Yes, there will be almost exactly the same number of jobs created as are lost, almost all of them in as yet unknown areas.
Correct.
Let me guess, it's the Invisible Hand sorting everything out?
It doesn't matter what you call it, it works, as two centuries of automation, massive changes in job titles, and steadily increasing labor participation rates show.
I don't think that's accurate. Productivity since the 70s has doubled [pinimg.com], but real-terms wages have been stagnant. In the last 3 decades, the top 0.1% of Americans have...
The implication of this juxtaposition is that somehow real-term wages have stagnated because the money has gone to top income earners. That is patently false. To the degree that real-term wages have grown slower than they should, it's because of massive redistribution and regulation within the bottom 80% of income earners. Take a simple example: if you were to mandate that employers provide health insurance, employers would take that money out of the salaries and incomes would appear to stagnate; but the employees would still receive that money in benefits.
Basic Income isn't about redistributing wealth evenly ; it's about making sure that no-one starves,
We already have plenty of welfare programs insuring that.
it's also about making sure that the businesses of today have customers tomorrow.
Where are we going to get 80 million new skilled jobs for all those newly skilled unemployed people?
Same place we got SEO optimization consultants, genetic counselors, and UX designers from: entirely new industries and technologies.
Some of the jobs we might have in a decade are VR fashion designers, 3D food printing designers, online education coordinators, commercial drone delivery operators, nanotech cleanup, virtual prostitute. Use your imagination.
Something in-between the two would be more progress than either extreme, I think. But, we've been living the profit to the owners side of the extreme since WWII.
Average corporate profits are around 7% a year, same as stock market returns and other risky investments. That's roughly where they should be; it's a fair compensation for the risks investors take and the value they contribute. And through the stock market, everybody can get that return.
Profits don't go up long term when companies become more efficient; competition instead drives prices down. Companies become more efficient not to increase profits, which they can't, but because they would go out of business if they didn't stay competitive.
When automation reduces the need for labor in the production of some good, profit margins may briefly go up, but then go down again as competitors automate as well. At that point, prices go down and demand goes up, depending on elasticity. Generally, fewer workers are needed, but they usually require different and higher skills so they get paid more; they don't earn more money, they simply transfer over from other similar paying jobs in other industries.
The existing workers move into other industries appropriate to their skills, usually at about the same salary. But since some good has become cheaper now, their salaries are effectively worth a bit more, so the benefits of automation effectively show up as a slight wage increase for everybody.
Your entire analysis is nonsense. You can't predict the effect of a decrease in the cost of making a product without knowing the demands for labor in other manufacturing plants, the difficulty of retraining, the elasticity of demand for needles, etc. Often, automation and mass production have increased the amount of employment related to making a particular product.
So contrary to your hypothesis, it's not the individual strive or laziness that made the difference between unemployed and employed needle workers. It's pure random chance.
That conclusion simply follows from your assumption that all workers are strictly identical and some are going to be unemployed. It has nothing to do with the economics of the situation. If the workers are not strictly identical, then businesses won't select them at random, but instead offer them salaries based on labor supply and demand.
Furthermore, whether unemployed or simply receiving a lower salary, that kind of price signal is the whole point of having a free market; it is what causes people to change jobs to industries where they are more needed than in needlemaking.
only we're doing nothing to improve the situation in the future, so that's the same as losing the war.
This "war" can never be won because people who reason like you keep shifting the goalposts. What you're asking for is not that people are better off year after year (which they are), but that magically everybody ends up with an above average income and standard of living, and that is mathematically impossible.
Yes, but it's still a race to the bottom, because of the jobs which were created, more of them were unskilled
Quite the opposite: automation increases the demand for skilled jobs.
We're seeing the same thing here in the USA right now; although the total number of jobs grew this last year, the number of people seeking employment has not changed at all.
Well, yes. And what policies did the US government pursue during that time? Increases in mandatory benefits, increases in minimum wage, massive stimulus and job creation programs, and massive increases in regulation. And instead of admitting that those don't work, you demand even more of the same.
If you don't have any money, "cheaper" doesn't help.
Why would people "not have any money"?
As someone has already pointed out, the first industrial revolutions occurred during a labor shortage. Now that there is a labor surplus
What evidence is there for a "labor surplus"? By historical standards, the US unemployment rate is fairly low. Furthermore, it would be even lower if government regulations didn't make some people unemployable.
People have made the same Luddite arguments that you're making for a couple of centuries. Even the notion that you can talk about labor as something that there is a "shortage" or a "surplus" of is idiotic. There are far more things that people want to get done than there are people to do them; always. When people don't have to do tedious and repetitive tasks that get automated, they can do more useful and productive things.
