Matt—it’s not necessary to disingenuously impute motives to the Free Press that they haven’t articulated even if you really believe that’s their motivation. I read this Substack for high quality analysis that has less political hyperbole and less snark. I’m not a progressive but you have me as a reader because of your sober analysis and avoiding snark is part of that.
“the Free Press perspective, which is to complain about Democratic Party positioning on cultural issues because they want to see Republicans win elections and cut rich people’s taxes.”
I feel like I am slowly going insane in relation student debt relief. With all the focus on the relief itself (and my outside worry that, having become politicized, the new trifecta will not just end Biden's reaches but get rid of good programs like the PSLF out of spite), there seems to continue to be zero discussion about actually making the loans prospectively better moving forward so that the problem doesn't present itself in the future. Since the government is essentially operating the business anyway, and people can generally agree that college is a human capital investment, it would make more sense to have loans be amortized over a specific time period with a very loan fixed rate by the government (since govt is covering a lot of the administrative costs anyway). There's a lot of angst over what do to about loans that people have paid for 20 years where they owe more than they initially took out...but we never worry about that with things like homes and cars. In fact, there'd probably be revolutions over loan structures for things like that. Plus, with fixed rate amortized loans, you can still overlay income-based repayments, and still make sure he are manageable for all. Seems like common sense to me.
Matt says we need a mostly free market but there are still important things that government must do...
But what is the system of governance, the "business model", that, in the absence of the accountability imposed by a competitive market, will drive efficient, high quality public services? Contractors and public employee unions will inevitably have more political influence than individual taxpayers.
Re stuff cooked up in 2017: I have this running theory that rot in the Democratic Party dates to the 2010 election, when Republican control of the House caused Democrats to focus their attention on activism and navel-gazing because there was no national policy outlet for their demands.
"And even while talking about housing costs, they raised tariffs on imported Canadian lumber. They reinterpreted the Waters of the United States rule in a way that homebuilders say is bad for supply. They put expensive rules in place to accelerate electric car adoption, even while alienating the owner of the world’s most important electric car company to please labor unions, while also alienating blue collar union members over cultural issues."
I know Matt has written about this extensively already, but it is becoming crystal clear that over-management of coalition building doomed the Biden administration. And it didn't even work! When you try to please everyone, you please no one.
You made a good point about housing when you said the Federal government doesn't control zoning. Therefore, the Fed cannot solve the (huge) part of the housing problem caused by restrictive zoning simply by throwing money at it. As long as localities zone to exclude high density and affordable housing, Uncle Sam is hogtied. Not to mention, transportation sourced emissions will climb as we sprawl in search of cheaper land on which to build more R-4 housing.
I have the same bone to pick with Uncle Sam cancelling student loans: the Federal government does not control how colleges inflate costs while saddling students with debt and sketchy educations. I was at a party yesterday where I was talking with a retired college provost and a formerly tenured faculty member who, like me and my wife, left academia mid career. There are, to be sure, serious problems with student loan burdens but colleges have willfully cranked up the cost of a higher education by piling on administrators, adding degree programs of marginal usefulness, adding deluxe accomodations, and encouraging people to go to college who should not be there.
The former prof I spoke to said her institution actively recruited disadvantaged students without a thought to their success. Most flunked out or gave up after piling up one or more years of costs. My campus, back in the '90's, wanted my STEM based school to create a science degree program without much science (by eliminating much of the math, physics, and chemistry distribution requirements) in order to boost enrollment and bring in more tuition dollars. But that degree wouldn't get graduates good jobs. Just get them loans to pay off. The bottom line is that nothing Sen. Warren or Pres. Biden suggested would hold our state or private universities accountable for keeping college affordable and issuing high quality degrees. In fact, it might do the opposite: simply encourage campus leaders to continue the status quo knowing they could load students up with debt to be passed on to Uncle Sam. Talk about a free lunch for college administrators! Heck, I would hold the states accountable for student debt in each state, since it is the states that control their state universities. As far as private universities? Sorry, not with my taxes.
I think we have to take a deeper dive into some of these programs if we want to fix them rather than throw money at more failure.
So what kind of academia are you talking about here?
I think the real issue isn't student loans for the Ivies, top tier publics, or even other good privates, but these fly-by-nite "colleges" that promise a "degree" but no jobs whose students take out the loans giving money to the "college" immediately but either aren't able to graduate or ultimately get a job that enables them to pay off the loan.
