Back to the question of how well we can optimize in practice, there is an interesting exchange in the Q & A at the last of Jeffrey Sachs's Reith lectures:
==> PROF. SIR BERNARD CRICK: It seems to me that this is sort of H.G. Wells re-born - that scientific wisdom can replace politics. These are surely political problems, and you seem to have you know skipped entirely from the logic of politics into, if you don't mind my saying, standing with both feet firmly planted at mid-air of the wisdom of scientists. JEFFREY SACHS: I think when you review the words carefully, I certainly did not say that scientific wisdom could or should replace politics. What I said is that science should inform politics. We do need science. The idea that we can somehow intuitively find our way through these challenges I find to be completely off the mark. With six and a half billion people in the world, with the ecological pressures that we face, with the challenges of extreme poverty, we'd better invoke expertise, because I see what happens when only hunch is used, and the results are miserable. We need to get science systematically into policy thinking and policy knowledge, and that's why I'm trying to think of processes and institutions that can help the public to understand. After all we did not say that the IPCC, this inter-governmental panel on climate change, should decide our climate policy. Indeed they're not even allowed to make policy recommendations. They are to inform the public. So I'm looking for science that informs politics, not science that replaces politics. <== (The entire lecture series is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2007/lecture4.shtml and is well worth reading.) I think James' advocacy of adaptive rather than prescriptive goals needs to be considered in this context. If we had no politics and no economics, if we all thought as one mind, we could resolve most of our global problems quickly and effortlessly. We all have our own interests, and little tendency to put others' ahead of our own. So carving out a policy that is sufficiently acceptable to everyone that it actually gets put into place turns out to be much harder than the technical constraints would indicate. There are many comments on internet discussions of these topics saying "all we need is the political will", which is surely true and sadly useless. The idea that we can set goals adaptively seems to me very much of the same stripe. It might be better technically to have goals expressed in terms that most people cannot understand, but I suspect it is politically infeasible. James, (or anyone) could you state an adaptive policy in a form that you might expect the general public to understand and support? I have technocratic inclinations myself, but I just don't see how we can put this into place globally under foreseeable conditions. 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
