Weekend Economists' 19th Nervous Breakdown April 6-8, 2012

[Demeter]

23. Here are 10 things you may have missed this week that are worth noting...OR NOT

http://www.alternet.org/story/154879/10_cool_things_the_world_learned_this_week?akid=8543.227380.AiIwN7&rd=1&t=25

1. Mini-We’s

If you want to lose weight you could exercise and eat sensibly. Or you could do something that’s going to work, like surgery.

That’s kinda what three researchers are proposing in regard to global warming. Since cultural and policy changes aren’t cutting it, human engineering might do the trick, though one researcher seems to suggest the idea be taken with a grain of salt.

“We might not be entirely serious that people should be doing this,” Anders Sandberg of Oxford University told Wynne Parry of LiveScience, but we should at least consider it. The article that will appear in the journal Ethics, Policy and the Environment suggests things like making humans red-meat intolerant, engineering us to be smaller, using drugs and education to make us smarter and oxytocin to make us kinder.

“Human engineering” might sound scarily sci-fi but, the researchers argues, vaccines amount to the same thing. Besides if we’re willing to use certain drugs to make ourselves temporarily dumber, why not a few to wise us up?

So, future humans: pint-sized vegetarian brainiacs? That wouldn’t be the end of the world…maybe even in a literal sense.

THIS IS AN OLD SCI-FI PLOTLINE FROM THE 50'S...BREED PEOPLE FOR SHORTNESS, SO APARTMENT BUILDINGS DON'T HAVE TO BE SO TALL....ALL I CAN SAY IS, BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR!

THE OTHER 9 ARE NOT SO WACKY...MAYBE. OR MAYBE, I JUST WANT TO SPARE US ALL THE 20TH NERVOUS BREAKDOWN..