My campus was a state university center. The other faculty member's campus was a private, not-for profit. Neither was one of these for-profit degree mills.
I think some context for Hepner's antipathy to YIMBYism is that he used to be an aide to Aaron Peskin, perhaps the major NIMBY force on the San Francisco board of supervisors.
You say the Democrats "just didn't do" supply driven growth. A bit hard to square that stance with the bipartisan infrastructure law, which was probably the most impactful supply side economic intervention since... I don't know, probably the creation of the interstate system? You can argue that they didn't do enough, but leaving that out seems quite egregious.
I must have missed the speech where Biden said "We are going to build infrastructure on time and on budget and strip away all the usual political baggage that make public works construction more expensive that comparable commercial projects. And if a particular project goes bad, we'll pull the money, I don't care whose district it's in.
… the claim wasn’t that Biden didn’t do whatever your imagined platonic ideal for supply side policy is. Nor, contrary to apparent popular perception, the reason New York builds subway at 4x the cost Paris does doesn’t have much to do with the federal government, and pretty much everything to do with state and local government.
I could never figure out what the Free Press was trying to do, but more often than not it seemed unwholesome. Which is why, unlike Slow Boring, I never subscribed to it and eventually threw my hands up in disgust.
There’s something I haven’t seen any coverage of, and maybe it’s just not popular with most folks, but you’ve mentioned part of it before and I’m hoping to draw your eye to it a bit more.
Inflation has not been even across all classes of good. Inferior goods have seen substantially higher inflation than standard or superior goods. For example, rice. “Brokens” - the lowest class of rice, nutritionally identical but the grains are broken - are now being marketed at a less steep discount than previously.
Pulse and legume seconds, tinned soups, value butter and value eggs (you wrote about eggs) have all seen hefty price increases since 2016. The CPI excludes these value priced items from the bundle of goods.
I believe that better data has allowed supermarkets to force more expensive substitutes, extracting more of the supplier surplus and impoverishing customers.
The most affected customers are those least able to afford food poverty, but it cuts off roads to save for anyone who cares to be frugal.
This prevents debt-free creation or aggregation of real wealth to individuals, who then are able to form a proper body politic.
It’s not just free minds that make a viable polity; you must also have debt-free liquid wealth in the hands of many actors, or elections become secondary to the “money election” of the donor classes first.
> and the Free Press perspective, which is to complain about Democratic Party positioning on cultural issues because they want to see Republicans win elections and cut rich people’s taxes.
Without it there would be no US shipping industry at all. If we went to war with China and the Panamanian flagged Greek owned ships didn’t want to risk transporting vital supplies to our forward bases - we’d be SOL. Unless we went all British Navy c. 17XX and seized the freighters and impressed their crews.
It’s sort of like how there is a system in place for compelling Delta, American and United to fly troops where needed in times of war. We don’t let foreign carriers compete domestically for fear that an Emirates and Singapore Airlines would recall their fleets to storage outside the US in times of war.
Actually we already have this problem now. The Jones act isn't protecting American shippers it's hurt them because it allowed them to stay uncompetitive.
But has it been successful at this? My understanding is that the Jones Act compliant fleet, such as it is, is basically enough for a few Mississippi River cruises and getting goods expensively to Hawaii and Puerto Rico, not actually something like an adequate stopgap for emergency international shipping.
OK, but "willingness to piss off Iraq and Afghanistan" and "willingness to piss of China (during a hypothetical US-China war)" are two very, very different things.
If the Jones Act provided us with a strong merchant marine fleet at the cost of increasing domestic shipping to PR and HI then I think we could talk about tradeoffs.
But it doesn't, I think mainly because rail/trucking is so efficient that we don't need any port->port transport on the mainland, and certainly not at those prices. Maybe if the Jones Act went away we might have a bit more port->port transport as the prices dropped, but that would be shifting resources from trucking/rail rather than other boats.
We just get so little out of it and penalize Hawaii/PR so much for it.
(Heck, often when here's an emergency we waive it because we _don't_ have the ships for an emergency)
Can anyone recommend a good primer on the fundamental problem with de-growth as an idea/ideology (from Matt or otherwise)?
