Julian Simon

Hoodwinking the Nation

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Most people in the United States believe that our envi- ronment is getting dirtier, we are running out of natural resources, and population growth in the world is a burden and a threat. These beliefs, according to Simon, are entirely wrong. Why do the media report so much false bad news about the environment, resources, and population? And why do we believe it? Those are the questions distinguished scholar Julian L. Simon set out to answer in his book, Hoodwinking the Nation.The opening chapter of this, the final book by Simon, discusses facts about population growth, natural resources, and the environment, and presents survey evidence of the public's view of these topics. The discrepancy between the facts and the public beliefs sets up the puzzle that the remaining chapters attempt to explain. Simon explores how and why false bad news is produced, citing government reports as often being the basis for environmental news scams and doomsday analyses. He examines the intellectual bases of concepts that lead to scares about resource depletion and population growth, and why biologists, in particular, tend to become overly alarmed about mythical environmental scares. Simon follows with an explanation of how the false bad news is disseminated. He notes that journalists know little about statistics and science and thus gather data in ways that lead to inaccurate conclusions, and politicians may misuse statistics in the service of their own policy and political goals. Simon contends that psychological and cultural mechanisms make people receptive to bad rather than good news and that most people have a too positive view of the past and a too negative view of the future.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Routledge
• Seitenzahl: 156
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Februar 2006
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 9mm
• Gewicht: 237g
• ISBN-13: 9781412805933
• ISBN-10: 1412805937
• Artikelnr.: 21841403

Autorenporträt

Julian Simon

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction
1: What Do Americans Wrongly Believe about Environment, Resources, and Population?
2: The Vanishing Farmland Scam
3: The Concepts That Lead to Scares about Resources and Population Growth
4: Why Does the Public Not Hear Sound Environmental Thinkers?
5: Why Are So Many Biologists Alarmed?
6: The Old-Time Journalistic Methods Don't Work Here
7: Damn Lies, Statistics, and Doomsday
8: Personal Knowledge versus Media-Shaped Opinions
9: How Psychology Affects the Evaluation of Trends
10: Why Do We Hear Prophecies of Doom from Every Side?
Conclusion