re the Klein mention, I find it helpful to just think of anti-capitalists as trying to attach other Left issues to their agenda to get more folks on board. It's not unique - my Libertarian friends do the same thing. But it's dangerous because it confuses the normies, and instead of building a broader left coalition these actors tend to galvanize opposition to otherwise reasonable ideas. Best to run the country from the middle, please.
I think it's hard to understate how damaging to the cause of reducing carbon emissions it's been that so many of the activists pushing on it so clearly have ulterior motives.
Yes. This is part of the logic of intersectionality generally, and also why you get situations like NARAL endorsing "defund the police" or whatever. If every left-wing group forms a united front and supports every other left-wing group's most unpopular positions, then that support will be additive and all the positions will become popular. Or so they think.
And that's why I've said that, if intersectionality had been around in the early to mid-19th Century, slavery would still exist and women still wouldn't have the right to vote because you'd have people explaining that they couldn't support abolition and suffrage without requiring legal recognition of gender self-ID and giving the country back to the Native Americans.
Does the non-libertarian Right do this ever, though? Are people ever like "we absolutely CANNOT ban abortion without addressing the threat of MILITANT ISLAM, and it's TELLING that some people continue to think we can" or "crime is the symptom, THE WELFARE STATE is the disease?"
yeah, at times I respect their ability to be such a tactical coalition. "YOU get anti-abortion judges, YOU get tax cuts and deregulation, YOU get unlimited guns, YOU get a border wall..." Add up the bits and you can hold onto power...
I would say right-wing voters tend to do this "we have school shootings because we got rid of school prayer", but the activists are more savvy.
For instance, you still see the idea that "abortion is bad because there should be consequences for sex" floating around, but it's quarantined to church newsletters and the like.
I guess the sincere answer is the first one is completely ridiculous but the second is something conservatives say all the time. It's an axiomatic part of conservative belief that 'handouts' are at the root of many social ills.
Conservatives do say that, but simultaneously I've never encountered a conservative who said they would refuse to support anti-crime policies unless and until social welfare programs were cut.
Yeah, that's a reasonable point. I guess what felt different enough for me to include that example is I'm not sure there's an analogue to "capitalism" for the right – there's "socialism", but it's presented as a looming menace rather than a monstrous system that has been imposed on everyone for generations to the point it would cause false consciousness. But maybe I'm making too fine of a distinction.
It's not necessarily even that it's best to run the country from the middle. There's just literally no other choice if you want to make incremental (any?) progress
I think that thats' a fair general critique of the left, but in the case of this specific idea (roughly: "the capitalist drive for more consumption drives unsustainable resource usage") isn't just "we want to glom your cause into our cause" - it's a critique that is simultaneously kind of true (at least in that if we didn't have a highly functional industrialized economy we couldn't extract and consume so many resources) and not at all useful for fixing anything.
See, the problem was that China and USSR were forced to compete against the capitalist oppressor, so they had no choice but to emit in order to keep up. But if they had prevailed and brought communism to the entire world, then they would have ushered in a green paradise.
On the topic of the USSR's demise, it is interesting to ponder what could have been, had Gorbachev not lost his grip on the tiger's tail while attempting to transform the Soviet Union into a modern social democracy. Certainly that's been on the minds of Chinese leadership ever since.
Yes. Though the Chinese are probably more gunshy than they need to be since China is so much more homogeneous than the USSR was, relatively speaking. The country could probably survive a more honest-to-goodness transformation without splintering quite so much or losing as much power relative to the rest of the world.
1. No matter what you think of building new nuclear plants, closing old ones is insane if you care about climate, since the main problem with nuclear is the cost of building new plants. Environmentalists killed Indian Point because they prioritize their anti-nuclear stance over lowering carbon emissions.
2. WA killed two attempts at carbon pricing via the incentive process.
3. Coastal CA is dominated by NIMBYs who fight all new housing developments despite density being good for the climate and density in moderate climates like CA even better.
These are all regions were the GOP doesn't have much power. Still climate is a lesser priority.
Evidence is overwhelming voters don't care about climate
The French plan did not have a rebate to make non-affluent whole, unlike Canada's or virtually all proposals in US, including one before Senate currently.
You are accepting the premise that a person making 6 times the global average should not have to pay $100 in taxes to fight global warming. Low income French make many times what the average person in the world makes. If that is the case climate change is happening. Build a sea wall.
Yup, a poor person in France is rich by world standards. I realize everyone in a rich country has been a net winner so far from not having to pay for fossil fuels' negative externalities. I didn't say they shouldn't have to pay $100 towards reducing climate change, just that mass acceptance of a carbon fee will almost certainly depend on offsetting the income effect of higher fossil fuel prices for all but the rich, while keeping the substitution effect of those higher prices to make the transition to renewables happen. Even with a rebate carbon pricing is going to be very difficult to do.
I have no clue about the actual demographics of the Gilets Jaunes, but the characterization of them on any left-of-center website I ever read was that they were middle class/upper middle class, not the poor.
My vague impression is the same but I wasn't claiming they were poor, just that they were not offered anything in exchange for higher fuel prices, which a rebate would offer for all but the affluent in most carbon fee proposals.
With climate change as with so many other issues, I think what left-wing activists don't like about economists is the absence of a role for repentance in economics. The kinds of people who admire Naomi Klein (like the twitter account "j.d. vance's 'holler aunt'", a name i remember because i've looked up that one tweet so many times) tend to doubt that any large-scale problem can be solved without a "reckoning" that upsets current moral and social rankings and imposes new ones. Economists could model other people's repentance as a good which people are willing to spend effort to obtain, or people's own repentance as a tax they seek to avoid, but I don't know how economics could incorporate the moral distinction anti-capitalists want to assert between incentivizing actions with shame and incentivizing them with affectively agnostic money or time.
yes, it seems clear to me at least that climate change has taken on the mantle of Judgement Day, a sort of coming end to the world at which humanity will be judged for its many sins, and the only way to avert the Last Judgement from arriving too soon is to, like Nineveh, wail and repent until Nature (i.e. God) takes pity on our souls
Spend some time listening to left-NIMBY discourse in SF, and you will get a very good lesson in just how much disdain many sectors of the left have for economics.
See: Robert Reich and his opposition of building apartments because it might "gentrify" a town where the average house price is already well over 1.5M.
I definitely see what you’re saying. Especially among progressives, I think there’s a general frustration with “economism” that is much less heavy hitting than what you’re calling “reckoning” movements.
Honestly, economists themselves don’t even bear much blame here as they tend to be serious academics. But there seems to be a gene that activates in a handful of people when they turn like 16 and lasts forever that makes the entirety of their identity about preaching the gospel of minimizing costs and maximizing profits. In my generation it was an obsession with constantly talking about decreasing marginal returns. Generation before it was Arthur Laffer. This persona strikes myself and many as lacking necessary humanitarianism and nuance to lead anything serious.
Dave Roberts is hilarious here. He argues that economists downplay political realities when they propose things like carbon taxes, which, sure. But if your solution to that political economy problem is to tie climate policy to even more unpopular ideas like the GND, then you're being a partisan hack, not a serious person.
He also decries applying discount rates to future climate outcomes. But unless he supports diverting medicaid spending to green energy investment, then he applies discount rates as well, he's just too dumb or too dishonest to realize it.
To best understand Roberts' post, it helps to be familiar with some of the long-running intramural arguments in the environmental community. In particular, a prominent piece of folk mythology among a broad swathe of climate activists is that the environmental movement's one-time enthusiasm for a carbon tax was originallyand largely meant as a sop to conservatives.
According to this narrative, left-wing climate types agreed to ditch the command-and-control regulation of corporations that they preferred in favor of less effective but more politically palatable market-based solutions.* Conservatives, the thinking went, hate regulations but love markets, so carbon taxes represented a sort of middle ground that left and right could unite on.
That carbon taxes are a total dead letter, in this telling, reflects the perfidy of the right and the foolishness of environmentalists who were willing to water down their policy ambitions out of political expediency.
