r/Economics • u/the6thReplicant • 18d ago
Economists Are Vastly Underestimating the Economic Impact of Climate Change Research Summary
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/economists-are-vastly-underestimating-the-economic-impact-of-climate-change22
u/SpilledMiak 18d ago edited 18d ago
This is a "what if" article low on actual data. If things are worse than predicted then they will be worse than predicted.
Humanity has the current solutions to our carbon adicition. The major issue is infrastructure and overcoming entrenched special interests.
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u/godlords 18d ago
What? These aren’t what ifs. We are blowing well past the 1.5C target limit. 3C is nearly guaranteed, and once you get there feedback loops reallllly start accelerating. We do not have solutions to our carbon problem, not in the slightest. We are at 35 billion tons of annual output, 10 billion more than just 20 years ago, and we continue to increase rapidly as the developing worlds ramps up their energy usage massively.
This article is saying, a 7C increase, which is ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE, and would RENDER MOST OF THE EARTH UNINHABITABLE, is currently estimated to have only a minor impact on world GDP.
Which is insane. The scientific community has been screaming about this for decades, even Powell mentioned how climate change presents a massive economic headwind. These aren’t what ifs. This is what is happening. Humanity simply has its head in the sand.
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u/Remixer96 18d ago
We actually do have several technical solutions to address climate change!
... but an equally difficult if not moreso challenge is mobilizing the world to make use of them at planet scale, in a way everyone can afford today.
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u/essenceofreddit 18d ago
Like such as?
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u/Remixer96 18d ago
A great report has been written up by Rewiring America that details this, but the short answer is:
- We have electric technology for most consumer goods that directly emit gasses otherwise (cars, heating house and water, etc.) and should move to them as quickly as possible
- Solar costs have been coming down more rapidly than even rosy estimates, and we should be deploying it along with wind and nuclear everywhere we can, as fast as possible
- If we do this for every machine that reaches its end of life starting today, then we've got a technical shot at hitting the warming targets, and we should be able to do so with the solar tech and available land we have today... theoretically
Like I said, the hard part is getting the political will (both in terms of regulations and in terms of widespread financing) to meet these goals. Everyone can't shell out for 5 new appliances + solar right now without help. We have to get over any semblance of nimby-ism for wind. We have to get nuclear back in the picture. We have to adjust building codes and utilities to meet the new reality of distributed power generation everywhere.
It'll be hard, but the tech part isn't actually the toughest part, since we're already at the level where we could mostly pull it off. There are a few remaining tech problems like making cement and such that still need to be solved, but the rest is all about rediscovering our ability to work together quickly for everyone's benefit.
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u/AnotherWarGamer 18d ago
GHG emissions continue to increase year after year. Our technology is not capable of keeping up with our energy consumption due to its size and rate of growth.
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u/Remixer96 17d ago
First, GHG's don't rise out of nothing. We have energy uses which we can analyze and estimate how to meet in different ways. There are many economic realities that keep GHGs in play today (for example, in peak load coal power plants), but that is a market response, not a law of nature.
I would also point out that our capacity to efficiently generate electricity from non-greenhouse gas sources is also increasing each year, with lots of economies of scale still unoptimized and unsubsizdized compared to GHG. Australia is a great example of rapidly decreasing price per kW hour when deployed at scale.
Meeting the demand will again, require a significant political effort. But in the US, an area of about 1% of land with current solar and wind technology would do it... roughly the same we've currently dedicated to roads.
It's certainly a large project, but far from *technically* impossible.
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u/ajt9000 18d ago
You can't simply replace fossil fuels with existing renewables like solar and wind without exponentially ballooning costs due to the way power generation and storage works. Even with super cheap and efficient renewables as it is now we still need fossil fuel based plants to be able to react to quick changes in energy demand.
I highly recommend practical engineering's video series on youtube that explains how different types of power generation are used, what the grid needs, and the limitations on each of them.
