Hans, I wrote something about Nordhaus and Schellenbarger a few years ago when their book appeared. I circulated this to a select group, but maybe it will be useful to you.
My comment: Break Through is a reckless book. There have been a number of reviews of Break Through, the hot new book with a fix for global warming by Nordhaus & Schellenberger (N&S). This is not a review but just a comment on the authors’ destructive policy recommendation: “Business as usual with clean energy.” Clean energy is to be desired but business as usual is an unfolding disaster. The authors’ trade, and they are evidently good at it, is packaging environmental issues in ways that will sell to the public and legislators. Their approach has been to find the positives in a good policy and to stress those. In this book, though, they started backwards. They chose a policy that can be spun as a positive. The book asserts that we can have business and consumption as usual, and with aspirations confirmed for even greater future consumption. Break Through brings the good news: “You can have it all.” Limits on emissions – mainstream environmentalism’s approach – is understood by the public, Nordhaus and Schellenberger say, as limits on the public’s aspirations for the future. Limits tells the public, they believe, that the future is limited, America’s best times are in the past, and their jobs are threatened. This is bad news and Nordhaus and Schellenberger pitch good news. The book goes wrong by resting on the 1943 widely taught insight of Abraham Maslow that once humans have secure food and shelter, their goals address love and self-esteem. N & S translate that into a dream of a dematerialized future, where consumption will be constrained by individuals self-actualizing and no longer seeking esteem by having more toys than others. That is beyond ingenuousness. Popular books like Cornell economist Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever show that esteem comes from having more. Deploring the race to outdo neighbors, Frank nevertheless ends the book with a confession of replacing his kitchen stove with a model with two 15,000 BTU burners. Nor are the rest of us exempt from aspiring to what others more affluent have. That is why the Chinese buy cars. Consumption is learned behavior and we learn from those richer than ourselves. At the secure little house on the prairie the children didn’t dream of iPods but now have them. Veblen nailed it when he said invention is the mother of necessity. Nordhaus and Schellenberger could have understood this by observing their neighbors, or downloading Waylon Jennings’ “Luckenbach Texas” for 99 cents. Veblen wrote of this 100 years ago in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Consumers are not autonomous, though economics textbooks aver that we are. There is solid economic theory on consumer behavior but professors won’t teach it, preferring to assume a fully differentiable mathematical function. Nordhaus and Schellenberger leap from Maslow to a future with dematerialized lifestyles, though mysteriously the economy they describe will nevertheless keep growing and jobs will proliferate. Break Through is a hodge-podge of assertions, evidence, and contradictions on the future of consumer behavior. They begin with Maslow and Voluntary Simplicity but by page 162 they assert “Rising prosperity has resulted in an increased orientation toward personal freedom and choice. But these values, combined with greater affluence and declining expectations and optimism have resulted in rising materialism, outer-directed status-oriented behaviors, and fatalistic survival values.” To offer a promising rather than a limited future N & S propose massive public expenditure on technological breakthroughs – billions, tens of billions spent on solar, on wind, a modern electric grid, batteries, cars powered by electricity generated on the owner’s dwelling – massive spending to find the next big things. The spending will promote jobs and income growth and the results will restore America’s technological leadership, while the Chinese will benefit by producing what America invents. Hillary Clinton and other candidates echo the “jobs, jobs, jobs” message of the book. Not a surprise, since Break Through is a campaign consultant’s handbook. It is about what can sell, not what can work. Will their vision of marvelous worldwide prosperity result in worsening environmental problems beyond global warming? The book answers “No.” That reckless answer is false. Eugene P. Coyle November 27, 2007 On Jun 2, 2014, at 8:58 AM, <[email protected]> <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Here in Salt Lake City we have an opportunity to discuss with Ted > Nordhaus. What questions / remarks would Pen-l-ers direct at Ted if you > were present? Please help us, we will take your suggestions and report > back how he responded. Here is the announcement sent out > at the Utah Energy list: > > < snip > _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
