Green recovery must end the reign of GDP, argue Cambridge and UN economists
phys.org
phys.org
> But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-famil...
"Some people see things as they are and say, 'why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'why not?'"
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy%27s_remarks_...
I agree with your overall point, but it is a mistake to see poetry as a product of development. The Persian-speaking region is among the most poetry-mad of all peoples on earth, but rarely have they been wealthy. And the Manas, the epic-poetry tradition of Kyrgyzstan that has persisted for centuries, is losing ground among younger generations precisely because of access to modern luxuries like television and the internet. Moreover, when Milman Parry and Albert Lord wanted to study firsthand the kind of techniques that gave rise to Homer’s poetry, they headed for what was then among the poorest parts of Europe. The list could do on and on.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-...
> Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
Really, global warming at least is a pretty much perfect scenario for market solutions, because it's simultaneously a vastly distributed problem and also can be attacked from anywhere in the world (since greenhouse gases naturally disperse evenly worldwide). Just set the price of emitting/extracting a ton of CO2/equivalent at the price of industrially removing it plus some minimum margin (5-7%). Make the latter a ratcheting auction system, completely revenue-neutral to the government, and countries that don't comply internally can have conservative worst case carbon internalization tariffs applied. Then just leave the markets to sort out the best ways to meet that goal. Everything almost instantly becomes carbon neutral, no need for any sort of moralizing about what luxuries are more important, everyone can just see the real prices and decide accordingly where they want to allocate their resources. And as carbon capture becomes large scale and mature, it'll be cheaper to then go negative carbon and reverse the problem.
I'm worried a lot of the feelings-based efforts and attempts to mix in huge revolutions are extremely counter productive to dealing with AGW specifically. Yes, there are lots of other major inequalities and systemic problems that desperately need addressing. But AGW is such a huge controversial deal riders should really, really be minimized. Fundamentally asking that economics be honest and properly account for costs shouldn't be as big an ask as a lot of other things, and it genuinely is for all of our benefit too. If measures like "GDP" are distorted based on externalities, the first thing to do should be un-distort them shouldn't it?
That's also problematic because CO2 acts globally - and you don't really want to give dictatorships of poor countries who are affected the most (e.g. Africa) a steady supply of money.
Now the problem is that CO2 for cheap gasoline cars is taxed a lot. While CO2 for airplane fuel for better off to go on holidays is not. And they get tax credits to buy nice electric cars. Regressive taxation at it's best.
I used to fuel commercial flights in a previous and much better life. International jets used a special ticket that said INTL EXEMPT on them.
France is a welfare state, but we still have 10%-15% of people hit by poverty.
How is it acceptable in one of the leading economies of EU, and how is it freaking possible we still have this have this problem in the twenty-first century?
I only skimmed TFA, but it seems that it talk about this. Environment and social issues.
IMHO new statics won't change a thing. Political leaders are already aware of this.
Emitting or extracting? The two are radically different and done in different countries. And how in both cases do you deal with simple but massive cheating?
> countries that don't comply internally can have conservative worst case carbon internalization tariffs applied
I look forward to some future US administration trying to impose tariffs on Saudi Arabia and a sheik turning up saying "Your campaign. How much?" and writing a bribe for a couple of billion dollars.
So the link and magnitude appears pretty strong and the results appear pretty much expected. We know how to do this.
One: stop the emissions by switching to renewables and nuclear, and away from fossil fuels for transport.
Two: drawdown the carbon we’ve already emitted (and will emit during the transition in One above) through reforestation, rebuilding wetlands, building new carbon sinks, and carbon capture.
The market and a political approach are the only solution. How else are you going to institute the subsidies and taxes and government scale infrastructure and environmental programs.
