Part 11 (1/2)

187. /watch?v=8Cz-6tYHK8I.

187. Kirk s.h.i.+nkle, ”Permabear Peter Schiff's Worst-Case Scenario,” U.S. News and World Report, May 30, 2008.

188. Brian O'Keefe, ”Peter Schiff: Oh, He Saw It Coming,” Fortune, January 23, 2009.

188. s.h.i.+nkle, ”Permabear Peter Schiff's Worst-Case Scenario.”

188. ”Peter Schiff-and Shawn Tully-Were Right,” Executive Suite, New York Times blog, December 3, 2008.

188. See the dedication to Peter Schiff's best-selling 2007 book Crash Proof. ”To my father, Irwin Schiff,” it reads, ”whose influence and guidance concerning basic economic principles enabled me to see clearly what others could not.” Irwin Schiff's views are spelled out in the 1976 book The Biggest Con: How the Government Is Fleecing You. The younger Schiff was not exaggerating. His beliefs, and the predictions he generates with them, are remarkably similar to those expressed by his father more than thirty years earlier.

190. See, for example, Victor Davis Hanson's essay ”Tomorrow's Wars” in the Winter 2010 edition of City Journal. I'm embarra.s.sed to admit I also repeated the calumny, both in newspaper columns and a first draft of this book. My thanks to political scientist John Mueller for setting me straight.

191. Martin Ceadel, Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872-1967, 2009.

191. Both letters quoted in an appendix to Norman Angell, The Great Illusion 1933, reprint 2006.

192. Robert W. Merry, ”Sands of Empire,” New York Times, June 26, 2005.

CHAPTER 7.

Page 199. R. E. Know and J. A. Inkster, ”Post-decision Dissonance at Post-Time,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968.

200. Lee Ross, Mark R. Lepper, and Michael Hubbard, ”Perseverance in Self-Perception and Social Perception: Biased Attributional Processes in the Debriefing Paradigm,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975.

200. Lee Ross and Craig Anderson, ”Shortcomings in the Attribution Process,” in D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, 1982.

202. Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, ”It Feels Like We're Thinking: The Rationalizing Voter and Electoral Democracy,” paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science a.s.sociation, 2006.

202. Danielle Shani, ”Knowing Your Colors: Can Knowledge Correct for Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions?” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science a.s.sociation, 2006.

202. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 1994.

204. Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, 2007.

206. On the foibles of memory, see Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory, 2002.

206. Daniel Offer, Marjorie Kaiz, Kenneth Howard, and Emily Bennett, ”The Altering of Reported Experiences,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2000.

207. Tavris and Aronson, Mistakes Were Made.

209. Baruch Fischhoff, ”Hindsight Does Not Equal Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1975.

209. Neal J. Roese and Sameep D. Maniar, ”Perceptions of Purple: Counterfactual and Hindsight Judgments at Northwestern Wildcats Football Games,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1997.

211. ”My Y2K-A Personal Statement,” April 1999, webarchive.org/web/20010211165926/kunstler.com/mags_y2k.html.

213. Kunstler's point about hypercomplexity is interesting and, obviously, worthy of exploration. But it's also important to know that it's not new. ”Vast concentrations of human beings are involved in systems that are now so complicated that they are becoming uncontrollable,” wrote Roberto Vacca in the 1973 book The Coming Dark Age. Soon, Vacca predicted, the advanced nations would experience ”an apocalypse that is impersonal, casual, and unpremeditated.” Hundreds of millions would die. Industrial production and scientific research ”would come to a complete stop.” The very foundations of modern civilization would crumble. ”We cannot know whether future historians will fix on 1960, 1970, or some later date for its beginning: it would seem from many signs that the era of breakdown may have started already.” But Vacca hoped the full plunge into the abyss wouldn't happen for a few more years-”sometime between 1985 and 1995,” he wrote.

217. An elaboration Heilbroner shared with New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. See ”Rome: Can the World Organize to Save Itself?,” New York Times, November 10, 1974.

220. ”Looking across the main developments of the last decade or two,” Heilbroner wrote in the 1995 book Visions of the Future, ”it is difficult to imagine any mood other than apprehension and anxiety that would reflect the experiences we have lived through.” Bloodshed in Yugoslavia. ”The descent into desperation of Soviet society, following the dissolution of its empire.” War in central Africa. Skinheads in Germany and neofascists in Italy. And ”the breakdown of civil society” in the United States. ”Each of these events, in itself, would have been traumatic; taken together, they have hypnotized and horrified the public imagination to a degree unimaginable some 40-odd years ago.” One would think the avoidance of ma.s.s starvation, the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War, and the end of authoritarian rule across a vast swathe of Europe and Asia would qualify as countervailing good news. But no. It was all so bad it would have been ”unimaginable” in the past, which is really quite an extraordinary statement coming from a man who had declared twenty-two years earlier that humanity's only options were extinction or dictators.h.i.+p, and who, thirty-six years before-in The Future as History, in 1959-had described that era as ”a period of historic a.s.sault such as we have never known before.”

224. Human Security Centre, University of British Columbia, Human Security Report 2005.

224. RAND-MIPT database. After 2000, the trend started up again, but only when incidents in South Asia and the Middle East are included. Elsewhere, the rate continued to decline.

225. Francis Kinsman, Future Tense: A Prophetic Consensus for the Eighties, 1980.

226. ”Population Control or Hobson's Choice” in L. R. Taylor, ed., The Optimum Population for Britain, 1969.

227. The world birthrate also fell, particularly from the 1980s on. It was thirty-three at the time Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. By 1980 to 1985, it was twenty-seven; 2005 to 2010, twenty.

228. ”The Population Bomb Revisited,” The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, 2009.