This excerpt from a JFK speech[1] is rather relevant:
> But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
Another by Shaw, one might say in the startup spirit:
"“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
> Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
The thing is though, that GDP is correlated with all those good things he mentions. It is wealthy countries with high GDP that have higher quality education, time and interest for poetry, less corruption, improved child mortality, improved air quality, and more equal, stable marriages, than countries with low GDP. Countries with high GDP are also the ones that care about the environment. Getting from low GDP to high GDP can be messy, but once a country has high GDP, it starts caring more about the environment. A good example of this is China, who is much more concerned now about air quality and pollution, than it was a decade ago.
I agree with your overall point, but it is a mistake to see poetry as a product of development. The Persian-speaking region is among the most poetry-mad of all peoples on earth, but rarely have they been wealthy. And the Manas, the epic-poetry tradition of Kyrgyzstan that has persisted for centuries, is losing ground among younger generations precisely because of access to modern luxuries like television and the internet. Moreover, when Milman Parry and Albert Lord wanted to study firsthand the kind of techniques that gave rise to Homer’s poetry, they headed for what was then among the poorest parts of Europe. The list could do on and on.
The real worthwile goal is having a high GDP /per capita/. If you take the top countries by GDP alone, you have China, India, Brazil, US. None of them are at the top in quality of life measurements.
Do we really need radical economic changes to deal with pollution versus just plain properly using the effective systems we've got by internalizing the cost? One of the fundamental foundations of Free Markets as tools is to have pricing at each step include costs, and I don't agree that failure to do that means the entire thing must be tossed. On the contrary, I suspect it's a lowest common barrier scenario, that if such a relatively simple thing can't be accomplished by societies why would vastly more difficult and ambitious efforts be successful?
Really, global warming at least is a pretty much perfect scenario for market solutions, because it's simultaneously a vastly distributed problem and also can be attacked from anywhere in the world (since greenhouse gases naturally disperse evenly worldwide). Just set the price of emitting/extracting a ton of CO2/equivalent at the price of industrially removing it plus some minimum margin (5-7%). Make the latter a ratcheting auction system, completely revenue-neutral to the government, and countries that don't comply internally can have conservative worst case carbon internalization tariffs applied. Then just leave the markets to sort out the best ways to meet that goal. Everything almost instantly becomes carbon neutral, no need for any sort of moralizing about what luxuries are more important, everyone can just see the real prices and decide accordingly where they want to allocate their resources. And as carbon capture becomes large scale and mature, it'll be cheaper to then go negative carbon and reverse the problem.
I'm worried a lot of the feelings-based efforts and attempts to mix in huge revolutions are extremely counter productive to dealing with AGW specifically. Yes, there are lots of other major inequalities and systemic problems that desperately need addressing. But AGW is such a huge controversial deal riders should really, really be minimized. Fundamentally asking that economics be honest and properly account for costs shouldn't be as big an ask as a lot of other things, and it genuinely is for all of our benefit too. If measures like "GDP" are distorted based on externalities, the first thing to do should be un-distort them shouldn't it?
I think what you’re describing constitutes a “radical economic change” unfortunately. I think it’s still a good idea and overall productive approach to price in externalities as taxes, but there’s pretty significant opposition to this in the US, to take one example.
There is a huge problem with pricing externalities as taxes because those who are harmed are not compensated, the cost of the externalities should paid to those who are harmed. This requires better understanding of property rights and measurements - if you want to pollute the air then those effected have to sell you the right -- that would be the ideal solution instead of the government taking more money out of the economy for it's uses.
The system you describe is the government. The government would tax it and then redistribute the revenue to the communities of those affected, if that’s what we decided was most important. The state is the mechanism through which groups of individuals take action in public.
> The government would tax it and then redistribute the revenue to the communities of those affected, if that’s what we decided was most important.
That's also problematic because CO2 acts globally - and you don't really want to give dictatorships of poor countries who are affected the most (e.g. Africa) a steady supply of money.
I was talking purely about domestic policy, just to clarify. In the US people in the southeast are most immediately affected by global warming, in the form of severe storms (incidentally states in the southeast are also already among the greatest recipients of federal aid, because of their high levels of poverty). On an international level there will need to be economic cooperation as well but it will look different because there isn’t a single sovereign to collect and distribute revenue. Typically such solutions focus on agreements to reduce tariffs in international trade provided certain conditions and such.
Usually this is paired with dividends paid equally to everyone. As you said we don’t have the sophistication to apply reimbursement fairly to those affected.