Last time around when automation "eliminated" a lot of jobs, people became game designers, software developers, UX engineers, software testers, data miners, social media managers, sustainability experts, E-commerce consultants, genetic counselors, SEO specialists, drone pilots, and wind turbine maintenance crew. Both they and everybody else benefited.
We don't know yet what these 15M people will do when their current jobs get automated, but one way or another, it's going to translate into 15M new and better jobs.
When, in your original post, you said "do nothing," I assumed that you meant "do nothing."
I think I was clear enough: "do nothing [...] the market will take care of this by itself"
OK. You're saying that people will decrease their use of fossil fuel because it's expensive. I'd like to see some numbers here.
No, I'm saying that entrepreneurs have an incentive to develop alternative energies and increase efficiency, for the simple reason that energy is a major input to just about every product. Increase energy efficiency by 10% and you increase profits by at least several percent. That's true whether or not you account for externalities.
In fact, most economists simply say that the more expensive you make fossil fuel, the less people will be using it and the more they will be incentivized to look for alternatives.
Exactly! You got it! Gold star!
But you aren't getting it. There is nothing magic about "accounting for externalities" when talking about supply, demand, and taxes. The more you tax, the less demand there is. In fact, current US gas taxes already actually are around what the EIA estimates to be the externality cost of carbon from burning gasoline (and in Europe, it's much higher), so existing taxes already achieve what you claim is the right thing to do. But you can increase taxes arbitrarily and drive usage to zero if you like. Of course, you also make people poorer and poorer, and the poorer they are, the worse able they are to deal with climate change. The Netherlands are 1/3 below sea level and are doing a lot better than many coastal countries that are above sea level. Worse yet, carbon taxes and similar programs effectively amount to highly regressive taxes and hurt the poorest most.
But there are deeper problems with the approach of "let's account for externalities through taxes": such policies are subject to lobbying and evasion, and they don't work well incentivizing people to develop new technologies. Worse yet, by incentivizing people to use bad technologies, you actually reduce the amount of money available for new R&D.
I repeat: if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions and reach carbon neutrality, the quickest way to do that is for government and society to do nothing and leave things to the free market, with no carbon taxes or other meddling.
Of course, personally, I think climate change is somewhere between harmless and beneficial anyway. I'd like to see us burn fossil fuels for another century just to be sure we have raised CO2 levels enough to get out of the current ice age.
You could have stopped typing after "I don't know any real-world economists".
You were doing so well for a while engaging at least in a reasonable debate before engaging in this silly snark; it's particularly silly because your economic arguments are flawed.
We seem to have a vocabulary problem here. Doing nothing is not a "solution." Doing nothing is choosing to not solve the problem. This is indeed an option which should be considered, but you can't call it is a "solution"-- saying "we don't have to solve this problem" is not a solution.
Indeed we have a vocabulary problem. "We do nothing" only means that government does nothing because the "we" in that phrase refers to collective action by society. You erroneously believe that "we do nothing" amounts to nothing being done at all. In fact, most things in the US get done when "we do nothing" as a society, and action is left to individuals operating in a free market.
No, it's not. You claimed that market forces would solve the problem. They won't, because the cost of warming is not incorporated into the market price.
Your premise is wrong, namely that externalities need to be accounted correctly for in order for markets to solve something. Horse shit was a huge externality for using buggies in cities in the 19th century. Did people develop automobiles only after that externality was accounted for? Of course not. People developed automobiles because they are cheaper and more powerful; no horse-shit-tax was needed.
Dealing with externailties is hard, but most economists accept that, one way or another, governments have to be involved.
Dealing with externalities would mean transferring money from the people causing the additional costs to the people actually bearing the consequences of those costs. But that is not what any of the AGW mitigation proposals do; instead, they simply raise the cost of fossil fuels and then transfer the money to government cronies. The only "benefit" of that is that it encourages people to look for alternatives to fossil fuels; but they are already doing that because fossil fuels are already expensive and taxed.
No, they don't. I am slightly amused here by the fact that two posts up you were saying we should listen to what economists say (because you assumed they agree with you), and when I point out that real-world economists don't actually agree with you, you tell me that we shouldn't listen to them because they are too naive to understand governments are imperfect.
I don't know of any real-world economist who says that the only way to discourage fossil fuel use is to properly account for externalities. In fact, most economists simply say that the more expensive you make fossil fuel, the less people will be using it and the more they will be incentivized to look for alternatives.
You make a nice libertarian argument. But there is more to economics, and for that matter to political science, than libertarian arguments.
Well, so far I haven't seen any argument from you how and why government action would be effective, or why it would be more effective than doing nothing. You simply repeat the mantra that unless we "account for externalities", something bad will happen, with no explanation of what you even mean by that, or explanation of how the proposed AGW mitigation efforts do that.