In this telling, economists play a sort of pied piper role. Matt quotes Greg Mankiw, but Greg Mankiw is just the problem! Greg Mankiw can go on all day long about how great carbon taxes are, and he can chair the Council of Economic Advisors, and he can advise Republican presidential candidates. What he can't do, however, is actually make Republican politicians care about climate change. The problem here (again, in this telling) isn't with the Republican politicians or voters in general. It's with economists for cheerleading a bunch of hopeless policies that distract all the well-meaning climate activists.
This narrative, as far as I can tell, is pretty much entirely bullshit. I've worked in cimate circles for over fifteen years, and in my recollection the enthusiasm for carbon taxes on the left was entirely sincere. It would take a better historian than me to really dig in on the genesis and development of climate policy thinking and activism, but simply as a matter of common sense it doesn't really track that environmentalists would preemptively organize their agenda around conservative policy preferences.
Regardless, the notion that support for carbon taxes on the left was largely a misguided and unrequited attempt to extend an olive branch to conservatives runs underneath Roberts' critique of economists.
* I am eliding some considerable nuance here. In particular, back in the day, cap-and-trade was seen as a sop to conservatives, with carbon taxes being the purity option for those on the left. (Cap-and-trade = markets = Enron = capitalism = bad.) Over time, as environmentalists have soured on carbon taxes altogether, they seem to have gotten lumped together with cap-and-trade as a shiny bauble that have distracted us from what we should have been doing all along: large-scale industrial policy.
I don't know what came before when and what caused what, but I think that the idea that carbon taxes or similar market-oriented schemes would be a middle ground that could generate some enthusiasm on the right was part of the equation, and did in fact fail.
I don't think it was a perfidious false-flag operation by economists meant to get the environmental movement to waste its time, energy, and political capital on doomed projects to undermine them.
When people saw the effect of acid rain in the eighties, most developed countries adopted taxes on SO2 emissions and similar gasses. That worked well and fast and everyone was happy (even Republicans).
This helped convince lots of people that market based solutions (carbon taxes or tradable emission rights) would work.
In the EU there is the EmissionTrading System with perhaps not enough sectors covered and too many rights issued …
Yes, and the success of a cap-and-trade system for addressing ozone depletion was an even more salient example back when many of these arguments were playing out. In fact, some carbon tax purists were so intent on denigrating cap and trade that they began arguing that ozone depletion would have been addressed more quickly if cap and trade hadn't been the policy mechanism employed. Cap and trade enthusiasts were equally eager to point out the political economy benefits of cap and trade.
But, as mentioned, eventually carbon pricing fell out of favor, which is when the myth sprang up that all such proposals were neoliberal schemes pushed by out-of-touch economists.
I agree about 90%. [I'm an economist, after all.] The 10% is in WHY the pubic opposes a carbon tax. I don't think it is primarily that they don't take climate change seriously enough, but rather think that a carbon tax would be much more disruptive (i.e. much higher increase in their gasoline and electricity bills) than would in fact be the case. And this fear while real should not be taken 100% as given. In part it is driven by some climate activists exaggerating the harm from climate change and conservatives exaggerating the size of and harm from a carbon tax. Economists' message that we have a (comparatively) easy solution to a very real and growing problem is a hard sell.
It's sort of like removing restrictions on more dense residential and commercial development and affordable housing. Everyone is afraid the low-income skyscraper will go up on the lot next to them.
This sounds right. I have literally no sort of knowledge of how a carbon tax works, but my gut instance is that it would someone how effect me more directly than some other intervention that didn't have the world "tax" in it.
Interesting anecdote. My brother in law owns a restaurant. Last year he switched is pricing system so that the prices included tax. So... burger used to cost $5, now costs $5.30 on the menu... man people got upset. They were paying the exact same thing... but having the higher price visible just irked them.
Not sure how it relates to this, but people are irrational. Especially with the word tax.
Definitely that is part of the problem. It no accident that one half of the wage tax is "paid" by the employer although the effects on workers incomes would be the same if 1005 came from their salary.
Matt is telling us that, if our goal is to solve climate change, then there's no point in hating on economists -- it's just not instrumentally effective.
I can live with that.
I never thought that hating on economists was a way to address climate change in any case. It just seemed like the rational reaction to economists per se, no matter what you think about climate change.
Economists are like military professionals - some good insights on how to achieve a goal or value, but no special insight on what the goal or value should be. Big mistake to confuse their expertise on means with expertise on ends.
For example, should we occupy and try to remake a distant foreign country? Military experts have something useful to say about how, not so much about whether.
Many of us see this as actually a part of our positivist training. We will tell you the right way to build housing in Hell, and then when you scream at us from your sulfuric smoldering armchairs respond, "But you never asked if living there was a good idea."
The goal is to reduce emissions to reduce future damage from climate change. Since even the measurable costs of the damage are so huge, it's clear that even reasonably efficient policies will be worth it, even when you include some cost to growth.
I just don't *get* David Robert's point here. He seems to critique a carbon-pricing solution because it faces "political-economy problems". Yet, his approach seems best summed up by the title of one of his prior podcasts: "How to replace everything in the industrialized world". How does that face far steeper "political-economy problems"?
If you look at polls people tend to prefer the "How to replace everything in the industrialized world" model.
That model is about the government spending lots of money on subsidies and R&D, and it is not as directly clear to voters who is paying for it. But with carbon pricing it is extremely clear who is paying for it, as they can directly see prices going up related to carbon pricing.
This whole thing is stupid and irrational. Of course the regular voter is still paying for the subsidies and R&D. If we pay for it through taxes on the rich, then those taxes on the rich could have been raised regardless and used to pay for tax cuts for the poor and middle class. But people don't notice that opportunity cost.
I think it is unfortunate that so many voters act in these irrational ways that lead us to suboptimal policy outcomes, but I don't see another solution. And I'll take the suboptimal solution over no solution at all.
That would actually be Dave's underlying problem. He is a journalist and has, at best, a superficial understanding of science and technology. This leads to a large amount of gullibility when it comes to these issues. How to achieve world peace would seem to present an easier challenge.
I wonder if it's based on the "climate justice" approach to the issue. The idea is that a carbon pricing solution would be a hard sell to marginalized communities, and you need their buy in for a comprehensive solution. Other options might be better at taking their policy preferences into account, and should be pursued instead.
I think this is part of why everyone was arguing about david shor last week -- the cognitive dissonance some people feel when marginalized communities aren't as progressive as they are can be *intense*
Well, there's also the fact that marginalized communities almost by definition don't necessarily have a great deal of political power, which you would need to actually accomplish things.
We are annoying to other academics. It’s too bad because when we do take the time to choke down a little humility, they let us onto their grants and then realize we do have some good ideas. We also eat our own kind. I’ve worked with non economists on joint articles who observe that Econ peer reviews are particularly harsh relative to their disciplines. And an econ faculty meeting during budget cuts is like the Serengeti during a drought. Still, carbon tax just seems so obvious (see, lack of humility).
How long is peer review for you? I wouldn't be surprised if it's more like math (...because of all the math) and takes many months. In biomedical sciences, for example, peer review is anywhere from 10-30 days.
Oh, 6-8 months submission-to-decision would be fast unless it is a top journal where the decision time is about 45 days (according to AEA editors), but at top journals that quick decision is of course often a quick desk rejection so I'm skeptical of the 45-day claim. For mid-level or field journals, 1 year start to finish is not abnormal. 3 rounds of reviews is not abnormal either. And you will hear economists tell you about 3 rounds of review only to be rejected...that sucks. This is why our assistant professors sweat bullets right up to tenure hoping that an editor gets back to them and is also why deans can't understand why economists' CVs are short compared to other disciplines.
I will say one year start to finish is becoming much more normal than I'd like in our field too, and that's because of multiple journal submissions, multiple rounds, etc. but also because editorial staff are also extremely slow these days. It's not uncommon for a paper to take 2-3 weeks to even be sent for review and a couple weeks upon receipt of the reviews for a decision to be made. And then responding to the reviews can take 3-6 months of new experiments, calculations, etc. I even had a paper recently where the editor had to get a fourth reviewer to adjudicate a debate between the previous three, adding another month (thankfully it ended in our favor at least).
