Borlaug and the bankers by Joseph Stiglitz in the Guardian today:

know or appreciate the greatness of Dr. Borlaug. The world needs more people like him.

I believe Texas A&M had his memorial service last week.

the rest of us to death.

Recommend.

Thank you, Joe Chi Minh.

When he talks about Africa not getting the agricultural productivity that Asia has, he should have immediately mentioned war and water.

The African nations (seemingly) have far more motivation to buy armaments and fight wars than to plant food.

And if they wanted to plant foods, what about the droughts?

Then when Stiglitz starts talking about India, he fails to mention that Monsanto and its GMO seed has destroyed the small farmers in India. Monsanto used the "green revolution" as the basis for hoodwinking the poor farmers into buying GMO cotton seed. Each year, thousands of Farmers in India now kill themselves -as they have no money for the RoundUp herbicide that is part of the contract they signed with Monsanto. And since they were required to destroy the seeds that t their families had saved over decades, they cannot return to conventional seeds.

time there making sure that such a spot is reserved.

And Hell hath no fury like a woman activist scorned!

paying people too much money. The conference board of Canada was doing a study asking kids if they thought about high tech jobs in their future. The majority of kids from private schools said no they wanted a job that made lots of money.

not conservation of the beneficial assets of a society, although invocation of the latter to an already scandalised and disaffected populace is still used as a vestigial front.

But then I'm no english major.

polysyllabic humour. Now you mention it and I re-read it.

thought I'd revisit posts I'd written to the Guardian and to my horror, I came across one I couldn't make head or tail of. And I've been too scared to revisit it a second time, in case it really was impenetrable - as, alas, I suspect.

Quotes:

If neoclassical theory were correct, Borlaug would have been among the wealthiest men in the world, while our bankers would have been lining up at soup kitchens.

Bank officers may have walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars, but everyone else in our society – shareholders, bondholders, taxpayers, homeowners, workers – suffered.

Not surprisingly, stock options create strong incentives for short-sighted and excessively risky behaviour, as well as for "creative accounting", which executives throughout the economy perfected with off-balance-sheet shenanigans.

Absurdly generous compensation in the financial sector induced some of our best minds to go into banking. Who knows how many Borlaugs there might have been among those enticed by the riches of Wall Street and the City of London? If we lost even one, our world was made immeasurably poorer.