It isn’t just Securus whose business model has relied on gouging people caught up in the criminal justice system.
Given how much we pay to incarcerate these people and given that they would be receiving lots of government handouts outside prison, I think the obvious solution is to give them a limited number of free domestic phone minutes per week.
Handing a phone monopoly to a private company is cronyism and government corruption.
And all of that doesn't matter, as there is no way in hell our modern societies and agriculture can operate in a climate like that.
Are you kidding? Warm temperatures and plenty of precipitation? Of course modern societies can operate in that; there are plenty of societies that do. It's pretty much ideal.
Actually the more efficient nuclear methods are much harder to make weapons-grade materials from.
Oh, personally, I don't believe the weaponization argument is rational; I think it's politically and economically motivated. But it's the argument that has actually been used to justify banning efficient fission reactors in the past.
We'd simply withdraw our product from EU states first.
Yes, and think about the effects of that.
Big US companies can afford to hire European IT staff, so to them, that eliminates a competitor. I think most of them aren't trying to actively use these issues to kill competition, but they aren't going to spend a lot of money to lobby on your behalf, and they themselves don't care.
European IT companies, big and small, also face one fewer US competitor. They are certainly going to lobby their government for protection from US competitors like you.
And European governments, police, and spy agencies have a strong desire to have all data belonging to European citizens hosted in Europe, where they can get at it easily.
Negotiations are in full gear to get this resolved as soon as possible.
I'm just saying: the interests of companies in your position in these negotiations are not well represented. Maybe governments will see reason (they don't always make bad decisions), I just wouldn't be surprised if the outcome is that US companies indeed must somehow host and staff in Europe.
I'm simply listening to what the scientific community has to say on the issue.
You are listening to political and economic ideologues that use science to justify their ideas. A century ago, people like you fervently defended eugenics and socialism with "what the scientific community" was saying.
As for your claims about the IPCC's findings, I have no idea
If you don't know the IPCC's findings, how can you claim that you are listening to the scientific community? How can you even begin to claim to have an informed argument about climate change if you don't even know in some detail what the IPCC report says?
First, I'm not sure why you think I'm not considering the option of doing nothing
Because you said so, in a roundabout way ("If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are 'statist'"). In fact, there is one solution that is not, namely doing nothing. It's been on the table for a long time, but people with vested political and economic interests keep denouncing its proponents as "deniers".
Second, if the cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of all the effects of burning it and putting the waste into the atmosphere, it's not paying its way-- the people who do have to pay for the effects are subsidizing the price. And so the market won't "take care" of this, because the externalities are not part of the market price-- the price is artificially low, meaning that too much coal will be burned.
That's irrelevant to the point I was making, namely that if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions quickly and efficiently, market mechanisms without government interference are likely to be the quickest way of accomplishing that goal, since markets already have a strong incentive to reduce fossil fuel use because it's expensive. That point has nothing to do with externalities.
Accounting for externalities is a good thing in principle. But the problem with that idea is the notion that governments can do this. In fact, the various carbon taxes that exist or are proposed do not account for externalities correctly, and they certainly don't go to the people who actually bear the cost from carbon emissions.
I know way too many economists. I don't believe that I have ever heard an economist use the word "statist". That's basically a word libertarians invented to mean "anybody who supports anything a government does that I don't like."
"Statism" is a term from political science referring to the concentration of economic and political power in the state; it is the opposite of "anarchism". The term is useful as a neutral generic descriptor for a variety of political ideologies, like progressivism, socialism, fascism, Nordic welfare state, etc.
You're right that libertarians like the term, for the simple reason that both major US political movements, conservatism and progressivism, are both statist. As a term of political advocacy, it's actually far too tame and academic to be very effective in attacking conservatism and progressivism.
As a general thing, economists point out that some things are well accomplished by market solutions, and some things require government actions.
When economists compare market action against government action, they compare markets composed of greedy, selfish, imperfect actors against an idealized government composed of disinterested, selfless, and perfect actors. However, the kind of people making up government and making decisions are no better (and arguably worse) than those making up markets. So, while in principle some idealized government could do a better job than real markets, that's not the government we have and that's not a government we can get. And economists have analyzed how government behaves when it is composed of the same kind of greedy, selfish, and imperfect actors that we find everywhere else in our society, and the outcome isn't good.
You're also wrong and misreading the IPCC reports, by the way. There is no one solution, with one well defined cost, that can be compared to one effects model, with again a well defined cost.
You are right that the IPCC doesn't propose "one solution", but it provides estimates for (1) the cost of climate change if we continue without changes, and (2) the cost of intervention to achieve certain outcomes.
In fact, their estimate for (1) is higher than the policy of no government intervention, because carbon emissions will likely decrease through market mechanisms and because they don't properly dis
Safe Harbor will be resolved in six months and we'll be back to where it was, with maybe a few changes.
