Yet one thing I notice reading your examples, is that the range of reasonableness we look for is not the same. It overlaps a lot, and both versions rule out the worst of the True Believers (TM). But I'm a bit more tolerant of US-left-flavored positions, and you are somewhat more tolerant of those flavored US-right.
I presume neither of us is quite as driven by truth as we want to be - we're both influenced by other things, perhaps the ideas commonly expressed around us, or our feelings of some people being on our team, and others not.
So if I wanted to spot a right wing True Believer economist, I'd look for one that ignored unpriced externalities, and/or insisted that their effect is negligible, particularly if this insistence were unaccompanied by citations to peer-reviewed research. They can babble about "stakeholders" all they want, and they can even ritually bend the knee to "people not profits", provided they express it in a way that looks like a ritual genuflection. (They get the same exemption I apply to those that credit God for creating whatever it is they are studying, without using some Holy Book as a source of scientific data.)
Qualifying them as unpriced implies that there are priced externalities. Could you give some examples to clarify this distinction?
My impression was that few economists, if any, would ignore externalities. But even those that want to focus on them have done nothing but hand waving. It is used as a fig leaf to cover whatever they want. Deciding what to do with shared resources is just a hard problem.
But an externality can become priced by making people pay something for it. Suppose you are in the entertainment business. In particular, loud outdoor entertainment. Some people are willing to pay to attend your events. OTOH, others regard the events as creating unpleasant noise, and don't want your events anywhere near their property.
In one hypothetical political/legal environment, your neighbours are out of luck. You can do whatever you like on your property. In another hypothetical environment, the law absolutely forbids "noise pollution"; you are out of luck. But in a third, they sue you for nuisance, and a settlement is reached. You pay them whatever compensation they've agreed to, and your externality has become priced.
Maybe it would be even better to say that the externality involved having the winners compensate the losers, in a way that encourages production of positive externalities or discourages negative ones.
“By a curious coincidence, the policies needed to prevent climate change were ones the people concerned about climate change, at least the ones who saw that cartoon as convincing, were already in favor of.”
This sentence confused me at first. Encouraging expansion of nuclear power generation is such a needed policy, but generally not supported by the people concerned about climate change. Then I realized that “policies needed to prevent climate change” was not meant literally, but rather that somehow the “policies needed to prevent climate change” were determined under a constraint that these could not include things that offended the orthodoxy, despite any effectiveness. Translation: what they really believe is that nature (and so also society) should be restored to some ideal past, not merely that climate change should be addressed effectively.
That was a comment on the cartoon, which shows a list of policies justified as preventing (actually slowing) climate change, all of which the author of the cartoon sees as good things, making the world better.
Abba Lerner was the one I had in mind. He tried to figure out how one could run a socialist economy by having the heads of the socialist firms act as if they were profit maximizing capitalists while not actually collecting the profits, thus taking advantage of the coordination mechanism of the market, which he understood. My father's description of Lerner, who I had met while giving a talk on what became my first econ journal article, was that he had a beautiful logical mind, utterly uninterested in facts.
The problem with free trade is you need enough of it to make it work. If you free trade lumber there are enough countries in the world producing wood that if country A no longer wants to trade with you (political, social whatever reasons) you can go to countries B, C, and so on. If you are free trading something that is not universal around the globe, lithium for batteries is a good example, and country A no longer wants to supply you with it. That can cause problems. If you trade medical drugs from a country like China and stop or decrease greatly your ability to produce it at home and they decide to stop selling them to you or vastly increase the prices then problems.
One reason Japan attacked American at the beginning of WW II is because America stopped shipping oil. So American should have continued to ship Japan oil and allowed it to invade China, The Philippines, etc because Free Trade? Free Traders seem to believe that only economic factors should govern trade. Reality and history decrees otherwise.
The real question about environmentalists is are they correct? So far none of the doom is coming (soon, very soon, any day now, it's a common) predictions have come even close to being true.
They remind me of the famous quote by Wolfgang Pauli:
"That is not only not right; it is not even wrong"
The predicted effects, increased global temperature and sea level rise, have been happening more or less as predicted: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/testing-ipcc-projections-against. The doom hasn't been happening but the respectable environmentalists, IPCC or Nordhaus, didn't say that we would have doom, serious negative effects, this soon.