Any carbon emissions taxes would have to be phased in very gradually in order to give people enough time to adjust, such as by purchasing electric vehicles. Otherwise it will be impossible to maintain political support.
Truly universal CO2 tax would be OK with yellow vests.
Now the problem is that CO2 for cheap gasoline cars is taxed a lot. While CO2 for airplane fuel for better off to go on holidays is not. And they get tax credits to buy nice electric cars. Regressive taxation at it's best.
Not meant to refute the GP argument but, in the US at the federal level the AvGas tax per gallon and gasoline tax per gallon are about the same ~ $0.19. This is probably one of those areas where subsidies and such obfuscate the reality.
Well, here in Illinois, a gallon of diesel fuel is 85 cents per gallon. An international flight to Hong Kong will take a little over 40,000 gallons (but is tax exempt), so 34000 dollars worth of taxes are not paid per flight.
I can find no data on that, and transoceanic flight have to fuel up at takeoff airport thus can't exploit lower taxes at home hub (commonly done with shorter range flights).
Yellow vest started with this, but is not just this. The subject was the tip of an iceberg, this iceberg being that a whole working class barely makes a living.
France is a welfare state, but we still have 10%-15% of people hit by poverty.
How is it acceptable in one of the leading economies of EU, and how is it freaking possible we still have this have this problem in the twenty-first century?
I only skimmed TFA, but it seems that it talk about this. Environment and social issues.
IMHO new statics won't change a thing. Political leaders are already aware of this.
I don't know about France, per se, but in most western nations, gasoline/petrol used by farmers is not taxed (or taxed much less) vs the same fuel used by industry or regular people. I suspect france was the same. The yellow vest protestors mostly originated from rural areas. It was, IMO, yet another example of the growing urban/rural divide.
The coronavirus halted a portion of world economic activity to a degree that could only be described as revolutionary or at least politically unthinkable. Yet global emissions have only slowed by a comparatively small amount. Clearly the market or even political approach is doomed, as only a form of carbon recapture or some other technology can fix the issues technology has created.
It’s not as disconnected as you might think. The pandemic is on track to cause a roughly ~7% drop in emissions for 2020. And (depending on the ever changing forecast) something like ~5-7% drop in global GDP for 2020.
So the link and magnitude appears pretty strong and the results appear pretty much expected. We know how to do this.
One: stop the emissions by switching to renewables and nuclear, and away from fossil fuels for transport.
Two: drawdown the carbon we’ve already emitted (and will emit during the transition in One above) through reforestation, rebuilding wetlands, building new carbon sinks, and carbon capture.
The market and a political approach are the only solution. How else are you going to institute the subsidies and taxes and government scale infrastructure and environmental programs.
The point I'm trying to make is that the fact that all of these unsustainable, revolutionary changes only generated a 7% drop indicates a few things:
-For political change to be effective, it would have to completely change how the economy functions, and essentially turn into some sort of WWII total war mode where almost all actors are focused on the same outcome, except many more countries have to be corralled together this time
-The market might produce the technology we need, but it would have to be black swan level good for it to have an impact, otherwise we are looking at investments in infrastructure so massive that we will need the total war mode described above anyway
I don't want to extrapolate too much from a single figure, but that 7% did indeed shatter many of my previously held beliefs. A complete revolution in the way things work for only 7%! I can't emphasize how disturbing that is. We have an albeit limited but at least hard datapoint that the current mindset is doomed. In a technical sense, it will indeed be a market and political approach but it will be so different from what most people mean with this phrase (i.e. carbon taxes will fix it, let's just carry on as usual but more carefully) that it's no longer a meaningful conversation
What revolution? I-280 still has traffic jams at 3 PM, people are still buying stuff, just through Amazon and DoorDash rather than going to their neighborhood store. Sure, people staying in helps a bit, but given that the changes we made were to keep people away from each other and not actually specifically reduce their emissions (in many cases we are being more "wasteful") it's not surprising that the drop is only 7%.
I get what you’re saying but 1) as shocking as the past year may be it hasn’t really been all that revolutionary. Some portion of people got shifted to working from home, but just about nothing else changed. And 2) there isn’t all that much about moving away from fossil fuels that’s going to look revolutionary. It will look pretty boring to most people. The idea that it’ll take a revolution is IMO a bit of fear mongering by vested interests.
Things like decarbonizing an electricity grid have been done before, France did it in the 80s. It wasn’t revolutionary. You wouldn’t have noticed except the air was cleaner.
Things like converting transport to non fossil fuels are already in progress and there’s nothing revolutionary looking about it. An electric car isn’t revolutionary it looks and (mostly) drives like a regular car. An electric train isn’t revolutionary, it’s already the norm for decades in most places.