I'm not so sure about that. European governments have two big reasons for wanting data and data centers to come home to Europe: (1) it brings IT jobs back into their countries, IT jobs they have been unable to create through competition, and (2) it makes it much easier for European governments to spy on their own citizens; as long as it's the NSA spying on this data, European access to it is quite limited.
As for the companies involved, the cost of operating data centers in Europe are likely lower in the US, in particular when European governments sweeten the deal with additional tax breaks, subsidized energy, subsidized benefits, and cheap land. In addition, it saves on bandwidth. And you don't need IT geniuses or cutting edge technology to run an additional data center in Europe with technology developed in the US, so the local workforce is good enough.
I would expect a lot of servers like this to move to Europe.
Translation: German intelligence is miffed that it is hard to spy on Germany citizens when their data sits on a US server; therefore, the German government pressures companies like Microsoft to move their servers to Germany, where the German government can spy on them much more easily. Having the servers in Germany not only makes it technically much easier to spy on users, it also allows the German police and spy agencies to demand data and issue gag orders, or even seize physical hardware if need be.
Will this reduce NSA spying on German citizens? Possibly, it's hard to say. But NSA spying has always been of little consequence to Germans. What Germans have to worry about is German agencies (e.g., BKA, BND) going on fishing expeditions through their E-mail and documents, looking for signs of illegal (under German law) political views and speech, and behaviors that allow blackmail of criminal suspects, public figures, and politicians.
Should Microsoft have done this? Of course: if that's what Germans want, they should get it; after all, US businesses make arrangements with much worse governments than the German government. Let's just not kid ourselves that this is for the benefit of Germans or their privacy.
3. The 'fire in a crowded theatre' example is a textbook case of speech being limited for public safety. 2. The US does have defamation law. Is it really free speech if someone can sue you and ruin you financially for saying something insulting?
In both cases, there is no law that prohibits you from engaging in the speech. However, of course, if you engage in speech that actually causes harm, then you can be held responsible for the harm you caused. That is not a restriction on free speech.
Note that many European libel and defamation laws are a restriction on free speech, since the punish the speech per se, independent of any demonstrable harm.
1. US obscenity law. The supreme court has ruled many times that obscene material is not legally a form of speech.
This is the only restriction that could even be argued to be a restriction on free speech in the US. SCOTUS has been whittling this down and it has no basis in the US Constitution. It isn't comparable to the ECHR phrasing.
I am trying to argue that they are directly comparable to Europe in terms of effective legal protections for individuals and legal recognition of their rights.
No, they are not. Free speech (and other individual liberties) are much more restricted in Europe than in the US.
Any 'absolute' right without exception is a recipe for trouble - and two of them becomes impossible, because they will inevitably conflict at some point. I might claim an absolute right to free speech, but my neighbour then claims an absolute right to freedom of religion, and his religion demands blasphemers be executed. You can't have both: One or the other must be constrained.
That is because you are mixing up positive and negative rights. The US Constitution guarantees free speech and freedom of religion only in the sense that "Congress shall make no laws...". There is no logical contradiction between "Congress shall make no laws restricting freedom of speech" and "Congress shall make no laws restricting free exercise of religion"; it's easy to comply with both. That's the classical liberal view of law and government underlying the US Constitution.
Contradictions only arise when you think of these as positive rights, as in "The government shall compel religious tolerance", "The government shall ensure that people can speak freely", "People have a right to earn a fair wage", etc. Those kinds of rights are popular with modern liberals, fascists, socialists, and progressives. As you observe, they are mutually contradictory. Since they are mutually contradictory, they are pretty much worthless as principles of government, since pretty much any infringement on any one of these positive rights can be justified by some other positive right.
Europe gets it wrong by elevating positive rights to a constitutional principle; that's an inherently inconsistent basis for a society. The constitutional principles of the US only guarantee freedom from interference by the US government; positive rights are not rooted in the US Constitution, and often simply represent temporary exceptions that sooner or later will have to get struck down in light of the US Constitution.
The scientists aren't necessarily right, but that's the way to bet, and they're a whole lot likelier to be correct than you are. They've studied the issue a great deal.
I am stipulating that the scientists are right on the science: the degree of sea level rise and temperature increase. They also furnish economic estimates of costs. And based on their estimates there is no justification for government action on climate change.
If you want to know what's really going on, pay little attention to the politicians and try to avoid relying on the media. Look for what the real scientists are saying.
That is exactly what I'm doing, which is why I concluded that the media and politicians are fabricating a crisis for which there is no scientific basis.