Its a whole lot more complicated than just counting up the total amount of power that all the devices hooked up to the grid need and building that many solar panels.
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u/Remixer96 17d ago
You can't simply replace fossil fuels with existing renewables like solar and wind without exponentially ballooning costs due to the way power generation and storage works.
It's hard to respond to this without more specifics (I'll check out the videos), but in general I would say two things.
First, moving to a more decentralized grid will require higher upfront costs, but lower ongoing variable costs. This is a problem we can solve with finance, just like we solved buying cars and homes with car loans and mortgages.
Second, I think you're referring to something I haven't mentioned yet, which is the need for lots of forms of batteries and energy storage, as well as smarter technology to help balance energy distribution. This is indeed another cost, though I haven't seen estimated very well, because that math gets a lot more speculative. It also is tech that would help fossil fuel energy as well, it just isn't as necessary for them.
I don't know if I would call these costs exponential though, as fossil fuels have their own rising costs over time associated with discovering, retrieving, and refining resources. There are many means of subsidizing and accounting for that process today, where renewables don't have such anything like that yet. To use one example, Oil companies are allowed to list untapped oil reserves they've discovered but not extracted on their balance sheets as assets... which are then traded on futures markets. This is a lot of capital solar companies don't currently have access to.
Even with super cheap and efficient renewables as it is now we still need fossil fuel based plants to be able to react to quick changes in energy demand.
The general understanding I have is that with a diversified and decentralized power infrastructure, coupled widespread energy storage technology, the role of utilities will shift from primary generator to primary mediator. We can already see this happening in places where utilities give credits for people who contribute solar back to the grid. We'll need this to tap into various forms of battery storage as well to balance everything out, but there is currently a huge imbalance in the potential solar energy hitting the Earth's surface (~85,000 TW) vs. what all of humanity currently uses (19TW) in our favor to work with. It's hard, but not unsolvable.
I do empathize with the fact that it won't be an easy hot swap, but as a species we don't really have a choice except to figure this out if we want to keep the planet livable. This summer is a great example of what will become increasingly normal, with more and more massive heat waves and natural disasters that cost human lives. We CAN change this trajectory, and we MUST.
I'm curious, do you have a general plan for fighting climate change that doesn't involve radical renewable deployment, whatever the challenge?
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u/ajt9000 17d ago
I'm curious, do you have a general plan for fighting climate change that doesn't involve radical renewable deployment, whatever the challenge?
I do not, although I think it will be much more difficult to replace our existing systems with fully renewable ones than many people realize. Better battery technology would help a ton, although batteries also have massive pollution problems of their own. That video series does a really good job of explaining the things I am trying to get at, and the video on pumped storage really highlights how insufficient our current power storage capabilities are for something like a fully renewable grid.
The reason I say the costs balloon exponentially is because of the way energy demand works. I think the first or second video in the series covers this, but basically quite a lot of effort is put into predicting the energy load of the grid consumers. The reason this is so important is because the output of the power plants have to be carefully coordinated and scaled to match the demand. It cannot be too high or too low, and at the most basic level this translates into the speed the turbines at the plant are spinning. But this introduces problems, for example nuclear reactors can take a very long time to start up and shut down, which makes them ill suited to dealing with the fluctuations needed. For this reason they are used to fill out the base load, which is the amount of power that will always be needed, even at times of minimum demand.
So this next section I don't remember that well (its been a while since I've seen the series). And you're probably better off just watching the videos over listening to me.
Renewables are great because they are cheap and clean excluding construction costs, but their output (especially wind) is difficult to predict because it is so weather dependent. Their power supply is also most efficient when it is used at the same time it is produced, because battery storage is inefficient and the amount we can practically store is woefully small compared to the grid demand. So we are somewhat limited in the situations that we can use them. Unfortunately for solar, the times of peak demand tend to be nighttime, which means an all renewable solar based grid would have to store tons of power in batteries to fill out the nighttime spikes in demand. But this basically means you have to build a whole new solar plant to do nothing but fill out a tiny bit of the peak demand, and this is wildly inefficient.