Planting trees or restoring wetlands isn’t revolutionary. It’s just trees and wetlands.
Even carbon extraction is going to look pretty uninteresting to most people if it happens.
The only thing that will be revolutionary is what will happen if we don’t do these things soon enough.
> Just set the price of emitting/extracting a ton of CO2/equivalent at the price of industrially removing it plus some minimum margin (5-7%)
Emitting or extracting? The two are radically different and done in different countries. And how in both cases do you deal with simple but massive cheating?
> countries that don't comply internally can have conservative worst case carbon internalization tariffs applied
I look forward to some future US administration trying to impose tariffs on Saudi Arabia and a sheik turning up saying "Your campaign. How much?" and writing a bribe for a couple of billion dollars.
It's never as easy as it sounds to "just" do something. I'm hugely in favor of the carbon tax you've described, but it will not be easy to enact it globally.
People have been about GDP as a measure of economic progress for decades.
Despite its well known flaws, GDP has some great features - it's relatively easy to measure, has more-or-less a standard agreed and universal method of measurement and it is quantitative.
As a result, GDP is widely measured and provides a basis for comparison across history and geography.
Many proposed alternatives for GDP (as a measure of economic progress) do not have these features. Nor does the proposal in the linked to article. And so I think (like previous proposals) it's doomed to failure.
Changes in GDP can be used a proxy for economic progress. GDP itself is a measure of economic activity. The underlying assumption is that the overall structure of the economy does not change much from one year to the next. Thus, while an increase in GDP is usually analogous to an increase in overall economic well being, one must keep in mind that GDP is NOT a measure economic progress, wealth, income, happiness, well-being, etc.
> GDP has some great features - it's relatively easy to measure, has more-or-less a standard agreed and universal method of measurement and it is quantitative.
None of these great features indicate that a larger GDP is in any way desirable.
I don't think anyone argues against measuring GDP. The problem is when people implicitly assume a larger GDP is better.
> it's relatively easy to measure, has more-or-less a standard agreed and universal method of measurement and it is quantitative.
Our tools have improved so much since we started measuring GDP. Maybe we should raise the bar on metrics: we're bound to find ones that are not-terribly-difficult-to-measure in 2020.
I'm intensely skeptical of this idea of "inclusive wealth" they're pushing for. It sounds a lot like it's intended to be a general and all-inclusive "what should we do" index, constructed to ensure all good changes increase it and all bad changes decrease it. I don't think such an index is possible to construct, and there's a lot of well-intentioned harm you could do if you think you have one.
If a country's GDP falls consistently over time it invariably leads to a very bad time. I don't have a a problem with using government levers to internalize externalities, but if that were to actually cause GDP decline, the whole system breaks apart and mass death follows.
In a productivist system that is... The issue is that the options we have on the table at this point are keeping such a system (possibly not keeping growth going anyway I may add) and we’re pretty much guaranteed mass death or coming up with some alternatives.
I'm not so pessimistic. I think we can say pretty confidently that Ehrlich was wrong. As was Malthus. Human ingenuity counts for something. And I don't understand how an economy works on anything other than a "productivity system."
You cannot grow the economy without increasing energy use. For environment and to reduce global warming need to reuse and recycle and use sustainable materials, yet the boost for economy promotes buy and throw.
Economist always promote growth, which grows energy use. Further economist is one science which assume a lot how the world works versus in other sciences that have to measure how the world works.
I would say that Keynesian economics and the environment is not coherent. In the sense that Keynesian economics lowers the interest rate in an artificial way, which promotes economic growth. This economic growth increases consumption.
> You cannot grow the economy without increasing energy use.
Yes, you can. It’s called Efficiency. In the narrow sense, we are nowhere near the limits of thermodynamics. But there is also efficiency versus effectiveness. If I make a different product that better satisfices the greater needs, it may have a higher embodied energy costs than the old product, and yet still drive overall efficiency.
A thinner saw blade has a smaller kerf, resulting in less raw material turned to dust. And even though the blade contains less steel, that steel is more dear. But I chop down fewer trees or dig up less stone if I use it.
Not on the right order of magnitude. We need to reduce our material consumption and energy consumption, even keeping them to the present level would not be sufficient, so for what you're talking about we'd need absolute decoupling, and that won't happen through efficiency gains, I'm willing to take that bet any day (and without even invoking Jeavons' paradox).
https://eeb.org/decoupling-debunked1/
PS: this was this week's latest paper that helps comprehend what exponential growth means:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5
Cannot find a simple explanation of what "Ecosystem Accounting" really is. Sounds like a number of disjoint ideas without any specifics. If you want to even start challenging GDP, you need something that can be reliably calculated. I don't think too many people take PPP seriously and that's much easier to calculate, let alone a monstrosity like this.