One of the unique features of the Eocene’s climate as mentioned before was the equable and homogeneous climate that existed in the early parts of the Eocene. A multitude of proxies support the presence of a warmer equable climate being present during this period of time. A few of these proxies include the presence of fossils native to warm climates, such as crocodiles, located in the higher latitudes,[16][17] the presence in the high-latitudes of frost-intolerant flora such as palm trees which cannot survive during sustained freezes,[17][18] and fossils of snakes found in the tropics that would require much higher average temperatures to sustain them.[17]
At the beginning of the Eocene, the high temperatures and warm oceans created a moist, balmy environment, with forests spreading throughout the Earth from pole to pole. Apart from the driest deserts, Earth must have been entirely covered in forests.
Polar forests were quite extensive. Fossils and even preserved remains of trees such as swamp cypress and dawn redwood from the Eocene have been found on Ellesmere Island in the Arctic. Even at that time, Ellesmere Island was only a few degrees in latitude further south than it is today. Fossils of subtropical and even tropical trees and plants from the Eocene have also been found in Greenland and Alaska. Tropical rainforests grew as far north as northern North America and Europe.
The science does not tell us the societal or economic costs, and in no way does it tell us the cost of acting-- that's economics and politics, not science.
To the degree that economics makes falsifiable predictions about the future, economics is a science.
Nope, you were right the first time: science doesn't address this, that's a political choice.
Economics and political science certainly tell us that large, statist institutions are inefficient or even ineffective.
he cost benefit ratio of various potential methods to deal with it.
The IPCC has evaluated the cost/benefit ratios, and it comes to the conclusion that the cost of action and inaction about balance out under its assumptions, but that is assuming that action is actually successful. Since there is a high probability that action is unsuccessful yet costly, that alone means that we shouldn't take action.
Well, that's true, but it's true because it's a tautology. The only way to tell whether any prediction for the future is right is to wait to see whether it happens.
Well, apparently you don't understand that fact, since you attempted to justify climate predictions for 2100 with the statement that "Scientists gain their reputation partly by being smart, but the way they show that they are smart is by being right." Generally, we don't know whether scientists are right until decades after they formulated their theories. And we won't know whether climate scientists are right for another half century.
If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are "statist"-- well, that's because the people who might have other ideas are too busy shouting
Your problem is simply that you aren't listening to the simplest and most effective solution: do nothing. Fossil fuels are already expensive and provide a strong built-in incentive to economize on their usage. The market will therefore take care of this by itself.
The subsidies are needed because of the cost of delays caused by regulation and lawsuits and to make it competitive with coal and natural gas.
Subsidies aren't an effective remedy to bad regulation. In fact, if you subsidize in response to bad regulation, you economically reward bad regulation and will encourage more of it.
In different words "impose a billion dollars of additional regulations on us and then subsidize us by a billion dollars" is a good deal for a regulated industry.
Natural gas is better than coal, but it won't get us to the carbon neutrality needed to mitigate Global Climate Change.
Well, I disagree with the premise that carbon neutrality is even a desirable goal.
Yes, they hand out millions of dollars worth of bets... with other people's money.
And what happens to the grant committee members if the projects don't deliver anything useful? Basically nothing.
Of course, scientific research projects rarely "fail" anyway because grant recipients have an interest in representing their work in the best possible light, and neither granting agencies nor grant committees have an incentive for challenging them.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct.
It doesn't matter what you call it, it works, as two centuries of automation, massive changes in job titles, and steadily increasing labor participation rates show.
The implication of this juxtaposition is that somehow real-term wages have stagnated because the money has gone to top income earners. That is patently false. To the degree that real-term wages have grown slower than they should, it's because of massive redistribution and regulation within the bottom 80% of income earners. Take a simple example: if you were to mandate that employers provide health insurance, employers would take that money out of the salaries and incomes would appear to stagnate; but the employees would still receive that money in benefits.
We already have plenty of welfare programs insuring that.
And how exactly does that work?
Same place we got SEO optimization consultants, genetic counselors, and UX designers from: entirely new industries and technologies.
Some of the jobs we might have in a decade are VR fashion designers, 3D food printing designers, online education coordinators, commercial drone delivery operators, nanotech cleanup, virtual prostitute. Use your imagination.
Average corporate profits are around 7% a year, same as stock market returns and other risky investments. That's roughly where they should be; it's a fair compensation for the risks investors take and the value they contribute. And through the stock market, everybody can get that return.
Profits don't go up long term when companies become more efficient; competition instead drives prices down. Companies become more efficient not to increase profits, which they can't, but because they would go out of business if they didn't stay competitive.
When automation reduces the need for labor in the production of some good, profit margins may briefly go up, but then go down again as competitors automate as well. At that point, prices go down and demand goes up, depending on elasticity. Generally, fewer workers are needed, but they usually require different and higher skills so they get paid more; they don't earn more money, they simply transfer over from other similar paying jobs in other industries.
