Our speaker for this meeting is Gordon Burghardt. Dr, Burghardt is an Alumni Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Tennessee. He has published several books. Dr. Burghardt has spoken to RET in the past and wad previously involved in Darwin Day at UT. He will be speaking on "Evolution and the Scopes Trial."
Coffee and other warm beverages will be served. Bring a snack to share if you wish.
We meet in the Cafeteria Annex at the rear of the Goins Administrative Building. Please enter from the back of the building where there is direct access to the cafeteria annex. This avoids disturbing other groups using the rest of the building.
For those who wish to join us via Zoom, the links will be in the newsletter and at the end of the announcement email. Be careful to choose the correct link.
by Liliana Doganova
A pioneering exploration of the defining traits and contradictions of our relationship to the future through the lens of discounting. Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent. Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally discounted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalization of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain. 325 pages.
This book is rather deep into the subject and those of you with limited time would be better off to read two short articles which are more readable and more focused on climate change. Here are the links: The Discount Rate: A Small Number with a Big Impact and Critical Assumptions in the Stern Review on Climate Change.
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This will be a lively "Bring Your Own Topic" discussion. We never seem to be at a loss for things to talk about.
Bring your own snacks and coffee.
The Zoom link will be in the newsletter and at the end of the announcement email.
For the April Field Trip we will once again meet in the parking lot behind the gas station of the Kroger located at Pellissippi and Northshore.
After deciding on car pools we will travel together to the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum at 576 Tennessee 360, Vonore, TN 37885. Cost is $5, $4.50 for seniors, or $2.50 per person for groups of 10 or more.
https://sequoyahmuseum.org/
Then we will visit nearby Fort Loudoun. https://fortloudoun.com/
Afterward we will have lunch in Vonore before returning to our meeting place.
Is Socialism Back?
As you have seen in the recent elections in NY, a democratic socialist was elected. Is a new and improved version of socialism coming back? Has capitalism burned too many bridges and dumped too many people into the gutter? Or are the rules of game rigged by the rich so that the little guy can never win? Systems or rules, or maybe buy the rules? Dust off you bust of Karl Marx and join us for a conversation. Some background to jog your memory:
A reckoning over capitalism
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by Susan Jacoby
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public. Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.
At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation. 384 pages.
Summer Vacations
Now is the vacation season. How do you do with vacations? Do you have great memories of past vacations and look forward to them or is it a stressful hit or miss situation for you? A couple of short ones or one long one? Any special memories to share with the group? Join us for a discussion of past and present good and not so good times.