Oh wait, sorry, this isn't where we complain about publishing? :D
Some people make a big deal about their twitter following ("public engagement"), maybe we could do the same with substack comments? Good luck to the first assistant prof who tries it. :D
Yeah, sorry. But if I can do it, so can you. The good news is that your colleagues get this and a good econ department chair always fights for you at tenure time. Advice for you. If you ever get asked to contribute to a special journal issue, always say yes. Those turnaround times are short and even if they don't carry the same weight as a field journal, they pay dividends in getting you name out there. Keep your head down, try to stay focused. The goal is a publication, not getting a Nobel. Exercise. A lot. Find someone you can kvetch to, a therapist, a friend from grad school, a spouse, a dog (cats don't care if you get tenure). It's a slog, and you'll hate it, but you can do it.
Thanks, Matt, for this good rejoinder to David Roberts. But Roberts was not all wrong. There are good arguments and bad arguments both for and against carbon taxes. Economists are sometimes on the right side and sometimes on the wrong side.
Roberts is right when he says that economists go-to knee-jerk argument in favor of carbon taxes -- the argument based on efficiency or optimality -- is not a strong one. BTW I am an economist myself (PhD Yale) and if you read my Econ 101 textbook and some of my blogs, especially older ones, you will find diagrams that show that if you have a market that is perfectly competitive except for an externality in the form of carbon emissions, and if you calculate the correct social price of carbon, and if you put a universal tax equal to that social cost of carbon on all emissions from everywhere in the global economy, you get a perfectly efficient, optimal degree of reduction in carbon emissions. That is true proposition. But it is so far from describing the real world that it has only limited relevance to the climate debate. We can't calculate the social cost of carbon, markets aren't competitive, carbon taxes can't be imposed globally, etc.
At the same time, though, we need to recognize that many of the arguments that climate activists make against carbon taxes are no less flawed. For example, many left critics say that carbon taxes are not good because they can only achieve incremental reductions in emissions, not deep decarbonization. Not true. (See here: http://tiny.cc/DeeP ) Or the argument that carbon taxes are a one-trick pony that can cut a bit off the demand for fossil fuels, but does little else. Not true. (See here: http://tiny.cc/versatility ) Or the argument that carbon taxes are a trick invented by capitalists to increase their profits by destroying the world. Hardly even worth refuting.
But David and Matt and lots of other more thoughtful critics are right when they say that economists don't pay enough attention to the political downside of carbon taxes. Anything that raises the price of gas at the pump is not popular. Not even if the money goes to filling potholes rather than something as hazy as making life better for our grandchildren.
But I have just one thing say about that argument. What makes me hopping mad is the disingenuousness of climate activists who say that we can't have carbon taxes because they are politically unpopular, when it is THEIR OWN wrong, ill-informed, ideologically driven rants against carbon taxes that are a lot of the reason they are politically unpopular.
Come on guys. We are all on the same team. We all want to save the polar bears. Let's behave like a team, not like a bunch of Bolsheviks arguing with a bunch of Mensheviks. Carbon taxes are just a tool, one that is not a silver bullet but one that can make other climate policies work more effectively.
A carbon tax is unpopular because raising taxes is unpopular. I'll be enthused about pursuing a carbon tax that fundamentally changes how people behave right after politicians show they can successfully pass a five cent increase in federal gasoline taxes. Of course, in such a case, we wouldn't need a carbon tax because global warming would already have been averted, as evidenced by our ability to ice skate in Hell.
Of course you can get around this, as we have, by cutting taxes or otherwise throwing money at green energy sources. That is, effectively making the existing taxes lopsided.
I see an argument all the time that says something to the effect of "climate policy can be unpopular, that's why we need to tie it to other economic policy related to jobs (like the GND) so the overall package of policies can be popular."
The problem is that if those economic policies were actually popular, there would be more support for them among politicians and voters.
It is not the climate activist's ideological rants that make a carbon tax unpopular. It is the word "tax." Once the label "tax" was affixed, carbon industry advocates had all the ammunition they needed to keep it unpalatable forever.
In your experience, do economists pay more attention to the political downside of any policy they advocate? Are carbon taxes just the most high profile example?
COVID has shown us the degree to which different groups will lift a finger for the common good.
The right has shown the only finger they will lift for the common good is their middle finger at doctors. The left has been better in this instance, but only because the stimulus programs that happened was fairly naturally aligned with their prior desires in terms of a more generous welfare state, at least for now.
But the left also has zero clean hands on the climate issue. The minute you want to upzone Berkeley, where average house prices are well past 1.5M and HHI approaching 100K, leftist like Robert Reich send in letters opposing over matters like parking. Sure, they wrap the issue in a thin veneer of "but muh working class" by talking about how poor people drive more. But it's all bad faith, all the way down.
Bottom line, people are selfish, tribal creatures that like to pretend they care about the kids and "the future", but would more often than not sell their own kids into indentured servitude for a free cruise if you gave them the chance.
SF, where you'd think climate issues would be winning ones, can't even close a street through golden gate park because the local ex hippies lose their minds if you take away so much as one parking space where they park their gas powered 60s era hippy bus.
If your climate plan depends on the goodness of humans making sacrifices of any type for more than two weeks, it is politically DOA and will not happen.
The reason people hate Elon isn't because he is rich. It's because he offers a way out using technology that does not require some sort of moral absolution in order to get there. Which strips authoritarian leftists of their fantasy world where you take a bunch of people who disagree with you and force them to live in the manner of your choosing. Similar to how the authoritarian right wants to force everyone to live in a Christian Nation where the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale is seen as a utopia.
This is why technology advancement is *the only* way that this gets solved. Inventing things requires a small group of people with a clever idea - and isn't subject to your average self-interested meat sack with nose attached vetoing it. Solar is powerful (pun intended) because despite its flaws, you typically don't have to ask for permission to deploy it (though some will try - don't give ppl more ideas). Electric cars are powerful because Elon, bless his heart, figured out a way to make something on balance good for the planet also something that allows idiots to still go "zoom zoom".
Agree with all of this. Economics can't, though, supply an answer to a central question underlying the question of what we should do about climate change -- who is "we"? There isn't agreement about collective obligations to other people even among those currently living in the same national community today, let alone what is the obligation of humans living today to make sacrifices for some degree of improvement in the lives of future humans. I.e., how much of the future is their problem, not ours.
Nor has philosophy, political science, religion or any other discipline provided a consensus answer to those questions. Elections are the best heuristic we have.
When you say "elections", do you mean plurality vote filtered through an electoral college, or direct plurality vote, or plurality vote in several hundred individual electoral districts, or instant runoff voting in one big election, or instant runoff voting in several hundred individual districts, or proportional representation, or mixed-member proportional, or something else? There's a whole field of study of these different options, being conducted by economists, political scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and others, and yet basically none of it ever gets brought to bear in American practice. (New York and Maine have recently changed their electoral system, but most of the range of possibility isn't even being discussed anywhere.)
This seems to be strangely conflating the philosophical underpinnings of an argument, with the mechanical way the public are asked to express a preference. The process of having an election cannot tell you the answer to 'who is 'we'?'
What better way is there to answer the question of how much people living today should sacrifice for the interests of future people, than to put it to a vote?
Recognizing that in the future people will both have better information about the problem and options facing them, and be constrained by choices already made....
It is not a given that taking action against climate change will not cause great harm future generations.
There's a very real risk that we will misallocate resources in a way that reduces worldwide GDP growth for decades and makes the world significantly poorer. The damage from this reduced worldwide wealth could very easily offset all the benefits of climate change mitigation.
It's a balance and the trick is to figure out an appropriate level of wealth to reallocate to climate action and then to figure out how to spend those funds to achieve the highest impact.
In arriving at a proper discount rate for climate costs, how do you account for the significant possibility of technological improvements and breakthroughs in addressing the costs far more cheaply in the future?
