The Good, The Bad, The Spin

Michael Shermer likes to tread dangerous waters. His latest dip into challenging the received turbulance of our times is an evolutionary explanation for the state of Modern Capitalism. Politicos, religionists and the lay masses, if they actually take a gander through Shermer’s The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics, will likely recoil in disagreement. “You mean to say democratic life is not God-ordained?” they may gasp.

Shermer, chief evolutionist and resident skeptic at Skeptic Magazine, has long maintained the root of human behavior lies not only in our biology but in how our surroundings influence our actions. In this latest iteration, Shermer traces human evolution to explain why we are the way we are today. “If our species is about a hundred thousand years old, then 90 percent of our history has been spent in (a) state of relative economic simplicity,” he writes.

It’s true. The 1997 anthropological manifesto Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environmentdescribes in various essays how our hunter-gatherer ancestry got along in sustainable bands and tribes. Shermer, similar to these others before him, then extrapolates the “relative state of economic simplicity” into what we are today: consumer traders. (more…)

It’s an elixir of journalism that is being used more and more to sell newspapers and newspaper ads online. The Fourth Estate’s First Amendment rights in practice guarantee that essentially anything can be said about anybody if attached to one magic word: allege.

He said, she said. Truth and facts be damned. Public pissing matches sell. Provide appropriate attribution, continue with referencing situations as having been alleged to have occurred and the public indubitably makes up its own mind, usually believing the allegation especially if it’s negative and involves people with power and money. (more…)