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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

That sounds very much like what Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek had been advocating. He also discussed prices as being information signals.

The danger of government money-printing is that the government ends up distorting the supply of money entering various industries (especially through big government contracts) and thus, to some extent, ends up determining what is profitable and what is not profitable... Then we end up with an economic system wherein winners are selected not on the basis of their adherence to the needs of working people, but on the basis of their adherence to the whims of government bureaucrats.

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The problem with this reasoning is that it depends on mis-modeling the government. Doing so is intrinsic - the argument is that market effects caused by government action is different than that caused by other market actors. The usual reason given is that government action is not "voluntary", for definitions of voluntary that don't model reality very well.[1]

The reality is that various market participants have powers the others don't. One can argue that the law treats me and Goldman Sachs the same. (I'd also argue that's false, but at least there is a kernel of a case there.) But nobody can argue with a straight face that I have the capabilities to make the same bets. Repeat in thousands of different ways for different actors.

Similarly, the government has special powers that others don't. Indeed, if you treat "government" as a monolithic entity, it is certainly the most powerful actor. But it it just another actor. (Or rather a number of different actors in different contexts, sometimes fighting with each other.)

When your simplifying assumptions don't work, you have two choices. Change your model or complain about reality. The Austrian school has made a philosophy out of the second.

[1] The idea that choosing to feed your kids is a voluntary act but choosing to pay your taxes is not runs contrary to most peoples' moral intuition.

My suspicion is that any asymmetry in the markets which makes it even slightly easier for one participant to make a profit over another is going to have a huge impact on determining which participants survive and which do not. I think this is why there are so many large monopolies today; they've been getting a little extra help; their profit margins have been a little bit bigger and they received a little bit more government contracts (or bailouts) during the economic downturns than their competitors.

When your simplifying assumptions don't work, you have two choices: change your model or complain about reality

This should be on a t-shirt, I feel. Or on a tegeltje (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegeltjeswijsheid)

You just eviscerating an instance of a problem I see damn near every time I follow a link to mises.org, and the pattern of argument that got me to give up on ever getting value out of Ayn Rand's essays the time I gave that a shot, and you did it better than I likely could have. Thanks you, because those bug the hell out of me.

Smug-ass more-logical-than-you tone (which is itself part of the con, so you feel good when you identify with them and start to repeat their arguments, and can more easily dismiss other ideas as "emotion-driven" or whatever, so you don't slip away from the pack) while apparently hoping I won't notice the parlor tricks they pulled near the beginning where they were relying on folksy, naïve definitions of key terms, and trying to sneak poorly-justified premises past me. And it seems to work on lots of people, is the worst part. Damned charlatans.

> Then we end up with an economic system wherein winners are selected not on the basis of their adherence to the needs of working people, but on the basis of their adherence to the whims of government bureaucrats.

You mean like Uber or WeWork? Just remove "government" and it works just as well. Let's not pretend that the government is the only entity that distorts the market and pushes through preferred solution regardless of "the needs of working people".

Private bank loans also play a part in increasing the money supply and inflating bubbles too. But who is to blame for reserve banking and our current soft-money standard which facilitates endless cycles of extreme booms and busts?

For those who prefer to learn Hayek's argument in rap-battle form, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

On a related subject, I can understand why reserve banks and governments think that they can use money printing as an incentive mechanism to fight against climate change, but so far, it does not seem to be effective because government bureaucrats are terrible stakeholders when it comes to the climate; they do not have the ability to differentiate between the kinds of ventures which will genuinely help to fight climate change and those which are merely engaging in green-washing... And it's too easy for government officials to claim plausible deniability when their true intentions have been to help their corporate friends get their hands on big stacks of public 'ESG' money.

I think the problem both has to do with incentives (since government bureaucrats do not 'own' the climate; it's not really their problem) and also with capabilities (they generally do not have the scientific knowledge/qualifications or the critical thinking skills required to be able to effectively make such decisions). Climate change is a very complex topic, it's probable that nobody in the world fully understands all the dynamics which drive it because every single thing (living and non-living) which exists on this planet is a factor contributing either towards or against global warming and everything is interconnected with complex feedback loops... So it's difficult to see how politicians who do not have any scientific background would be able to know how to allocate funding to fight climate change.

There are also many scientists who reject the notion of man-made climate change altogether; in this case, the whole global warming narrative could be seen as nothing but a giant financial scheme to launder freshly printed money from governments to large corporate entities under the ESG label.

Your first paragraph makes sense, but your reasoning on climate change is lacking.

> Climate change is a very complex topic everything ..interconnected with complex feedback loops.

Main driver of global warming is CO2/methane levels. Main drivers of CO2/methane levels since the industrial revolution are human.

That's not complex.

> There are also many scientists who reject the notion of man-made climate change altogether

This is only true if you are loose with your definition of "many" and/or "scientists".

The reason for the apparent confusion over climate change is a well-funded long-term initiative by the oil industry to create confusion by creating fake complexity and doubt.

>> That's not complex.

Humans only contribute around 3% of total CO2 emissions... That's almost certainly less than normal year-on-year variability of CO2 emissions from purely natural sources. The level of volcanic activity (which, on its own contributes more CO2 than humans) is not the same every year. It's difficult to see how human impact on climate change could be significant.