The existing workers move into other industries appropriate to their skills, usually at about the same salary. But since some good has become cheaper now, their salaries are effectively worth a bit more, so the benefits of automation effectively show up as a slight wage increase for everybody.
Your entire analysis is nonsense. You can't predict the effect of a decrease in the cost of making a product without knowing the demands for labor in other manufacturing plants, the difficulty of retraining, the elasticity of demand for needles, etc. Often, automation and mass production have increased the amount of employment related to making a particular product.
That conclusion simply follows from your assumption that all workers are strictly identical and some are going to be unemployed. It has nothing to do with the economics of the situation. If the workers are not strictly identical, then businesses won't select them at random, but instead offer them salaries based on labor supply and demand.
Furthermore, whether unemployed or simply receiving a lower salary, that kind of price signal is the whole point of having a free market; it is what causes people to change jobs to industries where they are more needed than in needlemaking.
This "war" can never be won because people who reason like you keep shifting the goalposts. What you're asking for is not that people are better off year after year (which they are), but that magically everybody ends up with an above average income and standard of living, and that is mathematically impossible.
Quite the opposite: automation increases the demand for skilled jobs.
Well, yes. And what policies did the US government pursue during that time? Increases in mandatory benefits, increases in minimum wage, massive stimulus and job creation programs, and massive increases in regulation. And instead of admitting that those don't work, you demand even more of the same.
Why would people "not have any money"?
What evidence is there for a "labor surplus"? By historical standards, the US unemployment rate is fairly low. Furthermore, it would be even lower if government regulations didn't make some people unemployable.
People have made the same Luddite arguments that you're making for a couple of centuries. Even the notion that you can talk about labor as something that there is a "shortage" or a "surplus" of is idiotic. There are far more things that people want to get done than there are people to do them; always. When people don't have to do tedious and repetitive tasks that get automated, they can do more useful and productive things.
Last time around when automation "eliminated" a lot of jobs, people became game designers, software developers, UX engineers, software testers, data miners, social media managers, sustainability experts, E-commerce consultants, genetic counselors, SEO specialists, drone pilots, and wind turbine maintenance crew. Both they and everybody else benefited.
We don't know yet what these 15M people will do when their current jobs get automated, but one way or another, it's going to translate into 15M new and better jobs.
I think I was clear enough: "do nothing [...] the market will take care of this by itself"
No, I'm saying that entrepreneurs have an incentive to develop alternative energies and increase efficiency, for the simple reason that energy is a major input to just about every product. Increase energy efficiency by 10% and you increase profits by at least several percent. That's true whether or not you account for externalities.
But you aren't getting it. There is nothing magic about "accounting for externalities" when talking about supply, demand, and taxes. The more you tax, the less demand there is. In fact, current US gas taxes already actually are around what the EIA estimates to be the externality cost of carbon from burning gasoline (and in Europe, it's much higher), so existing taxes already achieve what you claim is the right thing to do. But you can increase taxes arbitrarily and drive usage to zero if you like. Of course, you also make people poorer and poorer, and the poorer they are, the worse able they are to deal with climate change. The Netherlands are 1/3 below sea level and are doing a lot better than many coastal countries that are above sea level. Worse yet, carbon taxes and similar programs effectively amount to highly regressive taxes and hurt the poorest most.
But there are deeper problems with the approach of "let's account for externalities through taxes": such policies are subject to lobbying and evasion, and they don't work well incentivizing people to develop new technologies. Worse yet, by incentivizing people to use bad technologies, you actually reduce the amount of money available for new R&D.
I repeat: if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions and reach carbon neutrality, the quickest way to do that is for government and society to do nothing and leave things to the free market, with no carbon taxes or other meddling.
Of course, personally, I think climate change is somewhere between harmless and beneficial anyway. I'd like to see us burn fossil fuels for another century just to be sure we have raised CO2 levels enough to get out of the current ice age.
You were doing so well for a while engaging at least in a reasonable debate before engaging in this silly snark; it's particularly silly because your economic arguments are flawed.
Indeed we have a vocabulary problem. "We do nothing" only means that government does nothing because the "we" in that phrase refers to collective action by society. You erroneously believe that "we do nothing" amounts to nothing being done at all. In fact, most things in the US get done when "we do nothing" as a society, and action is left to individuals operating in a free market.
Your premise is wrong, namely that externalities need to be accounted correctly for in order for markets to solve something. Horse shit was a huge externality for using buggies in cities in the 19th century. Did people develop automobiles only after that externality was accounted for? Of course not. People developed automobiles because they are cheaper and more powerful; no horse-shit-tax was needed.