That peak demand is where natural gas power is really effective. Its big selling point is that its really easy to scale the speed of the turbines quickly, which makes it ideal for those quickly fluctuating peaks in demand that renewables and nuclear are ridiculously expensive for.
Its for that reason that I think we can take great strides in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels for the power grid, but they are not going to replace 100 percent of our power generation anytime soon. Not to mention our dependence on fossil fuels for other things like plastics, foams, oils and grease, etc.
I don't have a good answer, but renewables are clearly only a piece of the puzzle and we need to be thinking about how we are going to collect and sequester massive amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere.
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u/Remixer96 17d ago
That's all true, but it actually becomes a somewhat easier problem when you decentralize power production as will be needed with renewables. To use a hyperbolic example, if you have one power plant serving a whole region vs. a million, a single cloud can't throw you off the distributed arrangement nearly as badly. You spread out your risk and variability to help you through odd times. This raises the coordination effort needed, but it's very similar to the way the Internet is structured now.
I agree we should be looking into carbon capture as well, but my concern there is simply scale.
We emit roughly 40 giga tons of carbon into the air each year, while all the worlds plants combined sequester about 2 giga tons per year. To my knowledge, there isn't a technical path to being able to sequestor nearly enough carbon to make a dent in what we're doing, and we'll have to radically shift to renewables anyway. Every single carbon atom we don't burn now is one we won't have to pull out of the air later.
But we should do all the things, sequestration and nuclear included. I just wish there was more impetus already to do more instead of the prevailing... apathy? Indifference? I find it baffling.
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u/ajt9000 17d ago
But the demand is still the same and the corresponding amounts of power you need to produce are still the same. You still need the same number of plants and the same storage capabilities. In most places the grid is largely connected and decentralized to some degree already. There are also major challenges with transporting power over distance.
We should be trying our best to smooth out the demand curve any way we can. If the curve was completely flat we could completely power the world with nuclear and renewable energy. It is those peak demand hours that are the most carbon costly, aside from places that use fossil fuels for base load production.
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u/bodega_cat_ 18d ago
once you get there feedback loops reallllly start accelerating
The most recent IPCC report said that while the impact of feedback loops is significant, they're not expected to be enough to cause 'runaway warming,' so to speak.
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u/InkTide 18d ago
The unfortunate empirical truth of the matter is we don't have a deep enough understanding of those potential feedback processes and the total amount/distribution of the deposits and environments that facilitate them (peat bog thawing gas release, deep sea methane clathrates, ocean current changes, ocean acidification and anoxia, etc.) to predict much very well. About the only process we do understand well is atmospheric greenhouse effects, and specifically from CO2. A lot of this has to do with abysmal environmental science funding, ignoring inconvenient conclusions of environmental science, a lack of robust frameworks for interdisciplinary (or even inter-institutional within single disciplines) information exchange thanks in large part to a profit-driven academia, and the frequent proprietary exclusivity and limited regional scope of much of the best environmental data available: prospecting and agricultural studies.
We understand shockingly little about the geochemical/ecological properties of places where we haven't gone mining for resources or settled extensively - far too little to make even educated guesses about the scope and future rate of total climate change as a result of those secondary effects, let alone calculate the indirect economics impact. What you see from climate data is typically best-case-scenario predictions that minimize the uncertainty by ignoring the impact of those feedback loops. Basically, "this is the effect that what we do understand will have, but we don't know how much worse feedback loops might make it." There is very little in the way of evidence for processes that would make it any better.
It's also important to note that "runaway greenhouse effect" refers to the conditions on Venus. "Runaway warming" is a bit of a confusing term, because there is no risk of Earth becoming Venus - climate science seems to prefer using "positive feedback loops" to describe the relevant Earth systems.
