Check Out These Blog Posts From Steve McEllistrem

We began around 3 million years ago (give or take a couple hundred thousand years). We evolved over time, becoming smarter in some ways, less intelligent in others as we have focused our efforts on increasingly narrow fields of study. For example, we know a lot more about computers than even our grandparents, but most of us lack the knowledge to efficiently grow our own crops or raise healthy sheep. With each generation, we become just that tiny amount more ...

We all get angry. It grows in all our gardens – a base human emotion, hard wired into us by millions of years of evolution, rooted to the depths of our emotional structure. We can no more eliminate anger than we can lust or fear or joy. The other day, I was driving on the interstate when a moron in a minivan – a little ahead of me and to my left – decided to brake and cut across two ...

There comes a time in every democracy, in every nation, when we reach a crisis that can’t be handled in the usual ways, in the ways that we have traditionally managed those challenges. We understand the world by examining the past, by looking at how we solved certain kinds of problems before, then extrapolating from those experiences to utilize a similar solution to our current dilemma. Often this works. A recession? We can increase the money supply as well as ...

Despite the relative prosperity of the past few years and the steady growth of our economy since the great recession, income inequality hasn’t gotten better. Instead, it’s gotten worse. But almost everyone is doing pretty well. Most people have smart phones, for example, an item that was once considered a luxury. Most people have computers and TVs. Yes, there’s still poverty in America, but it’s generally not as bad as it was in eras past. However, for those in poverty, ...