Dealing with externalities would mean transferring money from the people causing the additional costs to the people actually bearing the consequences of those costs. But that is not what any of the AGW mitigation proposals do; instead, they simply raise the cost of fossil fuels and then transfer the money to government cronies. The only "benefit" of that is that it encourages people to look for alternatives to fossil fuels; but they are already doing that because fossil fuels are already expensive and taxed.
I don't know of any real-world economist who says that the only way to discourage fossil fuel use is to properly account for externalities. In fact, most economists simply say that the more expensive you make fossil fuel, the less people will be using it and the more they will be incentivized to look for alternatives.
Well, so far I haven't seen any argument from you how and why government action would be effective, or why it would be more effective than doing nothing. You simply repeat the mantra that unless we "account for externalities", something bad will happen, with no explanation of what you even mean by that, or explanation of how the proposed AGW mitigation efforts do that.
Given how much we pay to incarcerate these people and given that they would be receiving lots of government handouts outside prison, I think the obvious solution is to give them a limited number of free domestic phone minutes per week.
Handing a phone monopoly to a private company is cronyism and government corruption.
Are you kidding? Warm temperatures and plenty of precipitation? Of course modern societies can operate in that; there are plenty of societies that do. It's pretty much ideal.
Oh, personally, I don't believe the weaponization argument is rational; I think it's politically and economically motivated. But it's the argument that has actually been used to justify banning efficient fission reactors in the past.
Yes, and think about the effects of that.
Big US companies can afford to hire European IT staff, so to them, that eliminates a competitor. I think most of them aren't trying to actively use these issues to kill competition, but they aren't going to spend a lot of money to lobby on your behalf, and they themselves don't care.
European IT companies, big and small, also face one fewer US competitor. They are certainly going to lobby their government for protection from US competitors like you.
And European governments, police, and spy agencies have a strong desire to have all data belonging to European citizens hosted in Europe, where they can get at it easily.
I'm just saying: the interests of companies in your position in these negotiations are not well represented. Maybe governments will see reason (they don't always make bad decisions), I just wouldn't be surprised if the outcome is that US companies indeed must somehow host and staff in Europe.
You are listening to political and economic ideologues that use science to justify their ideas. A century ago, people like you fervently defended eugenics and socialism with "what the scientific community" was saying.
If you don't know the IPCC's findings, how can you claim that you are listening to the scientific community? How can you even begin to claim to have an informed argument about climate change if you don't even know in some detail what the IPCC report says?
Because you said so, in a roundabout way ("If you are arguing that all the proposed solutions are 'statist'"). In fact, there is one solution that is not, namely doing nothing. It's been on the table for a long time, but people with vested political and economic interests keep denouncing its proponents as "deniers".
That's irrelevant to the point I was making, namely that if your goal is to reduce carbon emissions quickly and efficiently, market mechanisms without government interference are likely to be the quickest way of accomplishing that goal, since markets already have a strong incentive to reduce fossil fuel use because it's expensive. That point has nothing to do with externalities.
Accounting for externalities is a good thing in principle. But the problem with that idea is the notion that governments can do this. In fact, the various carbon taxes that exist or are proposed do not account for externalities correctly, and they certainly don't go to the people who actually bear the cost from carbon emissions.
"Statism" is a term from political science referring to the concentration of economic and political power in the state; it is the opposite of "anarchism". The term is useful as a neutral generic descriptor for a variety of political ideologies, like progressivism, socialism, fascism, Nordic welfare state, etc.
You're right that libertarians like the term, for the simple reason that both major US political movements, conservatism and progressivism, are both statist. As a term of political advocacy, it's actually far too tame and academic to be very effective in attacking conservatism and progressivism.
When economists compare market action against government action, they compare markets composed of greedy, selfish, imperfect actors against an idealized government composed of disinterested, selfless, and perfect actors. However, the kind of people making up government and making decisions are no better (and arguably worse) than those making up markets. So, while in principle some idealized government could do a better job than real markets, that's not the government we have and that's not a government we can get. And economists have analyzed how government behaves when it is composed of the same kind of greedy, selfish, and imperfect actors that we find everywhere else in our society, and the outcome isn't good.
You are right that the IPCC doesn't propose "one solution", but it provides estimates for (1) the cost of climate change if we continue without changes, and (2) the cost of intervention to achieve certain outcomes.
In fact, their estimate for (1) is higher than the policy of no government intervention, because carbon emissions will likely decrease through market mechanisms and because they don't properly dis
I'm not so sure about that. European governments have two big reasons for wanting data and data centers to come home to Europe: (1) it brings IT jobs back into their countries, IT jobs they have been unable to create through competition, and (2) it makes it much easier for European governments to spy on their own citizens; as long as it's the NSA spying on this data, European access to it is quite limited.
