Andrew,
Hmm, the analogy doesn't really apply to Stern, but that doesn't necessarily
mean he gets the right answer for the right reasons. I think it is possible
that Lomborg is correct within his intellectual tradition, and that Stern is
wrong. I haven't read either carefully but that is my cursory impression.
If you look at Pielke's Prometheus blog you will see people making the
argument that nothing we can do about greenhouse gas accumulation will have
any impact "for the foreseeable future", where "the foreseeable future" is
defined as forty years. It is difficult to argue against this position.
There really is little we can do now that will affect what we see by 2045,
just as what we see now is the warming we had already bought in 1965 with
infrastructure decisions and cumulative emissions to that date. The problem
is that (most) economists sweep their hands and smugly announce "case
closed".
The Tetris player is in fact correct within the Tetris context. It will be a
very long time before the bathtub flood fills the basement and cuts off
power at the fusebox and shuts down his computer. He will probably lose the
game for other reasons long before then. The discount rate applied by a
Tetris player is about 20% per second. Ten seconds is "the foreseeable
future". He will be dealing with the consequences of the flood for years to
come, but that is outside his temporal horizon, so he ignores it.
When we adopt the point of view of conventional economics (as I understand
it) and yet believe in preserving the planet, we are forced to the Stern
point of view, in which risks are arguably systematically overstated within
a context which systematically understates them.
What is really at issue is that the objectives built in to economics are, as
you have pointed out, unsustainable. It is unclear exactly when they will
break down, but many educated people in other fields understand that they
must break down whether we like it or not. This is bigger than climate
change, and will eventually plague us even if climate change manages to be
slower and calmer than we expect. Something has to give out, and there are
plenty of signs that it is coming to that.
Where I feel like I'm a voice crying out in the wilderness is as follows.
Most people who are uncomfortable with economics as conventionally practiced
simply want to offer intuition as a guide. The world is too crowded and
complicated for this to work. We are better off with a broken theory than no
theory at all, but it seems to me we need a new theory.
I appreciate that I am not totally alone on this, and I admit that I don't
have a coherent set of ideas as to how to achieve an appropriate objective
function, so that we have something besides romantic angst to offer in
opposition to purportedly rational economic thinking. (I also admit that I
haven't found time to do any serious reading on this of late, but my memory
of looking at Herman Daly some 15 years ago was that my impression was that
his heart was in the right place but that he hadn't come up with something
workable.)
I'd like to engage mathematically inclined people in thinking about what a
rational quantitative alternative to growth addiction might look like, how
we might preserve as much as possible of our commercial infrastructure and
prosperity, how we could minimize the extent to which established interests
(other than, perhaps, economists themselves) would feel threatened. It may
not be necessary to abandon this attachment to endless "growth" on a finite
planet. An alternative, which might be less risky, is to define the quantity
that grows so that it is constrained to be harmless.
Many thanks for your thoughts which I found very helpful and enlightening.
mt
On 12/12/06, Andrew Feeney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[Lots of good stuff]
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