DISQUS

And so when Peter Thiel says that when women got their nanoslice [of political power], the competence of this gigantic committee [i.e. democracy] deteriorated...he is making a factual statement.

Perhaps you're aware that the average IQ is 100. Have you ever collaborated with, employed, or otherwise befriended anyone with an IQ of 100? If not, it's never too late to moonlight in "food prep" at your local Hardee's...But 100 is just for average white people! Alas, as you may know, not everyone is white.

This Moldbug guy is so charming! I can't decide whether it's his misogyny, his racism, or his self aggrandizement that's more appealing.

He actually quotes fucking *Robert Heinlein* in that post. I thought that only happened in parodies of libertarians. Amazing.

And by the logic of zing!'s comment, the taxpayer money that the government gives to axe murderers to fund their activities should have no strings attached. Bravo!

You should read Douthat today. You won't be surprised to discover that he disagrees with you on the utility of neutered religion. He seems to think that fighting falsehood with falsehood is the way to go.

Without competitive pressure, our institutions generate flawed policies which benefit the political class, not those that reflect the consensus of academic economists.

This is the line from Friedman that made me laugh out loud.

Careful, Will, or you'll find that Jonah's next book will be titled "Libertarian Fascism". Then you'll be sorry.

Hey, by the way, you're lately giving me some reason to reassess my doubts about the "liberal" part of your liberaltarian moniker. Keep it up.

Who cares? If you're alleviating poverty more effectively at a lower growth rate than you were at a higher one what difference does it make? There are obviously optimization issues here, but "oh noes! you've maybe hurt growth!" seems to be missing the point.

Read this about growth elasticity of poverty. It's pretty straightforward stuff.

It's not quite so simple. The former chief economist of the world bank found that "...a permanent redistribution of income reduces poverty instantaneously through what was identified as the distribution effect; but also redistribution contributes to a permanent increase in the growth elasticity of poverty reduction - therefore accelerating the rate of poverty reduction for a given rate of growth." Since libertarian concern for the poor goes back "forever", I'm looking forward to their full throated support for the income redistribution that helps poor people every bit as much or more than economic growth alone does.

But I'm not holding my breath.

The numbers for nuclear are actually a pretty tough nut to crack based on what I read here, so I'm not too comfortable arguing this one in either direction. Nuclear's also got so many other moving parts beyond EROEI (security, waste, economics, construction time, depletion/breeders, etc.) that it's really a whole different discussion by itself.

...exploring for and producing our own energy which has the potential to be cheap and available for the next five hundred years or so...

Cite please.

One concern is that we roll-out huge infrastructure costs too quickly and miss out on breakthroughs in storage and transmission.

Well, another concern is that we start investing in infrastructure late and no breakthroughs arrive to make our procrastination look smart. Following your logic, building the telephone network and failing to wait for the development of cell phone technology was a "misallocation" of a lot of copper.

Not to endorse Rumsfeld in any way, but you fight a war with the army you have. If the army you'd like to have shows up halfway through, bonus.

The fundamental problem here is that renewable sources are diffuse and therefore require considerably larger investments in infrastructure to harvest than fossil fuels which are incredibly energy dense. This means that significant increases in overhead costs for energy production are just not likely to be avoidable regardless of whether it's government or private enterprise that's doing the heavy lifting.

A quick scan of oil company investment in recent years shows that stock buybacks are where it's at for people who know how to profit from energy production. Maybe that should tell us something.

By the way, here are a few numbers on energy return on energy invested to produce it for a few different technologies and sources: historical oil fields--100:1, current oil fields--20:1 (and falling), wind--18:1, hydroelectric--12:1, solar--8:1, coal--8:1, nuclear--6:1, tar sands--6:1, ethanol--2:1(maybe less!). Only "revolutionary, game-changing technology" will overcome both the 200+ percent greater energetic overhead costs (excepting wind, and hydro's got little room to expand) and the massive gap in installed capacity between renewables and fossil fuels within the next decade or two. Might as well call for what you need. Paging fictional libertarian savior-heroes with the intestinal fortitude to withstand 39% top marginal income tax rates!

