“Helmut Schlesinger, the Bundesbank president in 1992, was asked why he disliked the precursor of the Euro, which was called the Ecu. He replied, “I have nothing against the Ecu apart from its name – I think it should be called the Deutschemark.”
- Anatole Kaletsky, ‘The Euro Debate Gets Philosophical’, November 29, 2011.
So the UK doesn’t get to join the great euro zone leper colony. Oh well. Tant pis. Tja. As Captain Blackadder once said, we lost closer friends the last time we were deloused, and were more wounded the last time we clipped our toenails. If we could summon up the mental energy to care about Europe we might bother to cite the perhaps apocryphal British newspaper headline that once read:
“Fog in Channel; Continent cut off.”
As regular readers will attest, we have long approvingly cited the work of Albert Bartlett, emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Professor Bartlett regards sustainable growth as a contradiction in terms, and has voiced at least two startling opinions on the topic:
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
And he has asked,
“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavour on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by further increases in population locally, nationally or globally ?”
Such views are unfashionable, of course (although some have referred to them as fashionably declinist) – we are somehow meant to believe that perpetual growth is not just desirable but essential, and that the planet can cope with an infinite number of people despite its obviously finite resources.
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Download So long, and thanks for all the stress