Another thing is that CO2 is good for plants and trees; so increased CO2 should contribute to global greening; and there is evidence of this occurring. Since plants consume carbon dioxide, one would think that more plants and trees on earth would mean that more carbon dioxide would be taken out of the atmosphere. It seems like mother nature has already figured out how to achieve CO2 equilibrium.

Do the climate change models account for things like global greening? Do they account for the fact that plants can evolve to adapt to a changing environment (with more CO2) through the process of natural selection? A good environmental model would have to account for all the different plant populations around the world and their DNA changes over time... We would have to understand how plant genes affect CO2 consumption; and the simulation would involve trillions of variables and probably require millions or billions of times all the world's current computational capacity to compute accurately. That's barely scratching the surface of the complexity. It's arrogant and disingenuous to suggest that it's simple.

All scientists have been able to establish to far is correlation. There is no evidence of causation. Establishing causation is likely impossible due to the huge number of variables involved. Not only do we not fully understand how all the variables interact, we don't even know what all the variables are because the earth is so complex and massive.

No, humans contribute an order of magnitude more CO2 emissions than volcanos. And I hate to break it to you, but plants are not a new discovery hitherto unknown to scientists; "global greening" was discovered and quantified by them long before it became popular with cultists determined to believe in the myth that volcanos emit more CO2 than humans.

What is arrogant and disingenuous is to argue that as something is complicated, scientists' models can't possibly hope to compete with your desire to seek out misinformation on the subject

I don't trust complex models. I've written basic simulations with less than 20 variables to model far simpler phenomena and seen how a slight mistake in just 1 variable can invalidate the entire results in a dramatic way. It doesn't give me much hope for simulations with millions of variables. I suspect that these are completely worthless. It seems like every year, scientists are cherry-picking among thousands of different models for the one which has been right for the last decade or so... They keep changing models every few years and using 'technology has improved and made the old model redundant' as an excuse for doing so as opposed to 'the old model turned out to be wrong this year so we decided to switch to a newer model which has been right.' If they keep creating new models and changing them every few years, they will keep finding new models which have been 'scarily accurate' for the last 10 years or so. They will never run out of such models even if the models were randomly generated.

That said I also wouldn't say that there is no global warming or that humans have no effect on it. I just think humans often overestimate their knowledge and capabilities, especially when there is a financial incentive for doing so.

If you don’t trust complex models, I’m not sure what you can contribute in a discussion on complex problems.

> They keep changing models every few years and using 'technology has improved and made the old model redundant' as an excuse for doing so as opposed to 'the old model turned out to be wrong this year so we decided to switch to a newer model which has been right.

I’m unaware of any sort of major pivots like that happening each year. From what I’ve read it’s been pretty consistent for decades that increased co2 in the atmosphere is causing increased average heat on the planet and humans are the primary cause of the increased co2. The exact results of what that extra heat does/will do isn’t nailed down but the main point of global warming is accepted science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

If you look at a chart like this, and think: hmm, this is probably fine, you've completely lost the plot. Something is going to happen from this, and its probably not going to be fun.

That does look impressive and scary but I wouldn't rule out:

- Increased volcanic activity or other natural events (e.g. solar activity) causing this spike in CO2.

- Flaws in instruments used to accurately measure CO2 levels in the past due to some variables which have not been accounted for.

- That it could just be a temporary spike which will be offset by global greening, increases in ocean phytoplankton or some other natural events over the next few centuries.

It's a bit ... presumptuous ... to assume that scientists that have been studying climate change for 4 decades never considered these possibilities.

In fact, a quick google search: ``` While sulfur dioxide released in contemporary volcanic eruptions has occasionally caused detectable global cooling of the lower atmosphere, the carbon dioxide released in contemporary volcanic eruptions has never caused detectable global warming of the atmosphere. All studies to date of global volcanic carbon dioxide emissions indicate that present-day subaerial and submarine volcanoes release less than a percent of the carbon dioxide released currently by human activities. [https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP] ```

Even if it were true that humans contribute less to global warming than scientists think, we should still try to decrease our overall CO2 output because it's still a contributor to climate change, albeit a smaller one, and the majority of processes that lead to us putting CO2 in the atmosphere are unhealthy in other ways. In the US 50% of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to transportation and energy production. I think we'd all agree that burning fossil fuels is not great for our collective health and car/airplane exhaust fumes are full of stuff we don't want to breath.

It's very interesting that you seem to think climate science is shaky, but economics, that's the real hard science.

Of course, the exact opposite is true. There is now absolutely no doubt whatsoever that global warming is happening and that is is caused by the vast amounts of CO2 and other GHGs that our industrial activity is releasing into the atmosphere. There is a long history of fundamental science (chemical+physical quantifiable measurement of the warming effects of GHGs), historical data from geological records, statistical climate modeling and so on that is as established as any other of the earth sciences.

On the other hand, Economy can only vaguely be described as a science, with extremely over-simplified models that fail consistently, with very little theoretical or empirical evidence to back up the vast majority of its proponents claims - and with nowhere near the standards for what is considered "evidence" that physics or the earth sciences ask for (in terms of statistical measures).

I think you are mixing solid and much less solid science here.

GHG:s and their warming effects are solid science. This can be tested out in any lab.

Statistical climate modelling, and the historical climate reconstructions are much more shaky and are probably not much more reliable than economics is. And probably for the same reason too: Experiments in those area are very difficult to perform.

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