Richardcyoung.com

The Online Home of Author and Investor, Dick Young

  • Home
  • How We Are Different
  • Debbie Young
  • About Us
    • Foundation Principles
    • Contributors
  • Investing
    • You’ve Read The Last Issue of Intelligence Report, Now What?
  • Your Survival Guy
  • The Great Reset
  • COVID-19
  • My Rifles
  • Dividends and Compounding
  • Your Security
  • The Swiss Way
  • Dick Young
  • Key West
  • Paris
  • Dick’s R&B Top 100
  • Liberty & Freedom Map
  • Bank Credit & Money
  • Your Survival Guy’s Super States
  • NNT & Cholesterol
  • Work to Make Money/Invest to Save Money
  • Your Health
  • Ron Paul
  • US Treasury Yield Curve: My Favorite Investor Tool

Two Things Our Children and Grandchildren Won’t Understand

November 29, 2016 By Justin Logan

The end of the year is a good time for reflection, and usually in column form, it means taking stock of what the past year has meant for politics, or society, or what have you. I’ll leave that to others this year. Instead, I’ll take a crack at predicting a few things our descendants won’t understand about how we lived. Good, bad, or ugly, below are a couple things I suspect will befuddle the coming generations.

Factory Farming

Developments in food production and agriculture during the 20th century had huge positive benefits, to include the fact that they helped prove Malthusian warnings about population growth wrong. Developments in animal husbandry and the production of meat went too far, however. Here, we went from making animal protein far more abundant, to expecting it at every meal, to expecting certain cuts at every meal. This required enormous environmental despoliation and sickening mistreatment of animals.

Instead of treating animals as containing any moral worth, they became another commodity to simply be produced with as much efficiency as possible, without any consideration of their indisputable pain and suffering.

Led in part by ethical arguments, in part by food fashion using snout-to-tail cooking, and in part by plain revulsion at the practices of factory farmers, I suspect the strides taken away from factory farming will speed up. Overall meat consumption will decrease, more people will eat bone marrow, offal, and other parts of the animal that seem exotic today, and consumers will place increasing emphasis on the treatment of the animals and their surrounding environment. Our children will look back at the videos surreptitiously taken of factory farms and wonder how we shuffled through our lives refusing to look at the barbaric charnel house that provided our calories.

Football

This one sounds counterintuitive, as the NFL is the most prominent and profitable professional league in the United States, and college football is wildly popular as well. But though the research on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is in its infancy, I suspect the data will continue to pile up, showing that continual blows to the head over a period of decades has important negative health consequences.

I suspect our children and grandchildren will look back and wonder how it didn’t occur to us that a sport involving men who weigh 300 pounds and can run the 40-yard dash in 4.69 seconds chasing one another and wrestling each other to the ground with bad intentions might have lasting, negative health effects.

Paradoxically, as with mixed martial arts and boxing, I think the protective equipment that gave the illusion of safety will prove a culprit here. If, for example, players had not been able to wear helmets–or boxers had not worn 16-ounce gloves–the sports would have had to evolve in ways that prevented the repeated blows to the head that helped produce CTE. I would bet on long, drawn-out lawsuits, controversies from Pop Warner to the NFL, and a white-hot national debate about whether or why CTE is related to football.

There are many more things I think younger generations may puzzle over–the drug war, hour-long suburb-to-city commutes, telephones you talk into, the concept of privacy–but if I had to bet, put my money on Smithfield and the NFL.

Related Posts

  • Milk. Friend or foe for your children and grandchildren?
  • Trump Won’t Lose Romney States
  • Trump’s Next Few Months Won’t Be Any Easier
  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Justin Logan
Justin Logan is a contributing editor for RichardCYoung.com. Formerly the Cato Institute's director of foreign policy studies, Logan writes primarily about politics and American foreign policy. He holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from American University. He is an expert on U.S. grand strategy, international relations theory, and American foreign policy. He has lectured on American strategy across the country and across the world, and his articles have appeared in International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Harvard International Review, Orbis, National Review, the American Conservative, Reason, Politico, and the American Prospect, among others. A native Missourian, Logan currently lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two sons, where they are opening a Latin American wine and spirits bar, Ruta del Vino.
Latest posts by Justin Logan (see all)
  • The Case for Zero-Based Strategy - December 4, 2018
  • Thinking About a Noninterventionist Political Alliance - October 29, 2018
  • The Iran Issue Is Not Going Away …and All of the Wrong People Are in Charge - September 25, 2018

Dick Young’s Must Reads

  • The Common Ground of Democracy is Sinking Beneath Americans’ Feet
  • Hey, Where’s Everyone Going? Follow the Money Kid
  • Work to Make Money/Invest to Save Money
  • Your Cash Swept into Your Broker’s Bank Account!
  • Warning! Your Survival Guy’s on a Boil Water Advisory
  • California’s Progressive Liberals Have Created a Monster
  • A NEW CONTRACT WITH AMERICA: Rick Scott Finally Gives the GOP Something to Run On
  • Mises and Rothbard Finally Get Their Due
  • Joel Salatin and Alfie Oakes, America’s Food Kings
  • Sen. Hawley Makes the Case Against U.S.-China Relationship

Disclosure

RSS Youngresearch.com

  • “You Just Have to Be Willing to Move Defensively”
  • Americans Are Fleeing Bank Deposits
  • If You’re a Highly Effective Person, We Should Talk
  • Trouble Now Brewing at Deutsche Bank
  • Is Vanguard Voting Against Your Political Beliefs?
  • Are 0DTE Options a Threat to Markets?
  • “I Need Preservation of Principal and Growth”
  • Are You Fairly Wealthy? I’m Listening
  • Treasury Studying How to Increase Deposit Insurance
  • Your Survival Guy’s BEST Insider’s Guide to Key West

RSS Yoursurvivalguy.com

  • “You Just Have to Be Willing to Move Defensively”
  • Did SVB Fail Because of Climate Change?
  • If You’re a Highly Effective Person, We Should Talk
  • What’s Happening to Charles Schwab?
  • Prepare for the Predictable
  • Is Vanguard Voting Against Your Political Beliefs?
  • Call It the Difference between Normal and Crazy
  • “I Need Preservation of Principal and Growth”
  • DEMOCRATIC SENATOR: Biden’s ESG Veto “Absolutely Infuriating”
  • Are You Fairly Wealthy? I’m Listening

The PRC Aims to Make Taiwan a Pariah Nation

“You Just Have to Be Willing to Move Defensively”

Donna: The Queen of Louie’s Backyard, Key West

Biden’s Fake Democracy Summit: Hungary and Turkey Snubbed

Freefalling at Stanford

If You’re a Highly Effective Person, We Should Talk

Copyright © 2023 | Terms & Conditions | About Us | Dick Young | Archives