By Tim Worstall
Professor Mazzucato tells us that much, much, more should be within the state. Professor Weber tells us that anti-fascist economics should be done by utilising the fascist economic tactics of a nominal market based capitalism but with the state setting all the prices. Given this revival of century old policies perhaps we could run with another one?
Bristol could become home to the UK’s first “wetland city” thanks to a charity’s efforts to create vast wildlife corridors that will reduce flood risk and give people more access to green and blue spaces.
The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) said the five-year initiative would include more than 200 projects to restore and create wetlands across the city. These will range from small household rainwater ponds and street-level rain gardens to restoring river habitats, reconnecting rivers with their floodplains, and creating new wetlands.
We’re really unsure this is wise. A major prediction from the climate change projections is that the viable areas for malaria, dengue, chikungunya, and so on will expand. Northwards in this hemisphere. We’d also observe that the method Singapore uses - already well within the potential areas as it is - to control these diseases is to eradicate, vehemently, such small household rainwater ponds and so on.
Now, yes, it is true that one of us comes from the next city upriver and therefore is predisposed to believe absolutely anything about the stupidity, even vileness, of Bristol. But even so the idea of recreating the malarial, ague ridden, swamps of yore does seem contra-indicated at this time. Recreating them in the city-centre seems, well, so very Bristolian. Worse even than Ben Goldmith’s insistence that all of North Somerset should be returned to that primordial ooze with Athelney - Alfred’s cake burning site - as the one island of solid land.
But given that current insistence upon the policies of a century ago. Rome’s millennia-long malaria problem was solved by the draining of the Pontine Marshes. By the same bloke who got the trains to run on time - another current preoccupation. So, well, if we’re going to revive things tried historically might we pick up the things that worked, not those that didn’t?