This is another reason why using high discount rates in these models is appropriate. The discount rate reflects the level of uncertainty in the future cash flows. Many things can affect uncertainty of future cash flows and uncertainty around future tech innovations is a big one.
These models have so much unavoidable uncertainty embedded in them that their outputs should be interpreted as "if this, then this happens" rather than "this will happen."
Despite this huge limitation, they still can be useful for illuminating possible impacts and consequences. The key is to realize that they don't and can't support confident claims about the likelihood or severity of any specific real world impacts.
When you consider the feedback effects (e.g., sea water and tundra absorb more heat than the ice that used to cover them) and the tail risks of some decidedly non-linear effects in the models, this is not a prudent argument and most economists don't support it.
"The discounting approach that the U.S. government currently uses to analyze climate regulations and other policies – a constant discount rate calibrated to market rates – was identified by experts as the least desirable approach for setting discount rates in the context of climate policies. Nearly half (46%) of respondents favored an approach that featured declining discount rates, while 44% favored using rates calibrated with ethical parameters."
It took me over an hour to drive home yesterday because there are too few bridges crossing I-75. It took me almost as long to drive from work to pickleball the day before because Jonesboro road is still two lanes even though the population it serves has almost doubled. These problems are recent. Yet MY thinks we have plenty of roads and bridges and is boosting transit projects that won’t make my life any better.
Today, he wrote repeatedly that voters are the problem. Strange words for a popularist. I’m happy to support subsidized wind and solar power and research into nuclear and batteries. I’m happy to create jobs weatherizing old buildings, and I love attacking rich carbon spewers. I’m not willing to take a big lifestyle hit and that makes me normal. Dismissing my need for better roads and bridges while telling me that my views are part of the problem is a political dead end.
Fund my roads and I’ll fund your research. That’s how politics works.
I think it’s a good frame that keeps me grounded. 85% of workers drive a car to work. No one likes traffic. As a white Georgian who has never voted for a Republican for Congress or the legislature, I am probably more willing to sacrifice my economic interests for the common good than the median voter. Which means that any agenda which alienates me by telling me to suck it up and live like an urban liberal isn’t going to play well in the provinces.
1) yes, but i don’t see any other equally visble solutions. where is transit a good answer for commutes between outer suburbs and exurbs?
2) no community is typical of the country. this includes the urban areas and inner suburbs MY tends to focus on. indeed, more people live in places like McDonough and Peachtree City than places like Dupont Circle or Arlington. Car drivers from outer burbs are a big constituency.
Traffic is why roads are worth building. A road that isn't operating near capacity is a gigantic waste of money.
The big problem is that most roads are over capacity for about an hour a day, and massively under capacity for about 23 hours a day, and they produce much less value than a road that is near capacity for even two hours a day.
Maybe it's not the most innovative idea out there, but I've seen roads where lanes switch direction based on the time of day. I'm surprised it's not used more. I guess it's just too difficult to pull off safely in many cases, but it seems like it would be worth figuring out?
In places with strongly directional commuter flows this can be good. They use it on the Golden Gate Bridge, and in Houston they use it for the HOV lane on the freeways (for some reason there's only one lane, with this reversing flow, and its own support structures, rather than a lane on the existing support structures in each direction) as well as for at least one arterial road towards downtown.
I think it can be more effective though to just distribute residences and jobs a bit more evenly through the metro area, so that every direction of travel is used more equally - and perhaps even better, if you can find a way to get employers to not have the same start and end times for everyone, so the traffic flows can be more equal throughout the day.
This is also why I really like "sunday streets" type events, where certain roadways are opened up as linear parks and closed to cars on Sundays, when driving demand is much lower and park demand is much higher.
I think the country would be a better place if more people contextualized their opinions around their own lived experience rather than around caricatures of what they think other people they've never met want/need.
I appreciate how grounded your comment is, really. It's a reminder of how solvable this problem is - get you some more roads and nice electric cars with renewable power sources, and BAM you're pretty good to go with an environmentally friendly existence that's no worse for you.
This is the kind of green energy plan I could get behind. Hope we can get there as a country.
I'm a conservative economist, and I also have long supported a net zero carbon tax. IE, one that lowers taxes on labor and replaces them with taxes on carbon. Moreover, I remember reading conservative economists in the Weekly Standard advocating the same probably 10+ years ago.
I also strongly agree that while capital budgeting (discounting of the future) is a great way for companies to look at projects. It makes little sense from the standpoint of society as a whole.
Because capital budgeting basically says our grand children have no value. But most would disagree.
Matt mentions GRE scores for economics being high…what are they for sociology? Sociologists are creating infrastructure for massive future employment with DEIA departments and these will be high paying jobs because if they aren’t it will be a signal the organization doesn’t take it seriously. In the analysis of easy degree vs high pay this is going to be the way to go!
Normally I think it's not worth getting too worked up either way about what private companies and organizations do about DEI - it's a free country, after all.
But this "trap house" incident at Yale Law School of the diversity officer's inanity is a bridge too far. This isn't just anywhere - it Yale Law, direct pipeline to power, sinking to this level of thought policing. Has there been a single complaint that Chapo Trap House is offensive?
While I haven't heard anyone complain that the name "Chapo Trap House" is offensive yet, the kind of people who would complain about such a thing are also probably overwhelmingly the people who call Chapo Trap House part of the "dirtbag left" and otherwise sneer at it for its class-over-identity focus.
I don’t think they will be HR. DEIA has to be its own department for status reasons. My organization has crated a group with a director. Within a year it is already staffed with 4 people. A DEIA project manager? What do they do? What skills are needed? Quite frankly, if they really want to make improvements they should hire someone with an Econ background. A sociologists will just go around espousing social justice rhetoric supported by bad causal links.
re the Klein mention, I find it helpful to just think of anti-capitalists as trying to attach other Left issues to their agenda to get more folks on board. It's not unique - my Libertarian friends do the same thing. But it's dangerous because it confuses the normies, and instead of building a broader left coalition these actors tend to galvanize opposition to otherwise reasonable ideas. Best to run the country from the middle, please.
I think it's hard to understate how damaging to the cause of reducing carbon emissions it's been that so many of the activists pushing on it so clearly have ulterior motives.
Yes. This is part of the logic of intersectionality generally, and also why you get situations like NARAL endorsing "defund the police" or whatever. If every left-wing group forms a united front and supports every other left-wing group's most unpopular positions, then that support will be additive and all the positions will become popular. Or so they think.
(Math joke) They are trying to form a union but end up forming an intersection.
Lol that's exactly right.
And that's why I've said that, if intersectionality had been around in the early to mid-19th Century, slavery would still exist and women still wouldn't have the right to vote because you'd have people explaining that they couldn't support abolition and suffrage without requiring legal recognition of gender self-ID and giving the country back to the Native Americans.
African Americans got the vote before Native Americans by over 50 years...
Does the non-libertarian Right do this ever, though? Are people ever like "we absolutely CANNOT ban abortion without addressing the threat of MILITANT ISLAM, and it's TELLING that some people continue to think we can" or "crime is the symptom, THE WELFARE STATE is the disease?"
"my authoritarianism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit"
yeah, at times I respect their ability to be such a tactical coalition. "YOU get anti-abortion judges, YOU get tax cuts and deregulation, YOU get unlimited guns, YOU get a border wall..." Add up the bits and you can hold onto power...
"crime is the symptom, THE WELFARE STATE is the disease?"
Are you being satirical? This is a really common thing they say?
I think that person is actually asking a question - do activists on the right do this same linking of causes the way that activists on the left do?
I would say right-wing voters tend to do this "we have school shootings because we got rid of school prayer", but the activists are more savvy.
For instance, you still see the idea that "abortion is bad because there should be consequences for sex" floating around, but it's quarantined to church newsletters and the like.
abortion is bad because your are terminating an innocent human life. No other reasons are needed
I guess the sincere answer is the first one is completely ridiculous but the second is something conservatives say all the time. It's an axiomatic part of conservative belief that 'handouts' are at the root of many social ills.