As for the companies involved, the cost of operating data centers in Europe are likely lower in the US, in particular when European governments sweeten the deal with additional tax breaks, subsidized energy, subsidized benefits, and cheap land. In addition, it saves on bandwidth. And you don't need IT geniuses or cutting edge technology to run an additional data center in Europe with technology developed in the US, so the local workforce is good enough.
I would expect a lot of servers like this to move to Europe.
Translation: German intelligence is miffed that it is hard to spy on Germany citizens when their data sits on a US server; therefore, the German government pressures companies like Microsoft to move their servers to Germany, where the German government can spy on them much more easily. Having the servers in Germany not only makes it technically much easier to spy on users, it also allows the German police and spy agencies to demand data and issue gag orders, or even seize physical hardware if need be.
Will this reduce NSA spying on German citizens? Possibly, it's hard to say. But NSA spying has always been of little consequence to Germans. What Germans have to worry about is German agencies (e.g., BKA, BND) going on fishing expeditions through their E-mail and documents, looking for signs of illegal (under German law) political views and speech, and behaviors that allow blackmail of criminal suspects, public figures, and politicians.
Should Microsoft have done this? Of course: if that's what Germans want, they should get it; after all, US businesses make arrangements with much worse governments than the German government. Let's just not kid ourselves that this is for the benefit of Germans or their privacy.
In both cases, there is no law that prohibits you from engaging in the speech. However, of course, if you engage in speech that actually causes harm, then you can be held responsible for the harm you caused. That is not a restriction on free speech.
Note that many European libel and defamation laws are a restriction on free speech, since the punish the speech per se, independent of any demonstrable harm.
This is the only restriction that could even be argued to be a restriction on free speech in the US. SCOTUS has been whittling this down and it has no basis in the US Constitution. It isn't comparable to the ECHR phrasing.
No, they are not. Free speech (and other individual liberties) are much more restricted in Europe than in the US.
That is because you are mixing up positive and negative rights. The US Constitution guarantees free speech and freedom of religion only in the sense that "Congress shall make no laws...". There is no logical contradiction between "Congress shall make no laws restricting freedom of speech" and "Congress shall make no laws restricting free exercise of religion"; it's easy to comply with both. That's the classical liberal view of law and government underlying the US Constitution.
Contradictions only arise when you think of these as positive rights, as in "The government shall compel religious tolerance", "The government shall ensure that people can speak freely", "People have a right to earn a fair wage", etc. Those kinds of rights are popular with modern liberals, fascists, socialists, and progressives. As you observe, they are mutually contradictory. Since they are mutually contradictory, they are pretty much worthless as principles of government, since pretty much any infringement on any one of these positive rights can be justified by some other positive right.
Europe gets it wrong by elevating positive rights to a constitutional principle; that's an inherently inconsistent basis for a society. The constitutional principles of the US only guarantee freedom from interference by the US government; positive rights are not rooted in the US Constitution, and often simply represent temporary exceptions that sooner or later will have to get struck down in light of the US Constitution.
I am stipulating that the scientists are right on the science: the degree of sea level rise and temperature increase. They also furnish economic estimates of costs. And based on their estimates there is no justification for government action on climate change.
That is exactly what I'm doing, which is why I concluded that the media and politicians are fabricating a crisis for which there is no scientific basis.
Well, actually it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
To the degree that economics makes falsifiable predictions about the future, economics is a science.
Economics and political science certainly tell us that large, statist institutions are inefficient or even ineffective.
The IPCC has evaluated the cost/benefit ratios, and it comes to the conclusion that the cost of action and inaction about balance out under its assumptions, but that is assuming that action is actually successful. Since there is a high probability that action is unsuccessful yet costly, that alone means that we shouldn't take action.
Well, apparently you don't understand that fact, since you attempted to justify climate predictions for 2100 with the statement that "Scientists gain their reputation partly by being smart, but the way they show that they are smart is by being right." Generally, we don't know whether scientists are right until decades after they formulated their theories. And we won't know whether climate scientists are right for another half century.
Your problem is simply that you aren't listening to the simplest and most effective solution: do nothing. Fossil fuels are already expensive and provide a strong built-in incentive to economize on their usage. The market will therefore take care of this by itself.
Subsidies aren't an effective remedy to bad regulation. In fact, if you subsidize in response to bad regulation, you economically reward bad regulation and will encourage more of it.
In different words "impose a billion dollars of additional regulations on us and then subsidize us by a billion dollars" is a good deal for a regulated industry.
Well, I disagree with the premise that carbon neutrality is even a desirable goal.
Yes, they hand out millions of dollars worth of bets... with other people's money.
And what happens to the grant committee members if the projects don't deliver anything useful? Basically nothing.
Of course, scientific research projects rarely "fail" anyway because grant recipients have an interest in representing their work in the best possible light, and neither granting agencies nor grant committees have an incentive for challenging them.