One tricky point here is that proving a short-term effect is much easier than proving a long-term effect, because there is more uncertainty in long-term prediction.

Very true, but the corollary here is that greater certainty may arrive only after optimal inflection points for action. Accepting lower returns for the sake of hedging risk is common practice in finance but it's apparently heresy to apply the same logic to these kinds of questions.

To be clear, I'm all for improving the plight of the global poor right now because all evidence indicates that desperate people make decisions strictly weighted, understandably, toward short term results. The negative correlation between wealth/education and population growth speaks to this. The accelerated depletion rates that raising the living standards of the poor implies, however, could be substantially mitigated through redistribution, but, y'know, crazy talk and all that.

This is all very true, but spacetime has four dimensions and intertemporal justice is not addressed here. To the extent that current developed world levels of compensation/consumption are depriving future generations of access to sustainable stocks of natural resources, expanding such consumption is simply a time shifting of injustice in much the same way that immigration policy (and lets not forget capital mobility!) represents a spatial ordering of social injustice.

Of course that's probably just crazy talk, but not the good kind of crazy talk that you and Pritchett so value. After all, everyone knows that there's no "true power" behind the idea that growth is both necessary for human welfare and, conveniently enough, indefinitely sustainable.

First of all, why is picking winners at the basic research level philosophically any better than picking winners further downstream? Secondly, aren't we already doing this? Don't moth discoverers have to prove the value of their research in order to get grants now? I don't think there's a compelling case to be made that shrinking current research funding to a level such that "unimportant" moth discovery is defunded but "important" something else discovery is funded would result in much greater savings or efficiencies versus changes in other forms of government spending (can you say f-22?). This is especially true given that it's hard to know in advance what the future holds for the relative importance of current research projects. I thought that the recent McCain/Palin brand of know-nothing demagoguery (grizzly genetics/beaver management/cricket control) had highlighted the flaws of this kind of thinking

Let's review, shall we? "Arbitrary caps" has been shown to be a bogus objection, and we now both agree that c&t addresses a major shortcoming (or "difficulty" if you prefer) of Pigouvian taxes.

"QED and out".

From Wikipedia:

One difficulty with Pigovian tax is calculating what level of tax will counterbalance the negative externality. Political factors such as lobbying of government by polluters may also tend to reduce the level of the tax levied, which will tend to reduce the mitigating effect of the tax.

How can your suggestion that we review remedial economics not be considered an "own goal" on your part given the above quote?

Dazzle me.

From Wikipedia:

One difficulty with Pigovian tax is calculating what level of tax will counterbalance the negative externality. Political factors such as lobbying of government by polluters may also tend to reduce the level of the tax levied, which will tend to reduce the mitigating effect of the tax.

How can your suggestion that we review remedial economics not be considered an "own goal" on your part given the above quote?

Dazzle me.

OSweet's point is well-stated.

If you think that OSweet is disagreeing with me I'm pretty sure you're confused.

Had the spill not happened, the money...would have gone toward productive (non-dead-end) purposes.

I couldn't have said it better myself. The fact that this non-productive waste of money and natural resources is counted as a net benefit to the economy is a textbook demonstration of uneconomic growth and shows that argumentum ad GDP (to coin a phrase) is a fallacy.

As for the rest, yes, MACKINFRACKIN GOVT VARMINTS GRRRR!!!

If we can do CBA, then we must know how much emissions are costing us in environmental damage, and we can base a carbon tax on that knowledge. QED and out.

Once more, for whatever it's worth:

Science tells us that emission level x is advised. Cap and trade starts with a cap higher than x but lower than current levels, call it x+y. The goal is to gradually make y equal to zero. As we do this we are receiving accurate feedback on the costs of the emission reductions through that miracle of markets, price discovery. This is information that we can use to adjust the rate of y's diminution or to re-evaluate the advisability of achieving x (in other words, CBA with an accurate understanding of the C part). Meanwhile, we have guaranteed that emissions actually are x+y, no more, no less.