Yes. That's because there are no consequences. One of my favorite stories about Ehrlich is that he was in an argument about how Monarch butterflies navigate. He thought it was learned behavior and others such as Nabokov said it was genetic. Nabokov was a novelist and an amateur butterfly collector. Ehrlich is a Lepidopterist by profession. Nabokov was correct. Then there is Ehrlich's famous bet. He lost but only paid grudging. Though to be fair if he had made the bet for 7 years rather than 10 he would have won. Still over the long term he was wrong.
If Ehrlich was a finical advisor all his clients would have gone broke.
Thanks to Wikipedia, I just discovered the likely textual New Testament connection between Sodom and sexuality: Jude 1:7[41] records that both Sodom and Gomorrah "indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire
I believe there is an Old Testament reference to men lying with men as they lie with women, but I don't have the cite. The belief that Sodom was punished for homosexuality, whether or not justified, is the reason that anal intercourse is called "sodomy."
There isn't, in the Old Testament, only to adultery in Ezekiel. This idea actually seems to be Islamic in origin and is mentioned at least 13 times in the Koran. Let me know if you'd like the citations. No idea how this became so influential.
It does appear in the New Testament, but not in traditional Jewish sources.
I am not aware of where in the Bible it says that Sodom was destroyed for sodomy / homosexuality. I have always learned what makes more sense from the text, which is it was wanton cruelty.
You list a couple of conclusions, which don't define economics any more than elliptical orbits define physics.
I take left wing and right wing to describe clusters of beliefs, where someone who holds one belief in the cluster is more likely to hold another. Some of them may be beliefs about values but many are beliefs about facts of the real world. A left winger doesn't merely value equality, he believes that a minimum wage law helps poor people, that a market economy is unstable, prone to episodes of unemployment or inflation, and that those can and should be eliminated or reduced by proper government policy. A right winger probably believes that punishing crime, up to and including capital punishment, reduces it. He probably believes that making it easier for individuals to own guns will reduce crime, while the left winger probably believes it will increase crime.
To put the point more strongly, I don't think a socialist who shared my beliefs about the consequences of socialism would be in favor of it. I would probably not be in favor of a free market system if I shared all of a socialist's beliefs about its consequences and those of alternatives.
You probably assume here that minimum wages do not help poor people, presumably because of higher unemployment. I don’t think that the empirical evidence supports this.
How do you know? The relevant measure isn't the overall unemployment rate. Minimum wage workers are something like two percent of the labor force, so a substantial change in their unemployment rate will have a tiny effect on total unemployment, lost in the noise from other effects.
I think we would agree more than people do now. There could still be some disagreements based either on different general values or on people caring more about themselves and those close to them than about other people.
Left wing emphasizes the potential harms of climate change. Right wing emphasizes the potential harms of suggested policies intended to ameliorate climate change. Both are empirical to some extent, but ignore or de-emphasize aspects of the trade-off.
I was trying to put it in the narrow context of the post, since people often use left and right in confusing ways. So, yes, when discussing climate policies, I think the left will tend to emphasize the harms that climate change might create, and their critics, arguably on the right, will point out things they have exaggerated and things they have overlooked.
This works in this context, but it doesn’t really work more broadly. For instance, our host here is not a leftist, but that should not mean he must be considered on the right. The distinction is ambiguous and often a bit forced and contentious. But it got used in the post, and this is what I took it to mean here.
I'm neither a leftist nor a conservative — whether I'm on the right depends on how you define the right. But I am a libertarian, so you should be suspicious of my belief in economics if it always leads me to libertarian conclusions even in cases where to most good economists, including ones who have listened to my arguments, it is clear that it doesn't.
And when I think of instances of David's beliefs leading him to conclude specific _problems_ with libertarianism, despite identifying as one, well, there's this talk he gave back in 1981:
We have similar concerns.
Yet one thing I notice reading your examples, is that the range of reasonableness we look for is not the same. It overlaps a lot, and both versions rule out the worst of the True Believers (TM). But I'm a bit more tolerant of US-left-flavored positions, and you are somewhat more tolerant of those flavored US-right.
I presume neither of us is quite as driven by truth as we want to be - we're both influenced by other things, perhaps the ideas commonly expressed around us, or our feelings of some people being on our team, and others not.
