Or, did you ever see a dog with a marrowbone in his mouth,—the beast of all other, says Plato, lib. 2, de Republica, the most philosophical? If you have seen him, you might have remarked with what devotion and circumspectness he wards and watcheth it: with what care he keeps it: how fervently he holds it: how prudently he gobbets it: with what affection he breaks it: and with what diligence he sucks it. To what end all this? What moveth him to take all these pains? What are the hopes of his labour? What doth he expect to reap thereby? Nothing but a little marrow

Mass protests against Russia’s aggression combined with existing political pressure to move more quickly on climate change might lead to new policies to do yet more.

That summer was the first time he rented an inexpensive cottage on Gotts, a remote island off the coast of Maine; it lacked running water and electricity but was covered in pine forests and romantic mists. There, he wrote Levin, he was “reading nothing more frivolous than Plotinus and Husserl,” and Harry was welcome to join him “if Wellfleet becomes too worldly.”

The state has pumped more than 100 million pounds of low bush fruit into the frozen market each year for the last three growing cycles.

A typical acre of blueberry barrens will yield about 2,000 to 4,000 pounds of berries, depending on pollination and other factors.

Progressive values demand empathy for the poor and this often manifests as hatred for the rich.

I’m realizing more and more how desperately this perspective is needed as I watch researchers and advocates, politicians and everyday people judge others from their vantage point without taking a moment to understand why a particular logic might unfold.

Britain’s Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from the British, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also exerted a heavy salt tax. Although India’s poor suffered most under the tax, Indians required salt. Defying the Salt Acts, Mohandas Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently. (British rule of India began in 1858. After living for two decades in South Africa, where he fought for the civil rights of Indians residing there, Gandhi returned to his native country in 1915 and soon began working for India’s independence.) Gandhi declared resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new campaign of “satyagraha,” or mass civil disobedience. Did You Know?

By valuing capital gains above all others, we end up extracting the value of our marketplaces and rendering them incapable of generating economic activity. As a Deloitte study showed, corporate profits over net worth have been decreasing for 75 years. Corporations are great at accumulating capital, but terrible at deploying it. They vacuum the money off the playing field altogether, impoverishing the markets and consumers–not to mention the employees–on whom they ultimately depend.

Since the mid 1960s and the explosion of electronics, telephony, and the computer chip, corporate profit over net worth has been declining. This doesn’t mean that corporations have stopped making money. Profits in many sectors are still going up. But the most apparently successful companies are also sitting on more cash — real and borrowed — than ever before. Corporations have been great at extracting money from all corners of the world, but they don’t really have great ways of spending or investing it. The cash does nothing but collect.

I'm talking about optimizing the economy for the velocity of money rather than for the conversion of money into capital. It's going from a growth model to a flow model. Why are we, for instance, taxing capital gains at almost nothing but taxing dividends and earnings so high? That's a tax policy that is meant to favor the extraction of capital and to punish the exchange of things.