Conservatives do say that, but simultaneously I've never encountered a conservative who said they would refuse to support anti-crime policies unless and until social welfare programs were cut.
Yeah, that's a reasonable point. I guess what felt different enough for me to include that example is I'm not sure there's an analogue to "capitalism" for the right – there's "socialism", but it's presented as a looming menace rather than a monstrous system that has been imposed on everyone for generations to the point it would cause false consciousness. But maybe I'm making too fine of a distinction.
I think that's the core difference between left and right, though? The right seeks to protect what is, the left to overthrow it and replace it.
People in general make lots of arguments along the lines of, "The thing we agree is bad is caused by the thing I particularly dislike."
Great point!
It's not necessarily even that it's best to run the country from the middle. There's just literally no other choice if you want to make incremental (any?) progress
Agreed. While I support the idea of a net zero carbon tax. I strongly oppose the Green New Deal Agenda.
I don't want to remake the economy. I just want to pay a bit now, to protect against the risks of climate change
I think that thats' a fair general critique of the left, but in the case of this specific idea (roughly: "the capitalist drive for more consumption drives unsustainable resource usage") isn't just "we want to glom your cause into our cause" - it's a critique that is simultaneously kind of true (at least in that if we didn't have a highly functional industrialized economy we couldn't extract and consume so many resources) and not at all useful for fixing anything.
The problem is the voters.
1 In France they raised the price of gas via gas tax and the county almost fell apart.
2 80% in Europe and America believes climate is a serious issue and 72% will not vote for $100 I. Higher taxes to fix it.
3 climate activists are really anti capitalist activists. Like China is a low emitting country. Or the USSR was a low emission country.
See, the problem was that China and USSR were forced to compete against the capitalist oppressor, so they had no choice but to emit in order to keep up. But if they had prevailed and brought communism to the entire world, then they would have ushered in a green paradise.
People actually say this and it makes me want roll coal in my Prius
Rolling finely powdered lithium isn't as visually spectacular as rolling coal, but it's a lot more deadly to bystanders in the immediate vicinity.
On the topic of the USSR's demise, it is interesting to ponder what could have been, had Gorbachev not lost his grip on the tiger's tail while attempting to transform the Soviet Union into a modern social democracy. Certainly that's been on the minds of Chinese leadership ever since.
Yes. Though the Chinese are probably more gunshy than they need to be since China is so much more homogeneous than the USSR was, relatively speaking. The country could probably survive a more honest-to-goodness transformation without splintering quite so much or losing as much power relative to the rest of the world.
Yup, China is an actual country. The USSR was nothing more than a Russian version of the British Empire
Yup, some other examples.
1. No matter what you think of building new nuclear plants, closing old ones is insane if you care about climate, since the main problem with nuclear is the cost of building new plants. Environmentalists killed Indian Point because they prioritize their anti-nuclear stance over lowering carbon emissions.
2. WA killed two attempts at carbon pricing via the incentive process.
3. Coastal CA is dominated by NIMBYs who fight all new housing developments despite density being good for the climate and density in moderate climates like CA even better.
These are all regions were the GOP doesn't have much power. Still climate is a lesser priority.
Evidence is overwhelming voters don't care about climate
France falls apart on a regular basis though. We are now on the fifth French Republic, in the same time the US only had one.
France also had four monarchies in that period, plus whatever-the-heck Vichy was.
This is the tenth French regime. Arguably the eleventh (Thermidor)
The French plan did not have a rebate to make non-affluent whole, unlike Canada's or virtually all proposals in US, including one before Senate currently.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07717-y
You are accepting the premise that a person making 6 times the global average should not have to pay $100 in taxes to fight global warming. Low income French make many times what the average person in the world makes. If that is the case climate change is happening. Build a sea wall.
Yup, a poor person in France is rich by world standards. I realize everyone in a rich country has been a net winner so far from not having to pay for fossil fuels' negative externalities. I didn't say they shouldn't have to pay $100 towards reducing climate change, just that mass acceptance of a carbon fee will almost certainly depend on offsetting the income effect of higher fossil fuel prices for all but the rich, while keeping the substitution effect of those higher prices to make the transition to renewables happen. Even with a rebate carbon pricing is going to be very difficult to do.
I have no clue about the actual demographics of the Gilets Jaunes, but the characterization of them on any left-of-center website I ever read was that they were middle class/upper middle class, not the poor.
My vague impression is the same but I wasn't claiming they were poor, just that they were not offered anything in exchange for higher fuel prices, which a rebate would offer for all but the affluent in most carbon fee proposals.
I did not see a lot of Algerian Gilets Jaunes.
With climate change as with so many other issues, I think what left-wing activists don't like about economists is the absence of a role for repentance in economics. The kinds of people who admire Naomi Klein (like the twitter account "j.d. vance's 'holler aunt'", a name i remember because i've looked up that one tweet so many times) tend to doubt that any large-scale problem can be solved without a "reckoning" that upsets current moral and social rankings and imposes new ones. Economists could model other people's repentance as a good which people are willing to spend effort to obtain, or people's own repentance as a tax they seek to avoid, but I don't know how economics could incorporate the moral distinction anti-capitalists want to assert between incentivizing actions with shame and incentivizing them with affectively agnostic money or time.
yes, it seems clear to me at least that climate change has taken on the mantle of Judgement Day, a sort of coming end to the world at which humanity will be judged for its many sins, and the only way to avert the Last Judgement from arriving too soon is to, like Nineveh, wail and repent until Nature (i.e. God) takes pity on our souls
"The Anti-Capitalist Shock Doctrine"?
Spend some time listening to left-NIMBY discourse in SF, and you will get a very good lesson in just how much disdain many sectors of the left have for economics.
See: Robert Reich and his opposition of building apartments because it might "gentrify" a town where the average house price is already well over 1.5M.
Why you gotta trigger me with your mention of Rob Reich on this fine morning…
I definitely see what you’re saying. Especially among progressives, I think there’s a general frustration with “economism” that is much less heavy hitting than what you’re calling “reckoning” movements.
Honestly, economists themselves don’t even bear much blame here as they tend to be serious academics. But there seems to be a gene that activates in a handful of people when they turn like 16 and lasts forever that makes the entirety of their identity about preaching the gospel of minimizing costs and maximizing profits. In my generation it was an obsession with constantly talking about decreasing marginal returns. Generation before it was Arthur Laffer. This persona strikes myself and many as lacking necessary humanitarianism and nuance to lead anything serious.
I don't think Laffer was ever taken that seriously. "Something 'D-O-O' economics?"
Milton Friedman was the go to economist for that later 20th century period, I'd argue.
Yes, Laffer was always fringey among actual economists.
Generally speaking most of what vaguely left reformers want can be accommodated under current ways of living. This must be frustrating.
Dave Roberts is hilarious here. He argues that economists downplay political realities when they propose things like carbon taxes, which, sure. But if your solution to that political economy problem is to tie climate policy to even more unpopular ideas like the GND, then you're being a partisan hack, not a serious person.
He also decries applying discount rates to future climate outcomes. But unless he supports diverting medicaid spending to green energy investment, then he applies discount rates as well, he's just too dumb or too dishonest to realize it.
Two ways to judge which it is:
Listen for tough questions in his interview of Senator Tina Smith about the CEPP:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-sen-tina-smith-on-the
Politely ask him some serious questions about the CEPP on Twitter and see how long it takes him to block you.
To best understand Roberts' post, it helps to be familiar with some of the long-running intramural arguments in the environmental community. In particular, a prominent piece of folk mythology among a broad swathe of climate activists is that the environmental movement's one-time enthusiasm for a carbon tax was originallyand largely meant as a sop to conservatives.
According to this narrative, left-wing climate types agreed to ditch the command-and-control regulation of corporations that they preferred in favor of less effective but more politically palatable market-based solutions.* Conservatives, the thinking went, hate regulations but love markets, so carbon taxes represented a sort of middle ground that left and right could unite on.
That carbon taxes are a total dead letter, in this telling, reflects the perfidy of the right and the foolishness of environmentalists who were willing to water down their policy ambitions out of political expediency.
