Before long, geo-engineering may offer the most cost-effective option for preventing further harm from climate change. Should this be the case, utilitarians and liberals will have difficulty explaining the sense of aversion and tragedy many feel about intentionally manipulating the climate. Appeals to precaution only partially explain these feelings. For a fuller picture, we need a thicker conception of the proper values and ends of political society. To this end, I examine how classical Buddhist and Greek notions of temperance, justice, and freedom bear on the question of geo-engineering.My intention is not to pronounce on whether geo-engineering is morally “right” or “wrong,” but to highlight reasons for thinking it unattractive in a broader sense, thereby strengthening the case for exhausting conventional, emissions-reductions options.

Access to formal credit remains limited in many rural areas, where incomes are highly seasonal and follow agricultural cropping cycles. We develop a model to show that frictions in capital market access distort labor markets, driving up income and consumption inequality and lowering aggregate output. To identify the causal impact of intra-season credit availability on rural markets, we conducted a two-year randomized controlled trial with small scale farmers in rural Zambia. We show that lowering the cost of borrowing at the time of the year when farmers are most constrained (the lean season) results in a reallocation of labor from better-off to worse-off farms. This reallocation of labor reduces differences in the marginal product of labor across farms, increases local wages, and leads to modest increases in agricultural output.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ is commonly celebrated as an authoritative statement of the theory civil disobedience. A generation of scholars in the 1960s and 70s drew on King’s essay to codify a normative theory of disobedience as an act of fidelity to constitutional law. However, this liberal discourse of disobedience came to prominence just as King’s own theory of disobedience was shifting in a more radical direction. This essay critically examines King’s late theory of civil disobedience as an experiment in power. Drawing on published and archival sources, it reconstructs King’s Janus-faced conception of power and its role in reconceptualizing non-violent direct action as an illegal but loving act of taking freedom.