Adam Smith’s Green Thumb and Malthus’ Three Horsemen: Cautionary tales from classical political economy

This essay identifies a contradiction between the flourishing interest in the environmental economics of the classical period and a lack of critical parsing of the works of its leading representatives. Its focus is the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It offers a critical analysis of their contribution to environmental thought and surveys the work of their contemporary devotees. It scrutinizes Smith's contribution to what Karl Polanyi termed the "economistic fallacy," as well as his defenses of class hierarchy, the "growth imperative" and consumerism. It subjects to critical appraisal Malthus's enthusiasm for private property and the market system, and his opposition to market regulation. While Malthus's principal attraction to ecological economists lies in his having allegedly broadened the scope of economics, and in his narrative of scarcity, this article shows that he, in fact, narrowed the scope of the discipline and conceptualized scarcity in a reified and pseudo-scientific way

The ENIGMA Neuromodulation Working Group: Goals, Challenges, and Opportunities for the Field

Since 2009, the ENIGMA Consortium has brought together neuroimaging researchers from over 45 countries to perform some of the largest international studies of over 30 major brain disorders. The ENIGMA working groups tackle the growing challenge of data harmonization and standardization in analytic workflows, and address the need for well-powered, multi-center studies by providing a community-driven structure and platform for collaborations. The recently-formed ENIGMA Neuromodulation Working Group (ENIGMA-NeMo) includes subgroups representing individual neuromodulation modalities, supported by a machine learning/artificial intelligence core providing advanced analytic techniques within and across modulation modalities. The goals of this working group include: suggesting standards and standardizations for research in neuromodulation [e.g., neuromodulation extension of Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS)]; improving reproducibility of neuromodulation research findings; developing models for predicting and improving brain circuit engagement, safety, and clinical efficacy outcomes across modulation modalities; accelerating development of therapeutic parameters for clinical neuromodulation across disease populations; and evaluating existing neuromodulation methods and advancing these techniques to maximize individual treatment effects towards precision medicine. The ENIGMA-NeMo group applies standardized analytic pipelines for large-scale as well as single-patient analyses of multi-modal brain MRI, neuromodulation parameters and outcome data (e.g., neuropsychological, psychophysiological). Here, we discuss initial goals, challenges, and strategies for overcoming these challenges and gaps in the literature. We also outline both the current state of and opportunities to advance the field of multimodal neuromodulation and accelerate the translation of research findings to clinical practice