So if I wanted to spot a right wing True Believer economist, I'd look for one that ignored unpriced externalities, and/or insisted that their effect is negligible, particularly if this insistence were unaccompanied by citations to peer-reviewed research. They can babble about "stakeholders" all they want, and they can even ritually bend the knee to "people not profits", provided they express it in a way that looks like a ritual genuflection. (They get the same exemption I apply to those that credit God for creating whatever it is they are studying, without using some Holy Book as a source of scientific data.)
Qualifying them as unpriced implies that there are priced externalities. Could you give some examples to clarify this distinction?
My impression was that few economists, if any, would ignore externalities. But even those that want to focus on them have done nothing but hand waving. It is used as a fig leaf to cover whatever they want. Deciding what to do with shared resources is just a hard problem.
I am not an economist.
But an externality can become priced by making people pay something for it. Suppose you are in the entertainment business. In particular, loud outdoor entertainment. Some people are willing to pay to attend your events. OTOH, others regard the events as creating unpleasant noise, and don't want your events anywhere near their property.
In one hypothetical political/legal environment, your neighbours are out of luck. You can do whatever you like on your property. In another hypothetical environment, the law absolutely forbids "noise pollution"; you are out of luck. But in a third, they sue you for nuisance, and a settlement is reached. You pay them whatever compensation they've agreed to, and your externality has become priced.
Thank you. I think an economist would Express that as “the externality has been internalized to some degree.”
Maybe it would be even better to say that the externality involved having the winners compensate the losers, in a way that encourages production of positive externalities or discourages negative ones.
“By a curious coincidence, the policies needed to prevent climate change were ones the people concerned about climate change, at least the ones who saw that cartoon as convincing, were already in favor of.”
This sentence confused me at first. Encouraging expansion of nuclear power generation is such a needed policy, but generally not supported by the people concerned about climate change. Then I realized that “policies needed to prevent climate change” was not meant literally, but rather that somehow the “policies needed to prevent climate change” were determined under a constraint that these could not include things that offended the orthodoxy, despite any effectiveness. Translation: what they really believe is that nature (and so also society) should be restored to some ideal past, not merely that climate change should be addressed effectively.
That was a comment on the cartoon, which shows a list of policies justified as preventing (actually slowing) climate change, all of which the author of the cartoon sees as good things, making the world better.
Ah, now I see.
Who are some of the good socialist economists that you referred to? Genuine question.
Abba Lerner was the one I had in mind. He tried to figure out how one could run a socialist economy by having the heads of the socialist firms act as if they were profit maximizing capitalists while not actually collecting the profits, thus taking advantage of the coordination mechanism of the market, which he understood. My father's description of Lerner, who I had met while giving a talk on what became my first econ journal article, was that he had a beautiful logical mind, utterly uninterested in facts.
The problem with free trade is you need enough of it to make it work. If you free trade lumber there are enough countries in the world producing wood that if country A no longer wants to trade with you (political, social whatever reasons) you can go to countries B, C, and so on. If you are free trading something that is not universal around the globe, lithium for batteries is a good example, and country A no longer wants to supply you with it. That can cause problems. If you trade medical drugs from a country like China and stop or decrease greatly your ability to produce it at home and they decide to stop selling them to you or vastly increase the prices then problems.
One reason Japan attacked American at the beginning of WW II is because America stopped shipping oil. So American should have continued to ship Japan oil and allowed it to invade China, The Philippines, etc because Free Trade? Free Traders seem to believe that only economic factors should govern trade. Reality and history decrees otherwise.
The real question about environmentalists is are they correct? So far none of the doom is coming (soon, very soon, any day now, it's a common) predictions have come even close to being true.
They remind me of the famous quote by Wolfgang Pauli:
"That is not only not right; it is not even wrong"
The predicted effects, increased global temperature and sea level rise, have been happening more or less as predicted: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/testing-ipcc-projections-against. The doom hasn't been happening but the respectable environmentalists, IPCC or Nordhaus, didn't say that we would have doom, serious negative effects, this soon.
Regarding the foretold doom, you can be wrong about everything and still celebrated.
https://www.mattball.org/2023/01/wrong-about-everything-yet-still.html
It is pretty bananas, IMO.
Yes. That's because there are no consequences. One of my favorite stories about Ehrlich is that he was in an argument about how Monarch butterflies navigate. He thought it was learned behavior and others such as Nabokov said it was genetic. Nabokov was a novelist and an amateur butterfly collector. Ehrlich is a Lepidopterist by profession. Nabokov was correct. Then there is Ehrlich's famous bet. He lost but only paid grudging. Though to be fair if he had made the bet for 7 years rather than 10 he would have won. Still over the long term he was wrong.
