We move the goalposts

I've been working on a PDF about Simkhovitch's essay on exhaustion-of-the-soil as cause of the decline of Rome, and Ellsworth Huntington's response on climate change as cause of the decline of Rome. Huntington mentions Liebig -- for the opportunity to shit on Simkhovitch by saying it was all Liebig's idea and Simkhovitch just "restated" it. So I looked up Liebig. 19th century chemist. Wow! He should be on a list with James Watt and Thomas Edison as the three who created the modern world and made GDP go up faster in the 18th and 19th centuries.

To see why I'm so impressed with the guy, you can check out the first paragraph of the Justus von Liebig article at Wikipedia.

Below find some notes I made this morning, while re-reading Huntington. Here edited to be more presentable.

PS: I LOVE JSTOR OPEN ACCESS!

 
I looked up drought, for the spelling. Found Understand Drought and Know How to Respond. They say: "What Is Drought? Drought is a deficiency in precipitation over an extended period." Yeh. Then they add: "It is a part of normal climate variability in many climate zones."

Drought is "normal" now? 

That's like figuring debt is only high when it is above its trend level, or in other words, a trend of increasing debt is by definition not a problem. I object to that kind of thinking.

Normal used to be not-drought, but now drought is normal. We move the goalposts. We move the goalposts because we long for things to return to "normal". Ten years ago it was the economy we wanted back to normal. Now it is life despite covid that we want back to normal.

The economy, of course, is still not back to normal and was not, even before covid. To me our passionate desire for normalcy despite covid is a sickness as bad as covid, maybe worse.

Easy for me to say. I have zero social skills.