Tiny Countries Should Not Exist

There is no good reason for tiny countries to exist, and we should stop making more of them.

The World Bank classifies 40 countries as 'small states' on the basis of having a population smaller than 1.5 million (though, oddly, this list excludes some rich tiny countries like Luxembourg and Estonia). Some are as small as 11,000 (Tuvalu), and the total population of all of them put together is only 20 million. Nevertheless, each of these countries has full 'sovereignty' - meaning that the organisations recognised as ruling over the populations within these territories have special and equal rights under international law: to exploit the resources that fall within their exclusive economic zone, for example, or to vote on matters of global importance at the United Nations, or to make up their own regulations about corporate taxation and secrecy.

This is absurd, but also far from harmless.

Stop Occupying The Universities!

A University Occupation in The Netherlands - via de Volkskrant

Universities in several countries in the Global North have been targeted by activist groups using occupations or the threat of them to coerce these institutions into publicly renouncing any cooperation with Israeli universities and Israel based academics. I am not interested in the politics of university occupations -  and especially not the US politics of them, which is all mixed up with the Republicans' (culture) war on universities. 

I want to focus on the ethics: why some students (and non-students) think they have a moral right - or even a duty - to disrupt universities to force them to do certain things. 

Unconventional Ways To Contribute To Climate Care: World Peace, Ozempic, Economic Growth

It is widely recognised that climate change is so hard to deal with because it is a super wicked problem. Every part of it is connected to everything else and is continuously changing; billions of actors with different opinions and interests disagree about what to do; there is no right solution; every (expert's) way of understanding the problem is a misleading simplification; and so on (previously). 

It is less widely recognised that some of the very features that make climate care so hard also present opportunities for making it easier. In particular, the feature that everything is connected to everything else means that climate change is exacerbated by many other challenges at the same time that our efforts to manage it must compete with those other challenges for our limited resources - political, organsiational, and economic. For example, the New Cold War is geopoliticising international relations and diverting massive resources towards rearmament (in attempts to deter hot war). The New Cold War makes climate care harder. Conversely, however, we may see that any progress we might make in returning the world to more peaceful relations would be enormously helpful for the climate care project. 

Various other challenges - from the demographic transition to public health - may have the same feature. They appear to compete with climate care for our attention, but should actually be understood as complementary to the climate care project because wicked problems get easier to manage when the world gets easier.

The Climate Change Policy Problem: Why Can’t The World Do The Right And Obvious Thing?

Source

Many of those who care deeply about the environment find the climate change policy problem baffling. This includes the climate scientists who contribute to the increasingly pessimistic scientific consensus, as well the environmentalist activists who see that consensus as a call to action, and the many hundreds of millions of ordinary people (and my academic colleagues) who understand climate change as an existential danger to humanity.

Why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about this huge and urgent problem?

Billionaires Are Not As Rich As We And They Like To Pretend

The Scrooge McDuck model of obscene wealth, as propagated by inequality activists 

There are supposedly more than 2,500 billionaires in the world these days. While I certainly agree that these people are very very rich, it is important to be clear that they are not as rich as the infographics put about by the likes of Oxfam imply. The wealth of billionaires is largely theoretical - an accounting construction built upon generous assumptions rather than a literal pile of money. It would be more accurate to simply call them the super rich.

The Case Against Bottle Deposits

A common sight in Europe:
poor person searching bare-handed through
garbage bins in search of deposit bottles

Many environmentalists support the idea of charging deposits on drink bottles and cans in order to persuade people to bring them back for recycling. They believe this is a good and obvious way to reduce humans environmental impact.

They are mistaken.

While bottle deposit systems are superficially attractive they are a horrendously expensive way to do not much good, while also creating degrading and fundamentally worthless work for the poor. They are not the outcome of a real commitment to reducing humans' environmental impact but of our flawed human psychology. The fundamental political attraction of bottle deposits is twofold. They appeal to voters' underlying presumption that inflicting something mildly annoying on ourselves must be an effective means to address a problem, because the constant annoyance itself keeps in our mind that we really are doing something about it. (This resembles the folk-theory of medicine: If it tastes nasty it must be doing us good.) And bottle deposits appeal to governments' preference for getting something for free, since all they have to do is pass a law requiring that lots of other people organise and carry out a lot of fiddly work. It's a tax, but not one they have to justify and defend.

Artificial Wombs: A Technological (Partial) Solution To Gender Injustice and Global Fertility Collapse?

An artificial womb that allowed the entire gestation of babies to take place outside the human body would be an enormous benefit to humanity. Governments should be pouring tens of billions into the relevant sciences and technologies.

Such an invention would free women from the physiological burden of reproductive labour. It would also revolutionise fertility by expanding the number of people whose wish to have children can be fulfilled. Enormous direct value to human lives would be created by allowing such earnest desires to be met. In addition, if more people who want children could have children, then the global fertility collapse we are currently experiencing could be greatly reduced in severity, with beneficial political, social, and economic consequences for all.