In this telling, economists play a sort of pied piper role. Matt quotes Greg Mankiw, but Greg Mankiw is just the problem! Greg Mankiw can go on all day long about how great carbon taxes are, and he can chair the Council of Economic Advisors, and he can advise Republican presidential candidates. What he can't do, however, is actually make Republican politicians care about climate change. The problem here (again, in this telling) isn't with the Republican politicians or voters in general. It's with economists for cheerleading a bunch of hopeless policies that distract all the well-meaning climate activists.
This narrative, as far as I can tell, is pretty much entirely bullshit. I've worked in cimate circles for over fifteen years, and in my recollection the enthusiasm for carbon taxes on the left was entirely sincere. It would take a better historian than me to really dig in on the genesis and development of climate policy thinking and activism, but simply as a matter of common sense it doesn't really track that environmentalists would preemptively organize their agenda around conservative policy preferences.
Regardless, the notion that support for carbon taxes on the left was largely a misguided and unrequited attempt to extend an olive branch to conservatives runs underneath Roberts' critique of economists.
* I am eliding some considerable nuance here. In particular, back in the day, cap-and-trade was seen as a sop to conservatives, with carbon taxes being the purity option for those on the left. (Cap-and-trade = markets = Enron = capitalism = bad.) Over time, as environmentalists have soured on carbon taxes altogether, they seem to have gotten lumped together with cap-and-trade as a shiny bauble that have distracted us from what we should have been doing all along: large-scale industrial policy.
I don't know what came before when and what caused what, but I think that the idea that carbon taxes or similar market-oriented schemes would be a middle ground that could generate some enthusiasm on the right was part of the equation, and did in fact fail.
I don't think it was a perfidious false-flag operation by economists meant to get the environmental movement to waste its time, energy, and political capital on doomed projects to undermine them.
When people saw the effect of acid rain in the eighties, most developed countries adopted taxes on SO2 emissions and similar gasses. That worked well and fast and everyone was happy (even Republicans).
This helped convince lots of people that market based solutions (carbon taxes or tradable emission rights) would work.
In the EU there is the EmissionTrading System with perhaps not enough sectors covered and too many rights issued …
Yes, and the success of a cap-and-trade system for addressing ozone depletion was an even more salient example back when many of these arguments were playing out. In fact, some carbon tax purists were so intent on denigrating cap and trade that they began arguing that ozone depletion would have been addressed more quickly if cap and trade hadn't been the policy mechanism employed. Cap and trade enthusiasts were equally eager to point out the political economy benefits of cap and trade.
But, as mentioned, eventually carbon pricing fell out of favor, which is when the myth sprang up that all such proposals were neoliberal schemes pushed by out-of-touch economists.
I agree about 90%. [I'm an economist, after all.] The 10% is in WHY the pubic opposes a carbon tax. I don't think it is primarily that they don't take climate change seriously enough, but rather think that a carbon tax would be much more disruptive (i.e. much higher increase in their gasoline and electricity bills) than would in fact be the case. And this fear while real should not be taken 100% as given. In part it is driven by some climate activists exaggerating the harm from climate change and conservatives exaggerating the size of and harm from a carbon tax. Economists' message that we have a (comparatively) easy solution to a very real and growing problem is a hard sell.
It's sort of like removing restrictions on more dense residential and commercial development and affordable housing. Everyone is afraid the low-income skyscraper will go up on the lot next to them.
This sounds right. I have literally no sort of knowledge of how a carbon tax works, but my gut instance is that it would someone how effect me more directly than some other intervention that didn't have the world "tax" in it.
Interesting anecdote. My brother in law owns a restaurant. Last year he switched is pricing system so that the prices included tax. So... burger used to cost $5, now costs $5.30 on the menu... man people got upset. They were paying the exact same thing... but having the higher price visible just irked them.
Not sure how it relates to this, but people are irrational. Especially with the word tax.
Definitely that is part of the problem. It no accident that one half of the wage tax is "paid" by the employer although the effects on workers incomes would be the same if 1005 came from their salary.
Matt is telling us that, if our goal is to solve climate change, then there's no point in hating on economists -- it's just not instrumentally effective.
I can live with that.
I never thought that hating on economists was a way to address climate change in any case. It just seemed like the rational reaction to economists per se, no matter what you think about climate change.
Economists are like military professionals - some good insights on how to achieve a goal or value, but no special insight on what the goal or value should be. Big mistake to confuse their expertise on means with expertise on ends.
For example, should we occupy and try to remake a distant foreign country? Military experts have something useful to say about how, not so much about whether.
Which suggests that economists should always be kept under strict civilian control, by non-economists.
Otherwise, the incentive structure is all wrong, and we wouldn't want that now, would we?
Many of us see this as actually a part of our positivist training. We will tell you the right way to build housing in Hell, and then when you scream at us from your sulfuric smoldering armchairs respond, "But you never asked if living there was a good idea."
"That's not my department!" said Wernher von Braun....
The goal is to reduce emissions to reduce future damage from climate change. Since even the measurable costs of the damage are so huge, it's clear that even reasonably efficient policies will be worth it, even when you include some cost to growth.
https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusreport.pdf
I just don't *get* David Robert's point here. He seems to critique a carbon-pricing solution because it faces "political-economy problems". Yet, his approach seems best summed up by the title of one of his prior podcasts: "How to replace everything in the industrialized world". How does that face far steeper "political-economy problems"?
If you look at polls people tend to prefer the "How to replace everything in the industrialized world" model.
That model is about the government spending lots of money on subsidies and R&D, and it is not as directly clear to voters who is paying for it. But with carbon pricing it is extremely clear who is paying for it, as they can directly see prices going up related to carbon pricing.
This whole thing is stupid and irrational. Of course the regular voter is still paying for the subsidies and R&D. If we pay for it through taxes on the rich, then those taxes on the rich could have been raised regardless and used to pay for tax cuts for the poor and middle class. But people don't notice that opportunity cost.
I think it is unfortunate that so many voters act in these irrational ways that lead us to suboptimal policy outcomes, but I don't see another solution. And I'll take the suboptimal solution over no solution at all.
>If you look at polls people tend to prefer the "How to replace everything in the industrialized world" model.
yeah until you adjust for acquiesence bias
That would actually be Dave's underlying problem. He is a journalist and has, at best, a superficial understanding of science and technology. This leads to a large amount of gullibility when it comes to these issues. How to achieve world peace would seem to present an easier challenge.
I wonder if it's based on the "climate justice" approach to the issue. The idea is that a carbon pricing solution would be a hard sell to marginalized communities, and you need their buy in for a comprehensive solution. Other options might be better at taking their policy preferences into account, and should be pursued instead.
Disclaimer -- this is not my view.
I think this is part of why everyone was arguing about david shor last week -- the cognitive dissonance some people feel when marginalized communities aren't as progressive as they are can be *intense*
Yeah. There's a degree of paternalism here that I struggle with.
Well, there's also the fact that marginalized communities almost by definition don't necessarily have a great deal of political power, which you would need to actually accomplish things.
We are annoying to other academics. It’s too bad because when we do take the time to choke down a little humility, they let us onto their grants and then realize we do have some good ideas. We also eat our own kind. I’ve worked with non economists on joint articles who observe that Econ peer reviews are particularly harsh relative to their disciplines. And an econ faculty meeting during budget cuts is like the Serengeti during a drought. Still, carbon tax just seems so obvious (see, lack of humility).
How long is peer review for you? I wouldn't be surprised if it's more like math (...because of all the math) and takes many months. In biomedical sciences, for example, peer review is anywhere from 10-30 days.
Oh, 6-8 months submission-to-decision would be fast unless it is a top journal where the decision time is about 45 days (according to AEA editors), but at top journals that quick decision is of course often a quick desk rejection so I'm skeptical of the 45-day claim. For mid-level or field journals, 1 year start to finish is not abnormal. 3 rounds of reviews is not abnormal either. And you will hear economists tell you about 3 rounds of review only to be rejected...that sucks. This is why our assistant professors sweat bullets right up to tenure hoping that an editor gets back to them and is also why deans can't understand why economists' CVs are short compared to other disciplines.