-For political change to be effective, it would have to completely change how the economy functions, and essentially turn into some sort of WWII total war mode where almost all actors are focused on the same outcome, except many more countries have to be corralled together this time
-The market might produce the technology we need, but it would have to be black swan level good for it to have an impact, otherwise we are looking at investments in infrastructure so massive that we will need the total war mode described above anyway
I don't want to extrapolate too much from a single figure, but that 7% did indeed shatter many of my previously held beliefs. A complete revolution in the way things work for only 7%! I can't emphasize how disturbing that is. We have an albeit limited but at least hard datapoint that the current mindset is doomed. In a technical sense, it will indeed be a market and political approach but it will be so different from what most people mean with this phrase (i.e. carbon taxes will fix it, let's just carry on as usual but more carefully) that it's no longer a meaningful conversation
Things like decarbonizing an electricity grid have been done before, France did it in the 80s. It wasn’t revolutionary. You wouldn’t have noticed except the air was cleaner.
Things like converting transport to non fossil fuels are already in progress and there’s nothing revolutionary looking about it. An electric car isn’t revolutionary it looks and (mostly) drives like a regular car. An electric train isn’t revolutionary, it’s already the norm for decades in most places.
Planting trees or restoring wetlands isn’t revolutionary. It’s just trees and wetlands.
Even carbon extraction is going to look pretty uninteresting to most people if it happens.
The only thing that will be revolutionary is what will happen if we don’t do these things soon enough.
Despite its well known flaws, GDP has some great features - it's relatively easy to measure, has more-or-less a standard agreed and universal method of measurement and it is quantitative.
As a result, GDP is widely measured and provides a basis for comparison across history and geography.
Many proposed alternatives for GDP (as a measure of economic progress) do not have these features. Nor does the proposal in the linked to article. And so I think (like previous proposals) it's doomed to failure.
Our tools have improved so much since we started measuring GDP. Maybe we should raise the bar on metrics: we're bound to find ones that are not-terribly-difficult-to-measure in 2020.
These are great features, but interestingly absent from this list is whether GDP is accurate and precise as a measure of economic progress.
None of these great features indicate that a larger GDP is in any way desirable.
I don't think anyone argues against measuring GDP. The problem is when people implicitly assume a larger GDP is better.
.pdf download: https://seea.un.org/file/17999/download?token=gi33gfel
Also referenced in article: Building Forward: Investing in a resilient recovery - Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge
https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/publications/building...
Economist always promote growth, which grows energy use. Further economist is one science which assume a lot how the world works versus in other sciences that have to measure how the world works.
I would say that Keynesian economics and the environment is not coherent. In the sense that Keynesian economics lowers the interest rate in an artificial way, which promotes economic growth. This economic growth increases consumption.
Yes, you can. It’s called Efficiency. In the narrow sense, we are nowhere near the limits of thermodynamics. But there is also efficiency versus effectiveness. If I make a different product that better satisfices the greater needs, it may have a higher embodied energy costs than the old product, and yet still drive overall efficiency.
A thinner saw blade has a smaller kerf, resulting in less raw material turned to dust. And even though the blade contains less steel, that steel is more dear. But I chop down fewer trees or dig up less stone if I use it.
Actually, if you look compared to the past, this pandemic was much less lethal than those of the past. In addition, we have had much better treatment options. Finally, it was modern development that allowed a vaccine to be made in around 1 year.
It seems pandemics are more devastating on people with higher natural capital. Take for example the Native Americans exposed to the European diseases. Also, diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, affect nations with more natural capital than more developed nations.
Something with the lethality of smallpox or Spanish Flu would have been far harder to deal with. It's not at all obvious that - say - supermarket food delivery would have survived without a complete breakdown.
It actually did break down briefly in the UK for a couple of weeks in March. Luckily supermarket logistics are mostly managed by rational adults and services recovered over the next few weeks.
But I have a Covid souvenir online shopping screen grab from March which says:
Number of users in queue ahead of you: 229343 Estimated wait time: at least an hour
Land ownership in it's modern form didn't happen in a voluntary way, it was forced through violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)#Us...
Basically you can only "own" land if you personally actually use it, not just rent it (or do nothing with it).
The alternative proposal was to divide government along watershed boundaries. Spain and France are still divided by the Pyrenees, because ridge lines are the same boundaries on both maps. But the Rhine and the Rhone say that France is divided from Germany, Italy, and Benelux all wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_watershed#/media/File...
