{"id":7036382,"date":"2026-08-10T08:35:57","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T08:35:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/this-weeks-selected-resources-august-9-2026-superabundance-again-locke-and-property-papers-quaker-history\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T08:35:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T08:35:57","slug":"this-weeks-selected-resources-august-9-2026-superabundance-again-locke-and-property-papers-quaker-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7036382","title":{"rendered":"This week’s selected resources, August 9, 2026: Superabundance (again), Locke and property papers, Quaker history"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This week I finished:<\/p>\n

\"\"Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Beautiful Planet<\/em>, by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley<\/strong>: This book follows in the spirit of Julian Simon, whose book\u00a0Ultimate Resource 2<\/em> I just reread. Since I understood that book much more going through it again not to dismiss it but to learn from it, I reread this one too.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see this book as mostly economic. Most of the middle of it looks at scarcity and abundance through prices of goods and services. It measures prices in time, which after getting used to makes sense.<\/p>\n

The book is about freedom and liberty, though. It says so on the inner front book flap and the book builds up to it in the end. All the progress it describes comes from people and our ability to innovate past problems, but we need liberty and freedom to realize that potential.<\/p>\n

This book quotes and refers to a cadre of authors that all seem to refer to each other: Michael Schellenberger, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus, Ted Nordhaus, Jesse Ausubel, and a few others. I think Julian Simon is the progenitor of them all. Pinker referred to them in his book\u00a0Enlightenment Now<\/em> as \u201cIt has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

I expect my book will refer to this book. Stay tuned for what I write.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Nazi And The Psychiatrist: Herman Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII<\/em>, by Jack El-Hai<\/strong>: A TV movie was made based on this book last year called\u00a0Nuremberg<\/em>. I\u2019m in touch with the team to bring the author to my podcast. I was very interested since it came out around when I was reading Philip Zimbardo\u2019s work<\/a> on the psychology of people induced to act against their values.<\/p>\n

Douglas Kelley was a psychiatrist spent more time with Herman Goring than anyone else. This book and his work relate to my book. I\u2019m going to take the liberty of quoting some parts relevant to my work. In particular, Kelley found that these high-level Nazis weren\u2019t that different from regular people but were influenced by their situations. He had originally wanted to find things that made them psychologically different.<\/p>\n

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\nIf Kelley had hoped to discover a Nazi \u201cgerm,\u201d a deviant personality common to the defendants, there was little evidence of one. Instead, he found in their personalities traits that he called neuroses, not uncommon psychiatric flaws that could certainly trouble the Nazis and increase their ruthlessness, but did not put them outside the boundaries of the normal. Kelley believed that countless men like G\u00f6ring, unburdened by conscience and driven by narcissism, spent their days \u201cbehind big desks deciding big affairs as businessmen, politicians, and racketeers. . . . Shrewd, smooth, conscienceless speakers and writers like Goebbels, slick, big-time salesmen like Ribbentrop, and all the financial and legalistic hangers-on can be counted among the men whose faces we know by sight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

His long proximity to the prisoners had convinced him that they exhibited several qualities: unbridled ambition, weak ethics, and excessive patriotism that could justify nearly any action of questionable rightness. Moreover, the Nazis, even the most elite and powerful among them, were not monsters, evildoing machines, or automata without soul and feelings. G\u00f6ring\u2019s concern for his family, Schirach\u2019s love of poetry, and Kaltenbrunner\u2019s fear under stress had moved Kelley and persuaded him that his former prisoners had emotions and responses like other people<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

Anyone who dismissed them \u201cbecause we look with disgust and hatred upon their activities and upon their actions, to sell the Third Reich short,\u201d was making a big mistake. Their relative normalcy left a portentous hanging question. How could their inexplicable conduct be understood? Without comprehending the Nazis or identifying their psychoses, Kelley could only reluctantly conclude that enormous numbers of people had the potential to act as the war criminals had.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cInsanity is no explanation for the Nazis,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThey were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are; and they were also\u2014to a greater degree than most humans are\u2014the makers of their environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

Nothing came of the committee\u2019s examination of the Rorschachs. Harrower was among those who did not provide the interpretation they had promised. In 1976 she explained this dropping of the ball by recalling that the tests \u201cdid not show what we expected to see, and what the pressure of public opinion demanded that we see\u2014that these men were demented creatures, different from normal people as a scorpion is different from a puppy. What we saw was a wide range of personalities, from severely disturbed neurotics to the superbly well adjusted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

So in the end Kelley remained the only investigator willing publicly to declare that people like the worst of the Nazis live among us.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

He wanted people to see that anyone could become those men, that America could become Germany. The United States was at a crucial moment of change, and the understanding he had brought home from Nuremberg could shine a light on the right path to follow. The Nazis, he warned, were you and me\u2014given the slightest twist of fate. In broadly optimistic postwar America, he sounded slightly paranoid.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s difficult to realize that if you lived in their time and place, you could have become like them, but research seems to show it.<\/p>\n

The point isn\u2019t to make you feel bad but to point where to look for sources of problems: not for other Hitlers but for breakdowns of the protections of democracy.<\/p>\n

Academic papers about property and John Locke<\/strong>: I reread Susan Liebell\u2019s piece<\/p>\n