This Must Be Godless Capitalist

John Derbyshire had a visitor.

If this “swelling wave of knowledge” resembles an earlier environmentalist wave, we can expect:

• A large number of soundly-established facts which require only trivial changes … most of which would have occurred anyway. (We probably would have gotten public sanitation, for example, even without epidemiology. After all, people prefer to move away from smells.)

• An even larger number of apparent facts causing lifestyle changes which turn out to be baseless. (For example, much of what passes for modern morality was based on supposed Malthusian necessity.)

• An enormous amount of preposterous cliches. The cliches are most firmly believed by people distant from science. Some of them are picked up by real scientists, who think that they're just using common sense.

Hmmm… I wonder if it's worth becoming the Julian Simon of this “wave of knowledge”…