Adam Smith, call your service

Future luxury commodity.

I used to love Popular Science.  At one time, it was the perfect light read for the mechanically and scientifically inclined –especially if you were a boy who had multiple models of American and Russian spacecraft with the odd USS Enterprise cluttering up the shelves in the late '60s.  The magazine always seemed to be writen by blokes who knew more about tools and electronics than I did, but were willing to share their enthusiasm with me.  Even now, the back issues on Google Books are where I keep finding myself browsing during the odd moments before going to bed.  If I had the time to set up a proper work bench, that's where I'd keep my old yellowing copies.

That's the very old copies, of course.  The modern one's I'd keep in the loo–and not for reading purposes.  In the last few years, Popular Science has gone downhill faster than a bobsled with greased runners.   When it isn't running articles that desperately try to recapture the gee-whiz feel of better days or playing its true role of a downmarket Skymall catalogue, Popular Science stoops to running lazy, bog standard "green" articles, such as this one about how cocoa prices are rising because cacao farmers don't have enough incentive to keep replanting.  In the current Pop Sci alternate universe, this can only mean that chocolate will vanish from childhood as small Dairy Milk bars trade for $11 a go.

Where did the editors learn economics?  From the New York Times?  Never mind the irony that cacao production is getting squeezed by pointless, heavily subsidised biofuel production that wastes land that should properly be used to grow food, did it never occur to the writer of the article what happens when a commodity shoots up in price by 1100 percent?  Like maybe an incentive to increase production, which causes supply to match demand and prices fall again? 

It's not rocket science–which Popular Science used to know a thing or two about before it became Mother Jones with car reviews.