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u/Street-Individual292 18d ago edited 18d ago
Dude I don’t think there’s any way we’re getting to 3C anytime soon. We’ve only seen 1C in the past 120 years, and a lot of that was from our reduction in aerosols. There’s just not a viable way for our CO2 emissions to increase enough to get us 2C more
Not to mention that it also depends on our oscillations like PDO and AMDO.
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u/ten-million 18d ago
Yes, I hate to say it but if the economists predicted a much worse economic outcome would anyone listen? Maybe someone could do a study, “The effect of economic modeling on political outcomes/choices” The results would probably be depressing.
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u/No-Effort-7730 18d ago
It's going to be hard keeping businesses open when the ocean and trees are no longer able to make oxygen.
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u/TheoreticalUser 18d ago
What action do economists suggest be taken to overcome entrenched special interests that can be implemented within the necessary timeline?
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u/SpilledMiak 18d ago
The carbon tax.
It's been an idea batted around for over a decade. Economic man cannot make appropriate decisions if the cost of carbon is not included in the price.
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u/TheEverHumbled 18d ago
FFS. Makes me so infuriated that this answer was downvited as a response to how to quickly take economic action to this crisis, on an economics thread.
Including carbon in our costs makes it a core part of everyone's day to day free market decisions, rather than allowing a massive externality which is increasingly massive impacts to our day to day lives. The only people who truly benefit from no carbon tax are fossil fuel industries.
If we keep the status quo going without adapting, markets/supply chains themselves will be increasingly unreliable and our political-economic system will fail. The writing is on the wall. The natural world doesn't care about our feelings.
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u/godlords 18d ago
Ironic since actual economists overwhelmingly support a carbon tax. Armchair economists of reddit know better I’m sure.
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u/AnotherWarGamer 18d ago
Here is my issue with the carbon tax. What is the end goal besides an incentive? An incentive to do what. A small carbon tax is a wealth transfer only, and will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions. We can't pay to make the problem go away either, we don't have such technology, and it won't exist due to the laws of thermodynamics. The only way a carbon tax works is if it reduces consumption. A carbon tax only works if it ends up being degrowth. The only working solution is degrowth. We don't need a carbon tax. A carbon tax isn't a solution, only maybe a means to an end. The solution, what we actually need, is degrowth. End rant.
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u/TheEverHumbled 17d ago edited 17d ago
No, its not just about paper incentives and degrowth alone isn't enough at this point if we're still net adding carbon.
A sane carbon tax would reflect the cost of adding a measurable unit of carbon to make the end result ecologically equivalent to having not harvested and emitted that carbon in the first place.
If we say our goal is to hit 0 net additions of carbon to the atmosphere(and honestly, we already need to be net negative to limit the worsening damage), a carbon tax would need to be high enough to not simply be a disincentive for pollution but to cover the costs of projects to cancel out the added carbon.
A carbon tax means that we don't simply punish or forbid carbon sources like jet fuels as universally "bad" for which we don't have immediately available replacements, but use it as a mechanism to cancel out the impact of the pollution, to balance the needs of having a livable, sustainable planet with a functioning economy(where today the demands of our present-day economy is completely unsustainable both environmentally and in terms of continued economic performance).
This means if the polluting option is economically more efficient after accounting for externalities, the tax covers the compensating green investments to cancel out the emissions we added. In that case it's not a central planner or legislators deciding winners or losers by dogma or how to do the optimal mix, its the individual market participants using hard nosed math with their wallets. If on the other hand the polluting option isn't efficient when emissions are factored in, we'd skip the dirty choice for better alternatives which don't pollute, or are at least green-er in the first place and don't need as much mitigations.
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u/AnotherWarGamer 17d ago
but use it as a mechanism to cancel out the impact of the pollution
This is impossible! The entire premise of a carbon tax doesn't work because such technology doesn't exist, and will never exist due to thermodynamics.
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u/TheEverHumbled 17d ago
Nothing about the laws of thermodynamics precludes incentivizing economic activitoes which take carbon back out of the atmosphere. As is, we have economic activities which we know can cause a net reduction of carbon in the atmosphere. e.g. tree planting.
