It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Month: July 2006
The dismal science of freedom
The topic for my BrisScience talk tomorrow night is Economics: The Hopeful Science. The name, obviously, is an allusion to Carlyle’s characterization of economics as ‘the dismal science’. In choosing though, I was under the common misapprehension that Carlyle was attacking Malthus, and his prediction of a stationary economy with a subsistence wage, that could be raised only through ‘moral restraint’.
It turns out, however, that the phrase actually occurs in Carlyle’s defence of slavery, charmingly entitled, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question*, and that the primary target is John Stuart Mill and other economists who favored free labour over slavery.
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ABARE on the costs of climate change
I’ve been reading the latest ABARE report on climate change, kindly sent to me by my colleague Renuka Mahadevan . While there are some problems with the analysis and even more with the way it’s been reported, the central findings are strikingly consistent with estimates I’ve made about the costs of stabilsing global CO2 levels, most recently here
All the evidence, though, is that we can reduce emissions to levels consistent with stabilising global CO2 levels over the next few decades at a cost of around 5 per cent of GDP – a few years worth of economic growth at the most. Quite possibly, as in previous cases, this wll turn out to be an overestimate.
ABARE studies a number of scenarios in which global CO2 levels are stabilised at 575 parts per million in 2100 and reports the estimated reduction in global product at 2050, which ranges from 1.7 per cent to 4.3 per cent, or from a bit under 1 years per capita growth to a bit over 2 years. That is, in the worst-case scenario (which is somewhat problematic in modelling terms, I think), the living standards in 2150 will be those that would have been reached in 2048 under the base projection.
ABARE is not known for lowballing the estimated costs of mitigating climate change, but if you’re going to do a credible modelling exercise, it’s inevitable that numbers of this magnitude will emerge. This simply reflects the fact that carbon-based fuels make up only a modest proportion of the value of total output, and that the demand for carbon (or more precisely C02) emissions is bound to be at least moderately elastic in the long run.
Weekend reflections
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Vote Yes in Toowoomba
The struggle of science against stupidity (and, in some cases, selfish interest groups) is being fought out on a number of fronts – creationism, global warming and passive smoking to name but a few. Tomorrow the venue moves to Toowoomba where a proposal to deal with a drastic water shortage by recycling effluent is being opposed by a know-nothing scare campaign, whose proponents have neither credible arguments nor an alternative to offer. I’m happy to endorse people’s freedom not to drink recycled water if they don’t want to. Their local supermarket offers chemically identical spring water at around $1/litre, so if they don’t want to drink what comes out of the tap at $1/kilolitre, they don’t have to. But they shouldn’t make their fellow-citizens suffer for their irrational squeamishness.
Australian Astroturf
Trevor Cook is campaigning against astroturfing, along with Paul Young. They’ve set up a campaign page.
As is pointed out on the page, Astroturf groups have their Internet equivalent in the form of sock-puppets, one of the lowest forms of life on the Web.
BrisScience, 31 July
I’ve been very much enjoying attending the BrisScience lecture series, and next week I’ll get to give one. I’m talking on Monday July 31 at the Ithaca Auditorium, City Hall, on the topic “Economics: The Hopeful Science” (6pm for 6:30). The theme of my talk, which should be familiar to readers of this blog is that we can (and must) have both economic growth and protection of the environment.