If Ehrlich was a finical advisor all his clients would have gone broke.
Thanks to Wikipedia, I just discovered the likely textual New Testament connection between Sodom and sexuality: Jude 1:7[41] records that both Sodom and Gomorrah "indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire
I haven't seen this in Jewish sources, at all.
I believe there is an Old Testament reference to men lying with men as they lie with women, but I don't have the cite. The belief that Sodom was punished for homosexuality, whether or not justified, is the reason that anal intercourse is called "sodomy."
There isn't, in the Old Testament, only to adultery in Ezekiel. This idea actually seems to be Islamic in origin and is mentioned at least 13 times in the Koran. Let me know if you'd like the citations. No idea how this became so influential.
It does appear in the New Testament, but not in traditional Jewish sources.
I am not aware of where in the Bible it says that Sodom was destroyed for sodomy / homosexuality. I have always learned what makes more sense from the text, which is it was wanton cruelty.
I bought The Moral Animal, and am on page 122. It is riotous, and very economics like!
The Moral Animal and what I consider to be the application-based follow-up Why Buddhism Is True are both amazing books. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Heck, I spend a lot of time in my latest quoting and promoting them! https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Religions-half-failed-airplanes-basketball-ebook/dp/B0BGJGC5D3/
You list a couple of conclusions, which don't define economics any more than elliptical orbits define physics.
I take left wing and right wing to describe clusters of beliefs, where someone who holds one belief in the cluster is more likely to hold another. Some of them may be beliefs about values but many are beliefs about facts of the real world. A left winger doesn't merely value equality, he believes that a minimum wage law helps poor people, that a market economy is unstable, prone to episodes of unemployment or inflation, and that those can and should be eliminated or reduced by proper government policy. A right winger probably believes that punishing crime, up to and including capital punishment, reduces it. He probably believes that making it easier for individuals to own guns will reduce crime, while the left winger probably believes it will increase crime.
To put the point more strongly, I don't think a socialist who shared my beliefs about the consequences of socialism would be in favor of it. I would probably not be in favor of a free market system if I shared all of a socialist's beliefs about its consequences and those of alternatives.
You probably assume here that minimum wages do not help poor people, presumably because of higher unemployment. I don’t think that the empirical evidence supports this.
How do you know? The relevant measure isn't the overall unemployment rate. Minimum wage workers are something like two percent of the labor force, so a substantial change in their unemployment rate will have a tiny effect on total unemployment, lost in the noise from other effects.
What empirical evidence are you referring to?
Australia.
How does Australia constitute evidence? Is Australia mostly minimum wage laborers?
https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/02/minimum-wage-rise-award-australia-lowest-paid-workers-5-75-per-cent-increase-wages-from-july-1
What does the evidence say?
I think we would agree more than people do now. There could still be some disagreements based either on different general values or on people caring more about themselves and those close to them than about other people.
You have understood my comment correctly.
Left wing emphasizes the potential harms of climate change. Right wing emphasizes the potential harms of suggested policies intended to ameliorate climate change. Both are empirical to some extent, but ignore or de-emphasize aspects of the trade-off.
I my point should be, we ultimately want to be aware of all the trade-offs, and not just those that are popular among one of the tribes.
I was trying to put it in the narrow context of the post, since people often use left and right in confusing ways. So, yes, when discussing climate policies, I think the left will tend to emphasize the harms that climate change might create, and their critics, arguably on the right, will point out things they have exaggerated and things they have overlooked.
This works in this context, but it doesn’t really work more broadly. For instance, our host here is not a leftist, but that should not mean he must be considered on the right. The distinction is ambiguous and often a bit forced and contentious. But it got used in the post, and this is what I took it to mean here.
I'm neither a leftist nor a conservative — whether I'm on the right depends on how you define the right. But I am a libertarian, so you should be suspicious of my belief in economics if it always leads me to libertarian conclusions even in cases where to most good economists, including ones who have listened to my arguments, it is clear that it doesn't.
And when I think of instances of David's beliefs leading him to conclude specific _problems_ with libertarianism, despite identifying as one, well, there's this talk he gave back in 1981:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuYt6X2g0cY
Jeff Hummel claims I gave a similar talk ten years earlier, but he hadn't found his recording of it last time I asked him.