Change my view: GDP is Goodhart's law writ extremely large - and if you think the government is in some way responsible for your lack of material well-being, that complaint is pretty much as valid in times of "good" GDP figures as bad.
The article is basically saying that "nature" should be more important than GDP. Perhaps that should be. National treasuries are linked to GDP because most taxes are either a consumption or an income tax, both of which are tied to GDP (consumption is paid by a buyer, income tax by a seller, either way, they are parts of GDP). Most arguments that try to say, GDP is unimportant or shouldn't be important are advocating for something that would ultimately shrink GDP, and reduce government incomes. Usually while making no case for anything other than, "making due" or austerity. This usually creates an unsustainable political climate leading to eventual regime change to something that will create economic growth.
> "The extreme human and economic cost of the pandemic arise from a failure to manage natural capital. It has proved far more costly than it would have been to protect wild habitats and biodiversity in the first place to avoid such zoonotic spillover."
Actually, if you look compared to the past, this pandemic was much less lethal than those of the past. In addition, we have had much better treatment options. Finally, it was modern development that allowed a vaccine to be made in around 1 year.
It seems pandemics are more devastating on people with higher natural capital. Take for example the Native Americans exposed to the European diseases. Also, diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, affect nations with more natural capital than more developed nations.
Covid isn't particularly lethal as viruses go. It's still on its way to killing a couple of million people and doing significant and lasting economic damage.
Something with the lethality of smallpox or Spanish Flu would have been far harder to deal with. It's not at all obvious that - say - supermarket food delivery would have survived without a complete breakdown.
It actually did break down briefly in the UK for a couple of weeks in March. Luckily supermarket logistics are mostly managed by rational adults and services recovered over the next few weeks.
But I have a Covid souvenir online shopping screen grab from March which says:
Number of users in queue ahead of you: 229343
Estimated wait time: at least an hour
It's almost like we live in a world that's reeling from the externalities of unfettered global capital. No need to end it, just need to break the tragedy of the commons that makes it so cheap to cause global problems.
Pretending that the only options are two extreme ends of a solution scale isn't operating in good faith.
Clearly, capitalism isn't the only possible cause of ecological ruin. In this case, however, it appears to be allowing _everyone involved_ to shirk the responsibility to pay for the damage they cause.
How did you ever come to that conclusion by reading the article?!?
If anything, the point of the article is that MORE things should be priced in. Nature's value should be analyzed from a monetary point of view and you shouldn't be allowed to destroy it at 0 cost.
> The economy of the United States is that of a highly developed country with a mixed economy
> A mixed economy is variously defined as an economic system blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy, free markets with state interventionism, or private enterprise with public enterprise.
Getting back to your question:
We establish a market for this, guided/corrected by state intervention if and when needed.
I think it’s more that a single system runs the world so any global issue is assumed to be the fault of that system. Which kind of ignores how every other system also loves oil etc.
I see capitalism as a tool in our belt, one that is incredibly powerful but not always the best for a specific job. Like using a hammer on a screw, sure it might work eventually, but its not easy. Though it doesn't mean you should throw away your hammer.
Given their effect on how we think and live our lives, economic systems are much more than tools. We adapt ourselves to fit to them rather than using them for our own purposes.
I don't see how that is different from a good tool. I purchased a brad-nailer recently and it has changed the way I work with wood. I now look at woodworking problems completely differently. It's like moving from a text editor to an IDE. The developers of today often have different skills than before based on the tools they have at hand.
In this analogy, you look at woodworking problems differently and might take on new projects but you still generally pick the same type of problem to work on with your newfound tool and retain the same system of values towards woodworking.
With economic systems, almost every action and thought-pattern you take in your daily life are reoriented according to the pressures you are subjected to. Even things that seem completely natural like the concept of a "hobby" or "free time" are massively different to previous eras and patterns of thought.
Getting rid of private land ownership is one of the many reasons I can never get on board with more collectivist ideologies that support that. The idea is flawed in itself and we've seen it doesn't lead to good things when it is tried.
Even the soviets came to that conclusion during their existence, starting with adopting leasing and then near the end full ownership for agriculture and then eventually for homes.
I still remember a friend from college telling me how his father had to retain his property after the fall of the USSR and new land rights were established in one of the now former satellite states, with a gun and an axe.
