Your Teacher Said What?! (33 page)

Or even making comments about my waistline on the CNBC Web site, which really hurt.

Bad as the Great Depression was for the country, it was a golden age for the Cubs: Between 1929 and 1939, they won the National League pennant five times. On the other hand, they didn't win the World Series even once; they were, after all, still the Cubs.

Note that Mrs. Obama, who had traced her family's financial success to her husband 's two best-selling books, earned $121,910 in 2004 . . . and after her husband was elected to the U. S. Senate in 2005, $316,962.

This is actually one way that twenty-first-century century Progressives differ from their early-twentieth-century ancestors, who were eager to adopt labor-saving technologies, possibly because they still remembered the backbreaking labor associated with preindustrial farming and manufacturing. Whenever you hear the word “artisanal ” spoken approvingly in reference to clothing or food, you are in the presence of a Progressive.

For information on how movies and television aimed at children reinforce this idea, see chapter 5.

Sometimes called “Pareto efficient” or “Pareto optimal ” for the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who defined it as a situation where it is impossible to make someone better off without making someone else worse off. Kind of like free agency in baseball.

For more on fair trade, see chapter 8.

Because the “D” in GDP stands for “domestic” expenditure, calculations have to take out the value of imports and exports . . . not that you asked.

Not as much as it sounds. This quantity of gold would be a cube about one hundred feet on a side.

This is true in the Northeast, which I now know adopted the old English system, called “metes and bounds,” in colonial times. Beginning in 1785, on territory that would become my home state of Ohio, the rest of the country was surveyed with a far more modern system: the Pubic Land Survey System.

The deed description, which I found in our locallibrary, begins, “Bounded and limited with the bay eastward and the great River Pesayak northward, to the great Creke or River in the meadow, running to the head of the Cove, and from thence bareing a westerly line for the south bound, which said great Creek is commonly called. . . .”

Hardin was nothing if not consistent, contending in the same article that the same logic argued for government control of reproduction, with the famous argument that there is “no right to breed.” The Nobel Prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom demonstrated why, despite Hardin's logic, the world was not, in fact, a desert . . . but he is still regarded as a hero of the environmental movement.

For more about the Kernen family's eating habits, see chapter 8.

Since then, it has, in constant dollars, more than quintupled. Thank you, inventors.

It's also, in a very different setting, why you can buy a reserved seat for a play but not for a movie: It costs just as much to hire ushers to make sure that no one sits in your $10 seat at the local multiplex as it does to hire ushers to make sure no one sits in your $100 seat in a Broadway theater.

Old-school guys like Koppel probably even believe in their own objectivity, which is the saddest part of all. For more about media confusion, see chapter 5.

Central planners
have
been attacking Bt cotton pretty regularly, though, despite its demonstrated ability to improve yields using far less toxic insecticides. Central planners tend to be Progressives, and Progressives haven't got a lot of love for genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

Acetate actually comes from the same wood-pulp mill as the raw material for the cardboard with which the laces are packaged.

For more about Hayek, see chapter 2.

The term has actually been used by engineers for fifty years as shorthand for a material that is perfect for some use but doesn't exist, like a wire with no mass that conducts electricity with no resistance.