I come from a pretty progressive, environmentalist background/social context. I've never been "deep green" (I value humans and culture too much) but in my teens and twenties, I thought that the world's problems could only be solved if the upper-class people of the world could learn to live with less (space, stuff, etc), and we could find a way to "decouple" various kinds of progress from economic growth/resource usage.
In the last couple of years, though, I'm more and more drawn to centrist, growth-oriented, abundance-oriented writing and thinking. But even recognizing the good things growth gets us and the problems caused by de-growth, I haven't quite been able to shake the Malthusian intuition that there are hard limits which will ultimately find us out in the end, in particular if we can't innovate fast enough.
So I'm somewhere in the middle on this, which makes it hard to advocate for growth (especially to people I know who care a lot about environmental issues). How I can educate myself more on this?
One of the best books I've ever read was "Beyond Growth" By Herman Daly.
Note even as someone with a BA in economics it can be a bit technical at times.
Still I think it's broadly helpful. One distinction it makes is the difference between growth and development.
With growth being defined as more resource use, but development being better use of resources. So building printing more books might be growth, but letting everyone read those books on a tablet they already own might be development.
The book also makes some really good critiques about how free trade should work.
I agree with you - I'm not like "humanity must embrace degrowth as penance for its sins," but I also think Matt Y is a bit too quick to dismiss environmental concerns with a, "fighting climate change is super easy, barely an inconvenience!* Just put up some solar panels and wind turbines and we can have eco-friendly luxury and abundance for all!" It's a lot more complicated than that.
*Any excuse to drop in a Pitch Meeting reference is a good excuse
It certainly is complicated. But there seems to be an *axiom* around these parts that de-growth is an incoherent or toxic position. That is, that it wouldn't be possible for a fair-minded thinker to support de-growth after a principled consideration of all the costs and benefits. And that's the part I'm not quite understanding. I can intuitively see all the ways that growth is good and how it's good for the world to get richer, but it still seems possible that we could grow (irresponsibly) to the point that we destroy ourselves.
I wonder if the problem with de-growth is: we can easily imagine a future world in which A) we stop economic growth, B) we redistribute wealth so that everyone has a decent (if not luxurious) living standard, and C) humankind exists in perpetuity thus.
But perhaps it's *not* in fact possible to satisfy A, B and C. Maybe if you stop economic growth, living standards will inevitably degrade over time? That's an unsettling proposition, but maybe it's just a fact?
If people want to chose to live with less more power to then. But if people want to use the police power of the state to force OTHER people to live with less I will oppose that with everything I have and the majority of the voters will too.
This is called the “Kuznets Curve”, and it’s a pretty standard feature in Econ textbooks (not quite 101, but close). There’s a good amount of scholarship out there on it.
The richer people get, the less visible, gross pollution you get - like soot or the Cuyahoga catching fire.
The richer people get, the more greenhouse gas emissions you get - CO2 from cars and power plants, methane from cows - and that's a big problem, and people have shown they have zero interest in internalizing the externalities (witness all the carbon tax ballot measures that went up in flames, not unlike large chunks of California in recent years).
“ The richer people get, the more greenhouse gas emissions you get - CO2 from cars and power plants”
Then build some nuclear plants and use that energy to charge the EVs. It’s not some insurmountable challenge - we’ve had the nuke technology for 70 years and the EV tech is moving along nicely.
New multifamily housing is broadly considered obscene decadence, and building meaningful amounts of public transit with American cost structures would plausibly exceed world GDP. We are going to need to be many orders of magnitude richer as a country to reduce CO2 emissions.
Although it does seem that the richest countries are the ones whose carbon emissions are actually decreasing now. It’ll be interesting to see when (whether?) rich countries eventually have fewer carbon emissions per capita than others.
Not only do I love this piece, I love it because it aligns with my own politics perfectly.
Matt—it’s not necessary to disingenuously impute motives to the Free Press that they haven’t articulated even if you really believe that’s their motivation. I read this Substack for high quality analysis that has less political hyperbole and less snark. I’m not a progressive but you have me as a reader because of your sober analysis and avoiding snark is part of that.
“the Free Press perspective, which is to complain about Democratic Party positioning on cultural issues because they want to see Republicans win elections and cut rich people’s taxes.”