The river would instead become the middle of a territory, not the edges. My hamlet “owns” the valley it sits in. The county owns the tributary that flows past my hamlet and into another tributary. The state owns the tributary all the way to the Rhone, our nation or a union owns the entire Rhone, and a regional group oversees the Mediterranean, while the UN oversees the oceans in general, when regions don’t agree with themselves or among each other.
Anyone who muddies our water is in a direct chain of accountability to everyone down stream.
Logistically this is a nightmare. We’ve wiped out any cultures who might have worked this way, and those that remain won’t move political boundaries except under extreme duress, except to expand them (see point 1). But it does have a very Conway’s Law feel to it.
Even the soviets came to that conclusion during their existence, starting with adopting leasing and then near the end full ownership for agriculture and then eventually for homes.
I still remember a friend from college telling me how his father had to retain his property after the fall of the USSR and new land rights were established in one of the now former satellite states, with a gun and an axe.
Not to create a false dichotomy but I'll take a stable slightly coercive economic system over a system that requires me to use violence to keep what is mine.
It's only our familiarity and compliance with the system that prevents us from encountering that violence.
“Business is war.”
For example your axe and gun won't help you when your health insurance company decides that your pre-existing condition is too expensive to insure and your medical costs are now 100% your own responsibility - which is something that causes the bankruptcy of around 500,000 Americans every year.
Or when there's a major financial crash and a bank decides that it needs to steal your home from under you, whether or not you're underwater on your mortgage.
These are not hypotheticals. These are all things that have happened, are happening, and are likely to continue happening.
GDP is not the issue, but a political and economic system which increases personal selfishness at the expense of others is. You can argue that collectivist solutions have the same problem, and to an extent you'll be right. But it's a long way from there to pretending that this is the best of all possible worlds, because there are economies which prove that isn't true.
I believe evolving our current system and maintaining certain elements is better than getting rid of it all together. I see reactions like yours as throwing the baby out with the bathwater when there are more level headed approaches we can take like limiting lobbying to course correct.
Edit: This is my US centric view, I realized after the fact that we may not be in the same place since this is a global forum
That's a very narrow view of capitalism.
If anything, the point of the article is that MORE things should be priced in. Nature's value should be analyzed from a monetary point of view and you shouldn't be allowed to destroy it at 0 cost.
The fact that “money” is still involved has nothing to do with this argument. Even the Soviet Union issued currency.
We do it the same way we do with everything else:
> The economy of the United States is that of a highly developed country with a mixed economy
> A mixed economy is variously defined as an economic system blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy, free markets with state interventionism, or private enterprise with public enterprise.
Getting back to your question:
We establish a market for this, guided/corrected by state intervention if and when needed.
https://socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/ecological-di...
In fact the above link doesn't even mention the whaling atrocity:
https://earthtrust.org/savethewhalesintl/homepage/busting-pi...
My point being - clearly capitalism isn't the cause of ecological ruin.
Clearly, capitalism isn't the only possible cause of ecological ruin. In this case, however, it appears to be allowing _everyone involved_ to shirk the responsibility to pay for the damage they cause.
this metaphor may have over stayed its welcome.
With economic systems, almost every action and thought-pattern you take in your daily life are reoriented according to the pressures you are subjected to. Even things that seem completely natural like the concept of a "hobby" or "free time" are massively different to previous eras and patterns of thought.
If we ever want to go beyond earth we'll have to figure out how to live independently from natural habitats and their ecology. One puzzle piece will probably be hydroponics (another HN frontpage thread from today). Others, like efficient temperature management adaptable to hugely different environments and high density and long term energy sources (e.g. fusion), have yet to be developed. I actually think researching these technologies is more important than saving earth. By all means, slow the decay so we get there, but eventually someone will fuck up anyway and we'd better have colonized the solar system by then.
In such a future clean air would be as much a tradable commodity as water and food are today. There are two ways of dealing with tragedy of the commons: remove the tragedy through coordinated action or let the market remove the commons. Looking at our history coordination and selfless cooperation are just not really a viable option long term, they only work intermittently.