I will say one year start to finish is becoming much more normal than I'd like in our field too, and that's because of multiple journal submissions, multiple rounds, etc. but also because editorial staff are also extremely slow these days. It's not uncommon for a paper to take 2-3 weeks to even be sent for review and a couple weeks upon receipt of the reviews for a decision to be made. And then responding to the reviews can take 3-6 months of new experiments, calculations, etc. I even had a paper recently where the editor had to get a fourth reviewer to adjudicate a debate between the previous three, adding another month (thankfully it ended in our favor at least).
Oh wait, sorry, this isn't where we complain about publishing? :D
Congrats on winning the pub after 4 rounds. If only we could put these comments as pubs on our CVs!
Some people make a big deal about their twitter following ("public engagement"), maybe we could do the same with substack comments? Good luck to the first assistant prof who tries it. :D
I just finished the job market... not looking forward to this
Yeah, sorry. But if I can do it, so can you. The good news is that your colleagues get this and a good econ department chair always fights for you at tenure time. Advice for you. If you ever get asked to contribute to a special journal issue, always say yes. Those turnaround times are short and even if they don't carry the same weight as a field journal, they pay dividends in getting you name out there. Keep your head down, try to stay focused. The goal is a publication, not getting a Nobel. Exercise. A lot. Find someone you can kvetch to, a therapist, a friend from grad school, a spouse, a dog (cats don't care if you get tenure). It's a slog, and you'll hate it, but you can do it.
Come to industry. Better pay, interesting questions, less politics.
Thanks, Matt, for this good rejoinder to David Roberts. But Roberts was not all wrong. There are good arguments and bad arguments both for and against carbon taxes. Economists are sometimes on the right side and sometimes on the wrong side.
Roberts is right when he says that economists go-to knee-jerk argument in favor of carbon taxes -- the argument based on efficiency or optimality -- is not a strong one. BTW I am an economist myself (PhD Yale) and if you read my Econ 101 textbook and some of my blogs, especially older ones, you will find diagrams that show that if you have a market that is perfectly competitive except for an externality in the form of carbon emissions, and if you calculate the correct social price of carbon, and if you put a universal tax equal to that social cost of carbon on all emissions from everywhere in the global economy, you get a perfectly efficient, optimal degree of reduction in carbon emissions. That is true proposition. But it is so far from describing the real world that it has only limited relevance to the climate debate. We can't calculate the social cost of carbon, markets aren't competitive, carbon taxes can't be imposed globally, etc.
At the same time, though, we need to recognize that many of the arguments that climate activists make against carbon taxes are no less flawed. For example, many left critics say that carbon taxes are not good because they can only achieve incremental reductions in emissions, not deep decarbonization. Not true. (See here: http://tiny.cc/DeeP ) Or the argument that carbon taxes are a one-trick pony that can cut a bit off the demand for fossil fuels, but does little else. Not true. (See here: http://tiny.cc/versatility ) Or the argument that carbon taxes are a trick invented by capitalists to increase their profits by destroying the world. Hardly even worth refuting.
But David and Matt and lots of other more thoughtful critics are right when they say that economists don't pay enough attention to the political downside of carbon taxes. Anything that raises the price of gas at the pump is not popular. Not even if the money goes to filling potholes rather than something as hazy as making life better for our grandchildren.
But I have just one thing say about that argument. What makes me hopping mad is the disingenuousness of climate activists who say that we can't have carbon taxes because they are politically unpopular, when it is THEIR OWN wrong, ill-informed, ideologically driven rants against carbon taxes that are a lot of the reason they are politically unpopular.
Come on guys. We are all on the same team. We all want to save the polar bears. Let's behave like a team, not like a bunch of Bolsheviks arguing with a bunch of Mensheviks. Carbon taxes are just a tool, one that is not a silver bullet but one that can make other climate policies work more effectively.
A carbon tax is unpopular because raising taxes is unpopular. I'll be enthused about pursuing a carbon tax that fundamentally changes how people behave right after politicians show they can successfully pass a five cent increase in federal gasoline taxes. Of course, in such a case, we wouldn't need a carbon tax because global warming would already have been averted, as evidenced by our ability to ice skate in Hell.
Of course you can get around this, as we have, by cutting taxes or otherwise throwing money at green energy sources. That is, effectively making the existing taxes lopsided.
I see an argument all the time that says something to the effect of "climate policy can be unpopular, that's why we need to tie it to other economic policy related to jobs (like the GND) so the overall package of policies can be popular."
The problem is that if those economic policies were actually popular, there would be more support for them among politicians and voters.
It is not the climate activist's ideological rants that make a carbon tax unpopular. It is the word "tax." Once the label "tax" was affixed, carbon industry advocates had all the ammunition they needed to keep it unpalatable forever.
Even if you call it a "carbon polluter fee" it is still unpopular. Sad.
In your experience, do economists pay more attention to the political downside of any policy they advocate? Are carbon taxes just the most high profile example?
COVID has shown us the degree to which different groups will lift a finger for the common good.
The right has shown the only finger they will lift for the common good is their middle finger at doctors. The left has been better in this instance, but only because the stimulus programs that happened was fairly naturally aligned with their prior desires in terms of a more generous welfare state, at least for now.
But the left also has zero clean hands on the climate issue. The minute you want to upzone Berkeley, where average house prices are well past 1.5M and HHI approaching 100K, leftist like Robert Reich send in letters opposing over matters like parking. Sure, they wrap the issue in a thin veneer of "but muh working class" by talking about how poor people drive more. But it's all bad faith, all the way down.
Bottom line, people are selfish, tribal creatures that like to pretend they care about the kids and "the future", but would more often than not sell their own kids into indentured servitude for a free cruise if you gave them the chance.
SF, where you'd think climate issues would be winning ones, can't even close a street through golden gate park because the local ex hippies lose their minds if you take away so much as one parking space where they park their gas powered 60s era hippy bus.
If your climate plan depends on the goodness of humans making sacrifices of any type for more than two weeks, it is politically DOA and will not happen.
The reason people hate Elon isn't because he is rich. It's because he offers a way out using technology that does not require some sort of moral absolution in order to get there. Which strips authoritarian leftists of their fantasy world where you take a bunch of people who disagree with you and force them to live in the manner of your choosing. Similar to how the authoritarian right wants to force everyone to live in a Christian Nation where the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale is seen as a utopia.
This is why technology advancement is *the only* way that this gets solved. Inventing things requires a small group of people with a clever idea - and isn't subject to your average self-interested meat sack with nose attached vetoing it. Solar is powerful (pun intended) because despite its flaws, you typically don't have to ask for permission to deploy it (though some will try - don't give ppl more ideas). Electric cars are powerful because Elon, bless his heart, figured out a way to make something on balance good for the planet also something that allows idiots to still go "zoom zoom".
The reasons people hate elon is because he's a smug douchebag who won't shut up or stop shitposting
Some good points. But, west coast hippies all drive Teslas today.
Of course they do. The hippy bus broke years ago. That's why it's parked there and doesn't move very much!
Agree with all of this. Economics can't, though, supply an answer to a central question underlying the question of what we should do about climate change -- who is "we"? There isn't agreement about collective obligations to other people even among those currently living in the same national community today, let alone what is the obligation of humans living today to make sacrifices for some degree of improvement in the lives of future humans. I.e., how much of the future is their problem, not ours.
Nor has philosophy, political science, religion or any other discipline provided a consensus answer to those questions. Elections are the best heuristic we have.
When you say "elections", do you mean plurality vote filtered through an electoral college, or direct plurality vote, or plurality vote in several hundred individual electoral districts, or instant runoff voting in one big election, or instant runoff voting in several hundred individual districts, or proportional representation, or mixed-member proportional, or something else? There's a whole field of study of these different options, being conducted by economists, political scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and others, and yet basically none of it ever gets brought to bear in American practice. (New York and Maine have recently changed their electoral system, but most of the range of possibility isn't even being discussed anywhere.)