I feel like I am slowly going insane in relation student debt relief. With all the focus on the relief itself (and my outside worry that, having become politicized, the new trifecta will not just end Biden's reaches but get rid of good programs like the PSLF out of spite), there seems to continue to be zero discussion about actually making the loans prospectively better moving forward so that the problem doesn't present itself in the future. Since the government is essentially operating the business anyway, and people can generally agree that college is a human capital investment, it would make more sense to have loans be amortized over a specific time period with a very loan fixed rate by the government (since govt is covering a lot of the administrative costs anyway). There's a lot of angst over what do to about loans that people have paid for 20 years where they owe more than they initially took out...but we never worry about that with things like homes and cars. In fact, there'd probably be revolutions over loan structures for things like that. Plus, with fixed rate amortized loans, you can still overlay income-based repayments, and still make sure he are manageable for all. Seems like common sense to me.
Matt says we need a mostly free market but there are still important things that government must do...
But what is the system of governance, the "business model", that, in the absence of the accountability imposed by a competitive market, will drive efficient, high quality public services? Contractors and public employee unions will inevitably have more political influence than individual taxpayers.
Re stuff cooked up in 2017: I have this running theory that rot in the Democratic Party dates to the 2010 election, when Republican control of the House caused Democrats to focus their attention on activism and navel-gazing because there was no national policy outlet for their demands.
Terrific piece.
"And even while talking about housing costs, they raised tariffs on imported Canadian lumber. They reinterpreted the Waters of the United States rule in a way that homebuilders say is bad for supply. They put expensive rules in place to accelerate electric car adoption, even while alienating the owner of the world’s most important electric car company to please labor unions, while also alienating blue collar union members over cultural issues."
I know Matt has written about this extensively already, but it is becoming crystal clear that over-management of coalition building doomed the Biden administration. And it didn't even work! When you try to please everyone, you please no one.
You made a good point about housing when you said the Federal government doesn't control zoning. Therefore, the Fed cannot solve the (huge) part of the housing problem caused by restrictive zoning simply by throwing money at it. As long as localities zone to exclude high density and affordable housing, Uncle Sam is hogtied. Not to mention, transportation sourced emissions will climb as we sprawl in search of cheaper land on which to build more R-4 housing.
I have the same bone to pick with Uncle Sam cancelling student loans: the Federal government does not control how colleges inflate costs while saddling students with debt and sketchy educations. I was at a party yesterday where I was talking with a retired college provost and a formerly tenured faculty member who, like me and my wife, left academia mid career. There are, to be sure, serious problems with student loan burdens but colleges have willfully cranked up the cost of a higher education by piling on administrators, adding degree programs of marginal usefulness, adding deluxe accomodations, and encouraging people to go to college who should not be there.
The former prof I spoke to said her institution actively recruited disadvantaged students without a thought to their success. Most flunked out or gave up after piling up one or more years of costs. My campus, back in the '90's, wanted my STEM based school to create a science degree program without much science (by eliminating much of the math, physics, and chemistry distribution requirements) in order to boost enrollment and bring in more tuition dollars. But that degree wouldn't get graduates good jobs. Just get them loans to pay off. The bottom line is that nothing Sen. Warren or Pres. Biden suggested would hold our state or private universities accountable for keeping college affordable and issuing high quality degrees. In fact, it might do the opposite: simply encourage campus leaders to continue the status quo knowing they could load students up with debt to be passed on to Uncle Sam. Talk about a free lunch for college administrators! Heck, I would hold the states accountable for student debt in each state, since it is the states that control their state universities. As far as private universities? Sorry, not with my taxes.
I think we have to take a deeper dive into some of these programs if we want to fix them rather than throw money at more failure.
So what kind of academia are you talking about here?
I think the real issue isn't student loans for the Ivies, top tier publics, or even other good privates, but these fly-by-nite "colleges" that promise a "degree" but no jobs whose students take out the loans giving money to the "college" immediately but either aren't able to graduate or ultimately get a job that enables them to pay off the loan.
My campus was a state university center. The other faculty member's campus was a private, not-for profit. Neither was one of these for-profit degree mills.
I think some context for Hepner's antipathy to YIMBYism is that he used to be an aide to Aaron Peskin, perhaps the major NIMBY force on the San Francisco board of supervisors.
Printed this to a PDF so I can feed it into ChatGPT to find highlights and wow, 102 pages as of right now.