Not to create a false dichotomy but I'll take a stable slightly coercive economic system over a system that requires me to use violence to keep what is mine.
Private property entirely depends on violence -- that's not hyperbole, there's ultimately no other compelling force to enforce societal norms and rules (see: police).
It's only our familiarity and compliance with the system that prevents us from encountering that violence.
That is very much a false dichotomy - and obviously so, because it simply means you have no idea of what Capitalism can cost you, and even less idea of what it has cost you already.
For example your axe and gun won't help you when your health insurance company decides that your pre-existing condition is too expensive to insure and your medical costs are now 100% your own responsibility - which is something that causes the bankruptcy of around 500,000 Americans every year.
Or when there's a major financial crash and a bank decides that it needs to steal your home from under you, whether or not you're underwater on your mortgage.
These are not hypotheticals. These are all things that have happened, are happening, and are likely to continue happening.
GDP is not the issue, but a political and economic system which increases personal selfishness at the expense of others is. You can argue that collectivist solutions have the same problem, and to an extent you'll be right. But it's a long way from there to pretending that this is the best of all possible worlds, because there are economies which prove that isn't true.
A hybrid capitalist system with social elements for healthcare and education and proper regulation is probably a better system. But those things are a far cry from talking about getting rid of private property and capitalism all together.
I believe evolving our current system and maintaining certain elements is better than getting rid of it all together. I see reactions like yours as throwing the baby out with the bathwater when there are more level headed approaches we can take like limiting lobbying to course correct.
Edit: This is my US centric view, I realized after the fact that we may not be in the same place since this is a global forum
There were some alternatives presented but not accepted. In the history of warfare, terrain set boundaries because the defenders had substantial advantage over attackers. I own this side of the river, you own that one. But from an ecological policy standpoint, it’s a disaster. Neither of us own the river, but if I dump shit into it and you have a port at the mouth, then my problems become your problems.
The alternative proposal was to divide government along watershed boundaries. Spain and France are still divided by the Pyrenees, because ridge lines are the same boundaries on both maps. But the Rhine and the Rhone say that France is divided from Germany, Italy, and Benelux all wrong:
The river would instead become the middle of a territory, not the edges. My hamlet “owns” the valley it sits in. The county owns the tributary that flows past my hamlet and into another tributary. The state owns the tributary all the way to the Rhone, our nation or a union owns the entire Rhone, and a regional group oversees the Mediterranean, while the UN oversees the oceans in general, when regions don’t agree with themselves or among each other.
Anyone who muddies our water is in a direct chain of accountability to everyone down stream.
Logistically this is a nightmare. We’ve wiped out any cultures who might have worked this way, and those that remain won’t move political boundaries except under extreme duress, except to expand them (see point 1). But it does have a very Conway’s Law feel to it.
Capitalism always exists. It is the management of scarce resources. Usually we use money to control the flow of very scarce resources. But it does not have to be money. A quota system is nothing more than a form of money but itemized.
I don't know. There was a certain Thomas Malthus who was quite convinced that the standard of living in the 1800s was the highest nature would permit, and any country which wanted to avoid famine would need to virtuously restrain itself from seeking to consume more. Maybe it's different this time, and we really are at the limits of what nature will support, but I think we need some explanation of how we know we're not repeating his lack of imagination.
This Twitter thread is an overcorrection. I've seen people characterize Malthus's position as "Famine is an inevitable part of the natural order of things" or "The current global population is the maximum we can possibly support", and neither of those are true. But he definitely didn't believe that "there are no limits to resources or food production". He claimed that it was absolutely impossible to improve agricultural productivity more than linearly (https://books.google.com/books?id=9-q_SSfE6skC&pg=PA5#v=onep..., p.10), and questioned whether densely settled countries like Japan and China could ever achieve even twice their current productivity (p. 8).
I doubt this will _always_ be the case, but it is for now.
If we ever want to go beyond earth we'll have to figure out how to live independently from natural habitats and their ecology. One puzzle piece will probably be hydroponics (another HN frontpage thread from today). Others, like efficient temperature management adaptable to hugely different environments and high density and long term energy sources (e.g. fusion), have yet to be developed. I actually think researching these technologies is more important than saving earth. By all means, slow the decay so we get there, but eventually someone will fuck up anyway and we'd better have colonized the solar system by then.
In such a future clean air would be as much a tradable commodity as water and food are today. There are two ways of dealing with tragedy of the commons: remove the tragedy through coordinated action or let the market remove the commons. Looking at our history coordination and selfless cooperation are just not really a viable option long term, they only work intermittently.
> But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-famil...