Sorry about the subject line. For clarity I removed a rambling discussion of that topic from what I sent: I should have changed the subject line back...
I will try to clarify my discomfort with how economists typically approach this matter and hope to submit that later. Meanwhile to whet your appetite I'd like to direct your attention to the work of Mastrandrea and Schenider as an interesting counterexample. See http://tinyurl.com/ls2so i.e.: http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/20560/ProbabilisticIntegratedAssessment.pdf I call your attention especially to the discussion of discount rates associated with Fig 4 (at the page boundary between pp 573-574). The probability of dangerous climate change, as one would expect, depends greatly on the assumed discount rate. At high discount rates lower controls become "optimal" in conventional economic thinking. Clearly such an optimization, one which economists would commonly defend as objective and rational, is optimizing for the wrong value. A policy that leaves the long-term future viability of the planet (and hence, plausibly, of sentient life in the entire universe) contingent on contemporary market forces is neither objective nor rational. mt --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