When you attach a cost to the introduction of carbon, you can likewise establish a market for taking that carbon back out.
When you have a price attached to removing carbon from that atmosphere, that incentivizes the discovery and optimization of activities which can do so at a lower cost.
If you have efficient technologies for removing carbon, this may mean a low carbon tax. If our best options for removing carbon are comparatively burdensome and inefficient, this would lend itself to a high cost for introducing carbon in the tax.
The practical effectiveness of technologies boils down to calibrating a tax rate
or carbon price which matches reality. That's completely in line with the laws of thermodynamics.2
u/Xipher 17d ago
Nothing about the laws of thermodynamics precludes incentivizing economic activitoes which take carbon back out of the atmosphere. As is, we have economic activities which we know can cause a net reduction of carbon in the atmosphere. e.g. tree planting.
I think I know where /u/AnotherWarGamer might be going with this. The carbon dioxide released during energy production produced X joules, only some of which was captured, say Y joules.
Since perfect efficiency is not achievable the energy that must be produced in order to capture and sequester the same amount of CO2 that was released must be greater than the X joules which were originally released, not just greater than the Y we were able to make use of. Also this energy must be produced using some non emitting technology or you're producing more CO2 than your capture technology can take in with the generated energy due to the same limits of efficiency. If we want to capture all of the emissions produced just last year, it would require more energy then it produced that entire year. If you want to capture at 2 times the rate of past production you need over twice the energy production on top of everything we are already using.
These are some significant challenges to overcome regardless of any economic incentives. It's going to take a lot of effort, resources, and energy if we want to double our energy production using systems that don't effectively emit any CO2 in their operation. This isn't just double energy production of grid sources, we have to also duplicate the energy production equivalent of every carbon fuel consuming engine including every car, truck, cargo ship, etc.
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u/AnotherWarGamer 17d ago
Thank you. I'm too lazy to write a long reply. There is also a lot of nuance, and it will take too long to refute all the simple looking "solutions".
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u/TheEverHumbled 17d ago
We are speaking of two related but independent problems.
The mechanism of coordination for decisions. E.g. central control or a market. The thermodynamics problems exist whether you have an eco dictatorship or a market economy, etc. Someone or something makes decisions with the available information. This may be centralized or distributed. In any such system the constraints of thermodynamics are in play.
The physical plant and technologies we have drives the options and viable choices for the above systems. Of course there is massive technical challenges with a transition. No one has said otherwise.
I don't disagree with the notion that a significant proportion of our industrial base becomes economically inefficient when the difficulties of reconciling those emissions are factored. Emissions/carbon pricing makes more transparent the costs of the decisions. I never pretended existing emission sources could expect status quo.
The conversation here was about the economics of responding to man made climate change(e.g how economic actors like households and businesses allocate limited resources they have available through this crisis, when many of those participants are not altruistic). I'm open to hearing better alternatives.
What is the counter-proposal for navigating a transition which is proposed? E.g. what plausible alternatives do we use to steer our decisions from our current path of rendering the planet inhospitable to human life?
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u/crossj828 18d ago
A carbon tax would definitely not over come entrenched interests.
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u/TheEverHumbled 17d ago
Explain specifically what you mean.
That the tax would be a toothless lie, or that it would be subverted, or?
With political will, laws can change and massive trusts have been broken.
E.g. The New deal was no small thing, and did overcome entrenched interests due to the political severity of the depression. Countries like NZ with political will implement serious laws in face of crisis.
Right now politicians in US and most countries haven't even attempted this solution. That's different from saying that once implemented it would be invariably subverted.
Imo: The difficulty isn't a carbon tax as a viable tool, its that in most areas too few voters consider the environment to be a priority in their voting decisions. Without political will, you can't follow through on a solution.
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u/IronTarkusBarkus 18d ago
Maybe if we implemented a carbon tax a decade (or three) ago, we’d be in a better place. As of today, a simple carbon tax is no solution at all. Should we have a carbon tax? Probably, but it isn’t a solution. Economics fails to account for things like carbon and environmental wellbeing.