You say the Democrats "just didn't do" supply driven growth. A bit hard to square that stance with the bipartisan infrastructure law, which was probably the most impactful supply side economic intervention since... I don't know, probably the creation of the interstate system? You can argue that they didn't do enough, but leaving that out seems quite egregious.
I must have missed the speech where Biden said "We are going to build infrastructure on time and on budget and strip away all the usual political baggage that make public works construction more expensive that comparable commercial projects. And if a particular project goes bad, we'll pull the money, I don't care whose district it's in.
… the claim wasn’t that Biden didn’t do whatever your imagined platonic ideal for supply side policy is. Nor, contrary to apparent popular perception, the reason New York builds subway at 4x the cost Paris does doesn’t have much to do with the federal government, and pretty much everything to do with state and local government.
I thought that FreePress was trying to get republicans elected to attack Iran
I could never figure out what the Free Press was trying to do, but more often than not it seemed unwholesome. Which is why, unlike Slow Boring, I never subscribed to it and eventually threw my hands up in disgust.
This makes much more sense than what Matt said.
Matt,
There’s something I haven’t seen any coverage of, and maybe it’s just not popular with most folks, but you’ve mentioned part of it before and I’m hoping to draw your eye to it a bit more.
Inflation has not been even across all classes of good. Inferior goods have seen substantially higher inflation than standard or superior goods. For example, rice. “Brokens” - the lowest class of rice, nutritionally identical but the grains are broken - are now being marketed at a less steep discount than previously.
Pulse and legume seconds, tinned soups, value butter and value eggs (you wrote about eggs) have all seen hefty price increases since 2016. The CPI excludes these value priced items from the bundle of goods.
I believe that better data has allowed supermarkets to force more expensive substitutes, extracting more of the supplier surplus and impoverishing customers.
The most affected customers are those least able to afford food poverty, but it cuts off roads to save for anyone who cares to be frugal.
This prevents debt-free creation or aggregation of real wealth to individuals, who then are able to form a proper body politic.
It’s not just free minds that make a viable polity; you must also have debt-free liquid wealth in the hands of many actors, or elections become secondary to the “money election” of the donor classes first.
As a subscriber from the start--or very near to it--I think this series is your best work.
Hopefully (also) his most impactful.
> and the Free Press perspective, which is to complain about Democratic Party positioning on cultural issues because they want to see Republicans win elections and cut rich people’s taxes.
Love it when Matt casually takes a swipe at TFP
what's missing in a lot of this jones act "obsession" (it feels like it!) is the nat sec implications. which you cant wish away.
Tell us more? What are the national security implications of the Jones Act? (Not a gotcha question, I genuinely don't know.)
Without it there would be no US shipping industry at all. If we went to war with China and the Panamanian flagged Greek owned ships didn’t want to risk transporting vital supplies to our forward bases - we’d be SOL. Unless we went all British Navy c. 17XX and seized the freighters and impressed their crews.
It’s sort of like how there is a system in place for compelling Delta, American and United to fly troops where needed in times of war. We don’t let foreign carriers compete domestically for fear that an Emirates and Singapore Airlines would recall their fleets to storage outside the US in times of war.
Actually we already have this problem now. The Jones act isn't protecting American shippers it's hurt them because it allowed them to stay uncompetitive.
But has it been successful at this? My understanding is that the Jones Act compliant fleet, such as it is, is basically enough for a few Mississippi River cruises and getting goods expensively to Hawaii and Puerto Rico, not actually something like an adequate stopgap for emergency international shipping.
Indeed, we did a vast amount of cargo shipping during the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and very little of that was on US-flagged shipping.
OK, but "willingness to piss off Iraq and Afghanistan" and "willingness to piss of China (during a hypothetical US-China war)" are two very, very different things.
But either way we don't have the boats.
If the Jones Act provided us with a strong merchant marine fleet at the cost of increasing domestic shipping to PR and HI then I think we could talk about tradeoffs.
But it doesn't, I think mainly because rail/trucking is so efficient that we don't need any port->port transport on the mainland, and certainly not at those prices. Maybe if the Jones Act went away we might have a bit more port->port transport as the prices dropped, but that would be shifting resources from trucking/rail rather than other boats.
We just get so little out of it and penalize Hawaii/PR so much for it.
(Heck, often when here's an emergency we waive it because we _don't_ have the ships for an emergency)
thanks, and yes exactly this.
i mean, sure - you could still say get rid of it - but at least address this point.
Makes sense, thanks.