Under a tax, we guess at a price that we think will achieve x+y emissions. Next year, when actual emissions turn out to be x+q, we guess again. If the relationship between prices and different values of y is non-linear, these guesses will be very hard to get right. Eventually, however, we get close to x+y, but our energies have been focused on figuring out a price, not on what an accurate understanding of the costs involved imply for our future course of action.

Meanwhile, I'm certain that our principled libertarian friends will restrain themselves from "taking advantage of a good crisis" and not claim that government sucks at setting prices and that this proves that reducing emissions is a misguided idea. Hahahaha!

Take your pick.

This conversation has now turned into a mobius strip. The cap would be based on scientific evidence regarding the current state of the atmosphere, and presumably modified by CBA and empirical feedback. How is this arbitrary?

My skin's fine, thanks. Here on the toobz, snark is the coin of the realm.

You do realize, don't you, that the Exxon Valdez oil spill was a net positive for GDP? The money spent on clean up was considerably more than the value of the oil lost so, voila, Valdez was an engine of economic growth!

Point being, even if your counterfactual were true, GDP is a stupid metric. Read the Wikipedia entry on "uneconomic growth" for an introduction to some of the relevant concepts.

Also, if you consider GDP as an indicator of society's "cost of living", there's no reason to think that bigger is better. It's really a question of what color ink you choose to write down the numbers. (If you're reading this Will, the concept of "natural capital" has relevance here--cheers!)

And, in the hopes that you won't dismiss this out of hand as the ravings of a stoopid liberal, I'll throw you a bone: Government is TOTALLY EVILLLL RASSAFRASSA HORRIBLE BUREAUCRATS ARGH!!!!

But if the cap is to be set arbitrarily...

Who said anything about arbitrarily? Throwing a dart at a bunch of numbers on the wall would certainly be a very stupid way to set emission targets. Of course better metrics, both economic and climatological, would be ideal, but letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is, in my opinion, unhelpful.

But if it helps you make your decision to think of cap and trade advocates as drooling idiots who have never heard of cost-benefit analysis, more power to you.

You haven't been persuasive so there's no hope?

I'd be more hopeful if your argument didn't essentially consist of "I've never heard of that so it must not exist". To the extent that my lack of persuasiveness may stem from just being a messenger, I recommend that you read the economists Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Kenneth Boulding, and especially Herman Daly. The ethicist/theologian John Cobb is good read on the moral issues too.

If you read some of their stuff, come away unconvinced and explain why, then I'd be happy. Dialogue, given its relative scarcity, is probably more valuable than agreement anyway.

As for the Cato crack--just calling it how I see it; maybe you can change my mind.

The difference between wealth and income is important here. If I have a million dollars in the bank (wealth) and I can make (inflation adjusted) 5% on it, then if I live on $50,000/year (income), then I'll be at least as wealthy in the future as I am now. If I exceed this level of expenditure and therefore begin to deplete my wealth, I have higher income now at the expense of future income and present wealth. Obviously, it can make sense to spend more now for some purposes, particularly if I plan to offset that spending with saving later. The regime I have outlined above is economically "sustainable", no?

If you consider the source and sink capacities of the planet as "wealth", then the logic of economic sustainability and environmental sustainability are exactly the same. Insofar as the scale of your economy's throughput of energy and material remains within the abilities of the various sources and sinks you depend on to provide those services (i.e natural income--forests grow, carbon is sequestered, etc.), you're golden.

If you've been paying any attention at all to recent scientific developments there is good reason to think that we're well past that point on a number of fronts right now (topsoil, fish populations, rain forests climate, oil, etc.) and are seriously compromising prospects for future income.

There is obviously room for debate as to what constitutes an optimal level of natural capital (most of this debate should be informed by empirical study, of course), but the parties to that debate have to agree it exists first.