This is a problem of sustainability, within a system where growth is the ultimate goal. We need to reimagine economics with a whole new set of goals. And we won’t be given a choice.
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u/Ray192 18d ago
... do you know what economics is? Have you ever seen an economic model?
You can plug in whatever variable you want to optimize. Economics is all about giving you the tools to calculate and model anything you want, including "carbon and environmental wellbeing", however you decide to measure it.
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u/Street-Individual292 18d ago
Climatologists do the exact same thing with their models. It’s called parameterizing.
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u/Helicase21 16d ago
That assumes that you don't have any ethical judgements feeding into your model.
Optimal carbon tax varies dramatically with choice of social welfare discount rate, and there is no empirically correct choice for that parameter; it must be chosen based on ethical principles.
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u/IronTarkusBarkus 18d ago
Yup, I have a degree in it.
Is that what “economics is all about?” Not everything can or should be put on a graph. Not to mention all the externalities that comes along with that narrow thinking. Which you’d know if you’ve read Smith or Rousseau
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u/Ray192 18d ago
If you can't put it on a graph, it's not economics. You can go argue about it in philosophy papers if you'd like. It's like complaining about how everything is numerical in math.
If you can't quantify it, then you can't empirically disprove it, then by definition it can't be economics.
I don't even know what your point is, you can definitely quantify ecological damage and global warming. It's literally what scientists do. What kind of narrow thinking do you have that you believe this stuff can't be quantified?
You have a degree in economics? Seriously? Yikes. This is shit you learn in first 4 weeks of econ 101, how can you not know this?
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u/IronTarkusBarkus 18d ago edited 17d ago
I swear, everyone takes Econ 101, then thinks they got a pretty good grasp on the subject. It has to be the most annoying intro class.
It’s a social science, so that math analogy, and whatever definition you’re referring to doesn’t really hold any weight. Yes, it uses math. But it’s about using math the prove philosophy. It also encompasses some psychology. It doesn’t fit whatever box you’re trying to fit it in.
The point about failing to recognize environmental well-being and carbon isn’t what you think it is. The point is to say that economics (at least the version you’re referring to) struggles to account for anything that is difficult to measure in graphs, excel sheets, and equations. How much is carbon worth? What things are worth putting carbon into the atmosphere? What decides this? The highest bidder?
That’s what I mean by narrow thinking. Taking ideas and problems that are much bigger than most of us think, isolating one detail, and sticking it on a graph. Then calling everything else an externality.
I’d also like to say, you have quite the faith in numbers, and their inherent empirical value. I guess I just think that’s a funny use of the word. Almost as if you only have a vague idea of what it means. Come to think of it, I’m sensing a pattern.
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u/TheEverHumbled 17d ago
Economics can function under different political regimes. A hypothetical totalitarian eco-state, would still have an economic system, simply with a different set of underlying rules.
Many intellectual disciplines are guilty of being in service of the dominant political ideology. Introductions to microeconomics in the US for instance often have a "Free Market" bias extolling the political idea of the invisible hand and libertarian principles, but that is not the only perspective within economics departments or the discipline.
Economics is ultimately about creating meaningful, useful models. Yes there is an ideological facet, but life is inherently political. We all bring biases and personal priorities in our perspectives.
Externalities are not a permanent or fixed detail which is intrinsic to economics. They are an inefficiency in that model. Traditionally more variables you factor into it, the more unwieldly the system becomes(e.g. it's too costly to measure or act on) so you choose to ignore some dimensions because in the grand scheme of things they are less critical concerns in your political-value system.
Different economists see problems worthy of modelling, and bring different lenses on the world.
Environmental economists are still using quantitative rigor and data of the economic process, but say that variables like say carbon or fish populations are too vital to ignore as externalities, and that the models must account for these details.
