Opened the article expecting it to be a more abstract cost. Turns out it's about economics. Christ alive.
"Yeah, billions are gonna die, but what really matters is my house prices are gonna go down."
"Yeah, billions are gonna die, but what really matters is my house prices are gonna go down."
The economists want something they can measure. They are using dollar losses as a proxy for the gravity of the situation and as a proxy for relative value that people place on things.
If you want someone to analyze people's feelings about the tragedy get a psychologist but there's a reason that economists are more likely to get invited to a climate summit than psychologists.
This is a poor proxy, as it over-values areas with high, uneven distributions of capital accumulation. If the Netherlands were to succumb to the impending boiling sea-waters, that would necessarily have a higher "economist cost" than a similar tragedy befalling Nigeria, despite Nigeria having over 10x the population of the Netherlands.
Rather than viewing the very real human impact, the "economist cost" rides the coat-tails of chauvinist mythology by saying that, yes, in fact a Dutchman is worth 11x a Nigerian.
> there's a reason that economists are more likely to get invited to a climate summit than psychologists.
I can guarantee you it's not the reason you think it is.
I'm pretty sure economists actually genuinely believe this statement.
Except for foreign aid in which being devalued works strongly in the favor of poorer nations. Ie if I have 10 million in aid money to spend and I can buy 10 housing units in Germany or 1000 housing units in Uganda because the currency goes further, that money is going to be routed to the poorer place.
So this is a total strawman. No one respectable (and I mean 0) is using these figures to compare human worth between economies.
You fail to present a better alternative.
Democracy sounds pretty dope when you put it that way.
> You fail to present a better alternative
I just want people to treat human life with dignity. Chile 1973--we've seen what happens with your line of rationalization and commoditizing human lives.
I'm sure it will be "dope".
>I just want people to treat human life with dignity.
I want an airplane made of gold. Who cares what you want? You dislike the only practical method of achieving what you want and present no alternative so you'll get nothing.
It's almost like there are multiple methods of organizing democratic systems of governance and not all of them rely on direct democracy. Maybe, if we had some roughly representative system, wherein people elected people to represent their interests, then those elected officials would hold town-halls to hear their constituents complaints, worries, and get a general feel for their "feelings." That sure seems capable of addressing infrastructural needs.
> Who cares what you want?
I am generally pretty interested in that. Maybe in the above fictional system of governance we recently conjured, my elected official might even have some interest in what I want.
> You dislike the only practical method of achieving what you want
What do I even dislike again? I critiqued you defending monstrous humans for prioritizing dollar values above human lives. Is the Pinochet model really the only viable model in your opinion?
> I want an airplane made of gold
At this point, it seems you'd sooner have a solid gold helicopter.
Frankly, if the solution to climate change will slow economic growth, I think that the highest human cost will come from the lack of growth. To put it in clear terms: lack of growth means that a sewage system, or a hospital, don't get built. This _will_ cause victims.
Although of course the ships that bring immense amounts of food across the globe have been built, and are operated, with fossil fuels. As is our agriculture. Again, increase the cost of the fuel that makes both possible, and people will die.