But when a shocking revelation in Randi’s personal life is discovered, it isn’t clear whether Randi is still the deceiver – or the deceived.
In the year 2393 a historian in the Second People’s Republic of China penned a book about how scientists, economists and politicians living in the 21st century failed to act on the solid science they had that gave clear warnings of the climate catastrophe ahead. As a result, the world experienced the Great Collapse of 2093, bringing an end to Western civilization.
So speculate historians of science Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University and Erik Conway of the California Institute of Technology in their book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (Columbia University Press, 2014), a short scientific- historical fantasy. During the second half of the 20th century— the “Period of the Penumbra”—a shadow of anti-intellectualism “fell over the once-Enlightened techno-scientific nations of the Western world…preventing them from acting on the scientific knowledge available at the time and condemning their successors to the inundation and desertification of the late twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.” (continue reading…)
Path dependency is an economic concept to describe what happens when a technology becomes stuck in a market pathway out of historical momentum, especially when the transactions costs of changing course are too high. The QWERTY keyboard is the most popular example of the phenomenon. As the standard narrative has it, QWERTY got a head start in the late 19th century over other keyboard arrangements that were vastly superior and so now we are stuck with this clunky keyboard system because of historical lock in.
Baloney. The QWERTY keyboard may not be the best of all possible letter key arrangements, but it has consistently held up against all would-be competitors because it is good enough to get the job done compared to costs of changing technologies for minuscule margins of improvement. What happens in most technologies is that the earliest innovators make most of the significant design features, which later generations tinker with and modify for improvements, and change happens mostly for convenience or efficiency factors, and not because of initial serious design flaws.
The bicycle is a case study in how technologies evolve, evidence for which is in abundant supply in Tony Hadland’s and Hans-Erhard Lessing’s encyclopedic history of bicycle design. This marvelous book features over 300 illustrations culled from many sources, most intriguingly from patent records. Having lived through what I thought was a major revolution in cycling technology in the 1980s when I was competing in the 3000-mile nonstop transcontinental bicycle Race Across America, I discovered in Bicycle Design that most of that decade’s innovations (as well as those in the decades hence), were invented, designed, and in many cases patented by cycling innovators decades or even a century before. (continue reading…)
One of the best-selling books of 2014 is Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty, a 696-page doorstop tome on economic history. Why is a data-heavy treatise from the “dismal science” so appealing? Because it is about income inequality and immobility, which in a December 2013 speech President Barack Obama called “the defining challenge of our time,” concluding that it poses “a fundamental threat to the American dream.” But does it? Maybe not.
The rich are getting richer, as Brookings Institution economist Gary Burtless found by analyzing tax data from the Congressional Budget Office for after-tax income trends from 1979 through 2010 (including government assistance). The top-fifth income earners in the U.S. increased their share of the national income from 43 percent in 1979 to 48 percent in 2010, and the top 1 percent increased their share of the pie from 8 percent in 1979 to 13 percent in 2010. But note what has not happened: the rest have not gotten poorer. They’ve gotten richer: the income of the other quintiles increased by 49, 37, 36 and 45 percent, respectively. (continue reading…)
