Agricultural Economics—Without Apology
From an article in today’s The Globe and Mail:
“Oil prices surged today after coalition strikes on Libya, prompting concerns over what the conflict could mean to the crude market and the global economy, already touchy after the devastation in Japan.
I grew up in the 1980s and the 1990s. Back then, cultural references to the superiority of the Japanese economic model where everywhere. Most of William Gibson’s Neuromancer takes place in Japan’s Chiba prefecture, which had become a suburb of Tokyo populated with expatriates much like New York or London are today. In John McTiernan’s “Die Hard,” a team of terrorists hijacks the Nakatomi Corporation’s office building in downtown Los Angeles in an effort to steal $640 million in bearer bonds. The first time I visited the United States on my own in 1996, I met people my age who were learning Japanese in college, “to do business with Japan.”
In short, if you grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, some part of your mind probably still equates “Japan” with “economic might.”
In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”