Behavioral economists say that human beings are not simple rational automatons that can be predicted like an ideal gas. They seek to better understand how we actually do make decisions.
Numbers and models are used because they are an incredibly powerful tool to provide a consistent lens for implementing change. What the goals of that change is, is a political question which is outside of that box.
If you have the political will to maintain an annual net change of 0 tons of net change of carbon in the atmosphere within a market based system, economists can give you options for achieving that goal, and for considering the tradeoffs.
In any quantitative discipline, your model deviates from reality in countless ways. If the deviations matter to you, you iterate to fix them. If they don't you tolerate it. We largely tolerate environmental externalities as a society, because our current system considers that an acceptable tradeoff.
If you don't have the political will to deal with problems, then they will absolutely be long standing externalities in your model. That's not a failing of economics as a discipling, that's a logical consequence of our political world.
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u/IronTarkusBarkus 17d ago
I’ll give you that you’re more nuanced than the other guy, but I still don’t think you’re getting my point. Correct me if I wrong, but you’re giving a more thoughtful argument that “if it can’t be graphed, it isn’t economics?”
I’m trying to say that economics is far from simply being the graph-makers for political ideology. It can’t be boiled down to the “creation of meaningful, useful models.” Though there are certainly economists who only do that, it’s the philosophical economists that drive the field forward.
Whether it be Reganomics, Keynesian economics, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Soviet centralized systems, they all start with political philosophy. I know people argue that Marx was more of a philosopher than an economist, but his impact on the field is undeniable. All of these ideologies either provided graphs, or other economists made them, and asserted they were correct. I took many classes plugging in numbers to prove reganomics. On paper everything was going swimmingly. The observable world around me spoke a different story.
Further, I am arguing that those graphs imply a level of objectivity that is borderline fantasy when taken outside of the theoretical vacuum. Graphs are useful when used to argue a point, but far too often are used to assert claims based on hidden premises that are questionable at best. Not to mention, a fundamental flaw of economics is that it cannot measure things like the value of art, general well-being, and opportunity cost. Let’s not pretend like economics knows how to stay in its lane. It’s constantly trying and failing to do those things.
I admire economics ability to creatively/logically use numbers to wrap our minds around complex trends and patterns. I also admire how it can be a productive tool to implement change into society.
In any quantitative discipline, your model deviates from reality in countless ways. If the deviations matter to you, you iterate to fix them. If they don’t you tolerate them.
This is the crux of my point, and is exactly what you’re missing. I can’t iterate my models or my measures to more accurately suit reality. There is no language for it in current economics. I don’t see how you comfortably say, if you can tolerate how a model doesn’t accurately represent reality, that it’s perfectly fine to just assume it’s good enough. It’s an insane balancing of (seemingly) objective assertions and subjective premises.
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u/Mr_Industrial 16d ago
r/economics distrust of economists runs on the same logic as anti-vax believers. The economic impact of climate change is being studied VERY closely. Economics is not about the exchange and management of money, but rather the exchange and management of limited resources. Nature/the climate/etc. are obviously intertwined with most if not all the resources we have available.
This is why we are confident that things like a carbon tax WILL work. It's not just one guy saying "yeah that sounds 'bout right" but rather hundreds upon hundreds of educated individuals looking at a problem, tracking the stats, and coming to a verifiably good solution.
Articles like this that bad-mouth existing models without providing a model of their own do nothing to help.
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u/Gr000vy 18d ago
Apparently so are the climate change activists who go to their houses on the beach after they get off their private planes wearing their brand new fashion clothes (fashion is the biggest contributor, more than all gasoline)
Even the "great innovators" like Musk are dumping Rocket fuel into the air, then cancelling bitcoin for climate reasons.
The whole thing is a f_____ joke. Either it's a complete hoax or we're completely screwed. It's easier not to think about it
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u/Zahpow 18d ago
Is the lead author Steve Keen the debunking economics Steve Keen? I am reposting this question as it was removed by the automoderator, I do not know how to verify this question on my own