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We can't cure a shortage by increasing the supply.

Garrett Hardin

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Garrett Hardin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1915
Born: April 21
Died: 2003
Died: September 14
Biologist
Demographer
Ecologist
Statistician
University Teacher
Dallas
Texas
Garrett James Hardin
Garrett J. Hardin
Shortage
Supply
Increasing
Cure
Cures

More quotes by Garrett Hardin

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Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.
Garrett Hardin
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However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.
Garrett Hardin
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But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.
Garrett Hardin
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Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
Garrett Hardin
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Value is a relative concept: the value of each action is determined by comparing it with other possible actions.
Garrett Hardin
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In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.
Garrett Hardin
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.
Garrett Hardin
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Ecology is the overall science of which economics is a minor speciality.
Garrett Hardin
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Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?
Garrett Hardin
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Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms skyhooks. Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't.
Garrett Hardin
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Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.
Garrett Hardin
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Numeracy: 1. The art of putting numbers to things, that is, assigning amounts to variables in order that practical decisions may be reach. 2. That aspect of education (beyond mere literacy) which takes account of quantitative aspects of reality.
Garrett Hardin
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The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.
Garrett Hardin
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Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
Garrett Hardin
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But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.
Garrett Hardin
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No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.
Garrett Hardin
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People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.
Garrett Hardin
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A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
Garrett Hardin
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Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species
Garrett Hardin
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You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended.
Garrett Hardin