Can anyone recommend a good primer on the fundamental problem with de-growth as an idea/ideology (from Matt or otherwise)?
I come from a pretty progressive, environmentalist background/social context. I've never been "deep green" (I value humans and culture too much) but in my teens and twenties, I thought that the world's problems could only be solved if the upper-class people of the world could learn to live with less (space, stuff, etc), and we could find a way to "decouple" various kinds of progress from economic growth/resource usage.
In the last couple of years, though, I'm more and more drawn to centrist, growth-oriented, abundance-oriented writing and thinking. But even recognizing the good things growth gets us and the problems caused by de-growth, I haven't quite been able to shake the Malthusian intuition that there are hard limits which will ultimately find us out in the end, in particular if we can't innovate fast enough.
So I'm somewhere in the middle on this, which makes it hard to advocate for growth (especially to people I know who care a lot about environmental issues). How I can educate myself more on this?
One of the best books I've ever read was "Beyond Growth" By Herman Daly.
Note even as someone with a BA in economics it can be a bit technical at times.
Still I think it's broadly helpful. One distinction it makes is the difference between growth and development.
With growth being defined as more resource use, but development being better use of resources. So building printing more books might be growth, but letting everyone read those books on a tablet they already own might be development.
The book also makes some really good critiques about how free trade should work.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-elemental-foe (the best ever noahpinion post imo)
and more:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/degrowth-we-cant-let-it-happen-here
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yes-its-possible-to-imagine-progressive
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth
Thanks, this is exactly what I was hoping to find! Appreciate it.
Very good question, I also want to know this!
I agree with you - I'm not like "humanity must embrace degrowth as penance for its sins," but I also think Matt Y is a bit too quick to dismiss environmental concerns with a, "fighting climate change is super easy, barely an inconvenience!* Just put up some solar panels and wind turbines and we can have eco-friendly luxury and abundance for all!" It's a lot more complicated than that.
*Any excuse to drop in a Pitch Meeting reference is a good excuse
It certainly is complicated. But there seems to be an *axiom* around these parts that de-growth is an incoherent or toxic position. That is, that it wouldn't be possible for a fair-minded thinker to support de-growth after a principled consideration of all the costs and benefits. And that's the part I'm not quite understanding. I can intuitively see all the ways that growth is good and how it's good for the world to get richer, but it still seems possible that we could grow (irresponsibly) to the point that we destroy ourselves.
I wonder if the problem with de-growth is: we can easily imagine a future world in which A) we stop economic growth, B) we redistribute wealth so that everyone has a decent (if not luxurious) living standard, and C) humankind exists in perpetuity thus.
But perhaps it's *not* in fact possible to satisfy A, B and C. Maybe if you stop economic growth, living standards will inevitably degrade over time? That's an unsettling proposition, but maybe it's just a fact?
If people want to chose to live with less more power to then. But if people want to use the police power of the state to force OTHER people to live with less I will oppose that with everything I have and the majority of the voters will too.
Why is the environment so much cleaner in rich countries than poor ones? It seems like the richer people get the cleaner the environment becomes.
This is called the “Kuznets Curve”, and it’s a pretty standard feature in Econ textbooks (not quite 101, but close). There’s a good amount of scholarship out there on it.
The richer people get, the less visible, gross pollution you get - like soot or the Cuyahoga catching fire.
The richer people get, the more greenhouse gas emissions you get - CO2 from cars and power plants, methane from cows - and that's a big problem, and people have shown they have zero interest in internalizing the externalities (witness all the carbon tax ballot measures that went up in flames, not unlike large chunks of California in recent years).
“ The richer people get, the more greenhouse gas emissions you get - CO2 from cars and power plants”
Then build some nuclear plants and use that energy to charge the EVs. It’s not some insurmountable challenge - we’ve had the nuke technology for 70 years and the EV tech is moving along nicely.
New multifamily housing is broadly considered obscene decadence, and building meaningful amounts of public transit with American cost structures would plausibly exceed world GDP. We are going to need to be many orders of magnitude richer as a country to reduce CO2 emissions.
> New multifamily housing is broadly considered obscene decadence
By whom? I'm not following.
Although it does seem that the richest countries are the ones whose carbon emissions are actually decreasing now. It’ll be interesting to see when (whether?) rich countries eventually have fewer carbon emissions per capita than others.