This seems to be strangely conflating the philosophical underpinnings of an argument, with the mechanical way the public are asked to express a preference. The process of having an election cannot tell you the answer to 'who is 'we'?'
Are they? Elections of course provide no weight to people who have not yet been born. Seems like a pretty poor heuristic for this question to me.
What better way is there to answer the question of how much people living today should sacrifice for the interests of future people, than to put it to a vote?
Recognizing that in the future people will both have better information about the problem and options facing them, and be constrained by choices already made....
It is not a given that taking action against climate change will not cause great harm future generations.
There's a very real risk that we will misallocate resources in a way that reduces worldwide GDP growth for decades and makes the world significantly poorer. The damage from this reduced worldwide wealth could very easily offset all the benefits of climate change mitigation.
It's a balance and the trick is to figure out an appropriate level of wealth to reallocate to climate action and then to figure out how to spend those funds to achieve the highest impact.
Yes, they can. It’s called public choice. Of course, the answer is roughly “we basically never exists”, but it is studied in detail.
In arriving at a proper discount rate for climate costs, how do you account for the significant possibility of technological improvements and breakthroughs in addressing the costs far more cheaply in the future?
This is another reason why using high discount rates in these models is appropriate. The discount rate reflects the level of uncertainty in the future cash flows. Many things can affect uncertainty of future cash flows and uncertainty around future tech innovations is a big one.
These models have so much unavoidable uncertainty embedded in them that their outputs should be interpreted as "if this, then this happens" rather than "this will happen."
Despite this huge limitation, they still can be useful for illuminating possible impacts and consequences. The key is to realize that they don't and can't support confident claims about the likelihood or severity of any specific real world impacts.
When you consider the feedback effects (e.g., sea water and tundra absorb more heat than the ice that used to cover them) and the tail risks of some decidedly non-linear effects in the models, this is not a prudent argument and most economists don't support it.
https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusreport.pdf
"The discounting approach that the U.S. government currently uses to analyze climate regulations and other policies – a constant discount rate calibrated to market rates – was identified by experts as the least desirable approach for setting discount rates in the context of climate policies. Nearly half (46%) of respondents favored an approach that featured declining discount rates, while 44% favored using rates calibrated with ethical parameters."
It took me over an hour to drive home yesterday because there are too few bridges crossing I-75. It took me almost as long to drive from work to pickleball the day before because Jonesboro road is still two lanes even though the population it serves has almost doubled. These problems are recent. Yet MY thinks we have plenty of roads and bridges and is boosting transit projects that won’t make my life any better.
Today, he wrote repeatedly that voters are the problem. Strange words for a popularist. I’m happy to support subsidized wind and solar power and research into nuclear and batteries. I’m happy to create jobs weatherizing old buildings, and I love attacking rich carbon spewers. I’m not willing to take a big lifestyle hit and that makes me normal. Dismissing my need for better roads and bridges while telling me that my views are part of the problem is a political dead end.
Fund my roads and I’ll fund your research. That’s how politics works.
I admire your commitment to viewing public policy issues thru the prism of your commute home
I think it’s a good frame that keeps me grounded. 85% of workers drive a car to work. No one likes traffic. As a white Georgian who has never voted for a Republican for Congress or the legislature, I am probably more willing to sacrifice my economic interests for the common good than the median voter. Which means that any agenda which alienates me by telling me to suck it up and live like an urban liberal isn’t going to play well in the provinces.
or, to put it more bluntly, I voted for Obama when only 22% of Georgians of my race did so. Good luck getting a majority if you treat me like a rube.
Have you considered the possibility that:
1. Roads and bridges are not the only solution to congestion on I-75?
2. The problems on I-75 are not representative of the country as a whole?
1) yes, but i don’t see any other equally visble solutions. where is transit a good answer for commutes between outer suburbs and exurbs?
2) no community is typical of the country. this includes the urban areas and inner suburbs MY tends to focus on. indeed, more people live in places like McDonough and Peachtree City than places like Dupont Circle or Arlington. Car drivers from outer burbs are a big constituency.
Honest question: is congestion in the greater Atlanta area due more to Democrats than Republicans?
per capita, no, in absolute terms, yes. greater atlanta is as blue as new jersey.
Traffic is why roads are worth building. A road that isn't operating near capacity is a gigantic waste of money.
The big problem is that most roads are over capacity for about an hour a day, and massively under capacity for about 23 hours a day, and they produce much less value than a road that is near capacity for even two hours a day.
Maybe it's not the most innovative idea out there, but I've seen roads where lanes switch direction based on the time of day. I'm surprised it's not used more. I guess it's just too difficult to pull off safely in many cases, but it seems like it would be worth figuring out?
In places with strongly directional commuter flows this can be good. They use it on the Golden Gate Bridge, and in Houston they use it for the HOV lane on the freeways (for some reason there's only one lane, with this reversing flow, and its own support structures, rather than a lane on the existing support structures in each direction) as well as for at least one arterial road towards downtown.
I think it can be more effective though to just distribute residences and jobs a bit more evenly through the metro area, so that every direction of travel is used more equally - and perhaps even better, if you can find a way to get employers to not have the same start and end times for everyone, so the traffic flows can be more equal throughout the day.
This is also why I really like "sunday streets" type events, where certain roadways are opened up as linear parks and closed to cars on Sundays, when driving demand is much lower and park demand is much higher.
yes but you need six lanes for it to work
Congestion pricing++
I believe there is research that we hedonically adjust less to bad commutes than any other bad event.
I think the country would be a better place if more people contextualized their opinions around their own lived experience rather than around caricatures of what they think other people they've never met want/need.
The economists would say the best solution is congestion pricing, since a price of 0 is leading to over use.
bring it, i’ll pay
Here at slow boring the people love congestion pricing!
I appreciate how grounded your comment is, really. It's a reminder of how solvable this problem is - get you some more roads and nice electric cars with renewable power sources, and BAM you're pretty good to go with an environmentally friendly existence that's no worse for you.
This is the kind of green energy plan I could get behind. Hope we can get there as a country.
Here's a good illustration of MY's point about people steeply discounting the future.
I'm a conservative economist, and I also have long supported a net zero carbon tax. IE, one that lowers taxes on labor and replaces them with taxes on carbon. Moreover, I remember reading conservative economists in the Weekly Standard advocating the same probably 10+ years ago.
I also strongly agree that while capital budgeting (discounting of the future) is a great way for companies to look at projects. It makes little sense from the standpoint of society as a whole.
Because capital budgeting basically says our grand children have no value. But most would disagree.
Matt mentions GRE scores for economics being high…what are they for sociology? Sociologists are creating infrastructure for massive future employment with DEIA departments and these will be high paying jobs because if they aren’t it will be a signal the organization doesn’t take it seriously. In the analysis of easy degree vs high pay this is going to be the way to go!
Trick question - they don't take the GRE because it's racist.
Normally I think it's not worth getting too worked up either way about what private companies and organizations do about DEI - it's a free country, after all.
But this "trap house" incident at Yale Law School of the diversity officer's inanity is a bridge too far. This isn't just anywhere - it Yale Law, direct pipeline to power, sinking to this level of thought policing. Has there been a single complaint that Chapo Trap House is offensive?
https://freebeacon.com/campus/listen-to-yale-law-school-administrators-tell-a-student-his-affiliation-with-the-federalist-society-is-triggering-for-classmates/
While I haven't heard anyone complain that the name "Chapo Trap House" is offensive yet, the kind of people who would complain about such a thing are also probably overwhelmingly the people who call Chapo Trap House part of the "dirtbag left" and otherwise sneer at it for its class-over-identity focus.
There will be tons of people lining up for them. They will be HR jobs. HR folks make a lot less than economists.
I don’t think they will be HR. DEIA has to be its own department for status reasons. My organization has crated a group with a director. Within a year it is already staffed with 4 people. A DEIA project manager? What do they do? What skills are needed? Quite frankly, if they really want to make improvements they should hire someone with an Econ background. A sociologists will just go around espousing social justice rhetoric supported by bad causal links.