I've often complained about spurious linkages made by those with fringe concerns to current hot topics, and I have more in the draft pile, but this one goes all over the place, back and forth, and so is an interesting example.

What, then, is the soil, the essential foundation, of our economy and Western culture? Perhaps it is entrepreneurial start ups, small business and enterprises on Main Street. These have historically been the largest generators of jobs. If this economic soil, like the soils of our forests and fields, has been over-mined and voraciously exploited by the industrial model, then is it any wonder we have a jobless recovery? After all, the government’s economic soil amendments have, so far, gone to the largest and most predatory businesses in America, especially to the too-big-to-fail banks and car companies. What do we call banks that will not loan Main Street and small businesses our very own tax dollars? Our money that they are now handing out as bonuses to the already rich? Is this any way to restore the soils that support our very economic well being?

Properly inoculated biochar is, in many ways, all about restoring the carbon content as well as the health and vitality of the living soils of our forests and fields — as well as many other environmental benefits. What is the biochar analog we need to apply to the economic soils that nurture and support entrepreneurial start ups, small businesses, and Main Street? If we want to have a recovery that provides plentiful jobs, we had better find that analog and start applying it as soon as possible.

Well, this gives rather too much credit to biochar, so any equivalent, metaphorical economic amendment would likely share that defect if nothing else. Economies, like ecologies, are complex beyond current understanding. The sensible intervention in both cases is modest and experimental. Better yet, do multiple controlled experiments simultaneously and learn something.

Putting faith in any single intervention is almost certainly the road to ruin. The error comes from thinking small and simplistically, and then adding "but on a massive scale" to the small and simple idea. To free society to recover from economic problems requires the national government to stop doing things, not do something else. In soil management terms the closest analogy might be something like "stop using fungicides" since you are not only killing some diseases, you are also killing beneficial fungi.

The problem in both cases is that the right answer is conditional. Killing beneficial fungi is bad, but it might not be as bad as some fungal blight that was killing everything. I'm generally in favor of fungi, "entrepreneurial start ups, small businesses, and Main Street", but one must be sensible and try to do objective analyses. Sometimes you do have to choose a lesser evil. It happens all the time in ag and the ability to deal with such disappointments and continue to make good decisions on the spot separates those who sustain their ag endeavors from those who quit.

Who is so knowledgeable and wise that they can make such decisions for the economy as a whole? No individual, no group of experts, no politician or ideologue - not even me in my private extra arrogant moments. This requires group problem solving by heterogeneous experts, by competing groups. It's the massively parallel search strategy that is more likely to find good solutions in less time.

But even if they succeed marvelously the general situation will be unchanged. There will be new problems that require just as much effort to solve, some of them created by implementations of the last solution. This is the human condition, not something that can be fixed.