Capitalism is, fundamentally, an economic system that promotes inequality.

Turning a zombie pandemic into a generic disaster movie robs the zombies of their dirty, nasty edginess and robs the disaster of its epic scope.

In the 1970s, as historians became enchanted with microhistories, economists were expanding the reach of their discipline. Nations, states and cities began to plan for the future by consulting with economists whose prognostications were shaped by investment cycles rather than historical ones.

It is true that I will confess that I have an incredible fascination for pop-culture stories about the Apocalypse and the end of the world.

There is evidence that we are headed into what would be the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's hard to know for sure if you're in one because a mass extinction is an event where over 75 percent of the species on the planet die out over a - usually about a million-year period. The fastest it might happen is in hundreds of thousands of years.

Humans have obviously contributed a great deal of carbon to the atmosphere. So we are warming the planet up.