Author Description

AFTER MANY YEARS OF STUDYING PEOPLE I HAVE become intrigued, as have many others, by how a species named for its intelligence (Homo sapiens: wise or knowing man) can sometimes be so stupid. Depending on how you look at it, humans are either marvelously intelligent or amazingly stupid. We build great cities in the desert, cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix. Then we waste and pollute the deserts already short supply of water. We pour concrete on the ground and spew carbon into the air to make the heat of the desert ever hotter. We wage vast public health campaigns to save poor people across the world from infectious diseases. Then we kill lots of them in endless wars. We know how to make some people richer than whole countries, people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and six members of the Wal-Mart Walton family. Then we leave whole countries to starve. In the United States, many people take the moral high ground on abortion and the sanctity of human life. Then they let a great many children and adults suffer or die in the United States because they have no health care and across the world because they have nothing to eat. We use our financial genius and newly minted MBAs to create amazingly complex new financial instruments like derivatives and credit default swaps. Then we use them as financial weapons of mass destruction and devastate the global economy. We go on to reward those who brought on this vast destruction with bailouts and bonuses rather than punish them with jail terms.