You know, I'm no big fan of Bombs-Away Gore, and you'll hardly find me leaping to his personal defense, but nonetheless. Is this is or is this ain't the single stupidest thing ever written? Anywhere. By anyone. (A hint, Reader: Yes.)
Bonus killer stupid happy line:
First, I'll make the extreme assumption that our environmental recklessness threatens to shave 1 percentage point off economic growth forever.Right. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Will no one rid me of these people?
Look. All of my assumptions about the ideal future development of the human race hinge on a global population of under 1 billion peeps, so I'm not even averse to a little man-made environmental catastrophe. But you know, in the meantime, I think it would be awesome if you hopped out of the Suburban and took a stroll to work, fatty.
25 comments:
Amazing. Just amazing.
I'm going to go with: "no". In fact, it all seemed pretty sensible to me. I can't even figure out what you're objecting to in the pull-quote.
It doesn't mean anything.
I've been writing this for years: Steven Landsburg is a buffoon who survives (it seems) on a profound ability to spell out e-c-o-n-o-m-i-c-s before launching into a pail of nonsense.
Shaving 1 percent off long-term economic growth means quite a lot. It is a nearly unimaginably large cost, in fact. Are you objecting to the fact that this specific value (1%) is being pulled out of an orifice? Are you objecting to the whole notion of applying cost-benefit analysis? Or what?
What does the guy from Barney Miller know about economics anyway?
Seriously, my brain hurt trying to read that essay. What convoluted BS. When I read something that stupid, I usually expect Joe Scarborough to be involved somehow.
I literally can't figure out if the Slate "essay" was a straight-faced analysis, satire à la Jonathan Swift, or just some guy swinging his keyboard around the room for a few minutes and clicking "Publish."
Dear Glen: I think you need to benchmark your metrics in order to realize leadership gains in sectors outside your core competencies in order to compete in todays ever-changing marketplace of ideas.
Ioz: I'll make sure to leverage some decentralized synergies while I'm at it.
Seriously, though: you guys find it that hard to parse Landsburg? Really? You're not just playing? Wow. Just...wow.
paolaccio: Landsburg used the prize announcement as an excuse to pull out an old column, dust off the cobwebs, tweak the intro and conclusion a bit, and get paid for it a second time. Apparently he found a wider audience this time around.
You've got it rather backward Glen.
Since most grass in the world will be bentgrass in 300 years given the astronomical and continuing increase in the size and number of golf courses throughout the world, therefore [fill in completely fucking pointless observation/prediction/suggestion here]
la rana: is that your main beef with Landsburg? That he assumes economic growth is likely to continue unless we do something to hamper it?
(Note that increase in economic value doesn't require either population growth or growth in the amount of physical stuff produced or consumed.)
God, that was more stupid per square inch than I've seen in a very long time. For those who have trouble parsing Landsburg, I think this is a fair paraphrase of this trainwreck:
1. "Is global warming real? Why ask me, silly, I'm an economist! But I'll crank out a column on it anyway!"
2. "How much harm will global warming do? I still don't know! But here's lots of words in the meantime!"
3. "Why should I care about future generations? They're as worthless as foreigners! Not that I think foreigners are worthless, although this argument assumes that you think they are! Also: if I don't plan on having babies, then future generations are unrelated to me, and doubly worthless - just like foreigners!"
4. "Maybe we'll just get blown up by an asteroid anyway, and all this silly worrying over global warming will be for nothing, ha ha!"
5. "Why should I worry about future generations, when, if the economy continues to grow at the same rate it's growing right now, future generations will be millionaires? And it's not like there's any kind of environmental catastrophe could come along and slow down the economy along the way! Trust me, I'm an economist!"
6. "What would you rather have - a policy that tries to make life equally good at all times, or one that makes things really awesome for a little while before plunging the world into abject misery? I'll take the latter, thanks - because if my disembodied soul was waiting to be born into a random time period, I could then gamble that I'd end up in the roaring 90s instead of in the savage, Road Warrior-esque post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited by my unfortunate descendants. Now where's my Nobel Prize?"
My God, you're so right IOZ, I've read plenty of stupid stuff written about Global Warming (some on both sides, but I assure you, more stupid stuff on the "skeptic" side) -- and that Slate article tops the list so far.
Like most "skeptic" articles, (but this is the most egregious example I've seen), it starts off by saying "Any 12-year-old can tell you X." Whereas any 12-year-old can also poke about a hundred holes in the skeptic's article. Really, people, I could live without the tone of condescension when the vast bulk of the evidence is not on the "skeptic" side. So here's some condescension of my own --
Glen wonders about specific faults? To start with, saying "Al Gore isn't a climate scientist so he doesn't consider X," not mentioning that X has been studied by actual climate scientists for upwards of 20 years now... as if the whole Global Warming "fad" would just vanish if-only Al's movie had flopped, or usually it's if-only that Mann "Hockey Stick" paper would just go away, or whatever. Rather than admitting that Al Gore may have actually studied the science even though he's not a scientist, these skeptics always, always start from the ironclad assumption that tens of thousands of climate scientists working on the IPCC report count for absolutely nothing; the IPCC is so obviously wrong that a child could spot it; yet two or three guys funded by the American Fossil Fuels Newsletter ( -- plus, of course, your selfless "skeptic" blogger, who usually isn't a climate scientist either) somehow have an exclusive lock on the obvious truth.
(For the record, "X" in this case is, "Al Gore hasn't considered how probable it is that humans are affecting the environment, Al Gore hasn't considered the cost/benefit equations that pro-rate today's sacrifice over the next 100 years assuming a 5.5% rate of inflation." Just for the record, numerous scientists have indeed considered both those questions.)
The argument about "Al Gore is wrong because he doesn't know the future"... (i.e., "An asteroid might hit us in 200 years")... I wish I could believe that it was satire, but it probably isn't. You'd be surprised how often this is tried as if it were some sort of refutation. Yeah, an asteroid might hit us tomorrow and render this whole argument moot. Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my ass tomorrow, but I am not planning my retirement income strategy by assuming I can sell those monkeys to pet stores. Usually this line of syllogic is phrased with much more reasonable-seeming conditions:
* "Al Gore is wrong about the science because next Tuesday we're gonna start building 20 nuclear power plants every week until the end of time, which will solve all our energy and pollution problems" (because, you see, uranium tailings and radioactive waste just don't count as pollution).
* "Al Gore is wrong about the science because next Wednesday we're going to invent a fabulous new technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere without causing any worse problems economically or to the environment"
...but the odds of the nuclear plants or the Savior technology happening are roughly equal to the asteroid or the monkeys. Smart money says mankind sits on its collective asses until the atmosphere is literally killing people on the street -- and smart money is the reason we are in this mess in the first place.
Still, it was pretty awesome to see such a sterling and well-worded version of the argument, "Al Gore is wrong on the science because my own economic equations tell me it's perfectly moral to screw over our own grandchildren for short-term oil company profit which I'll never see a dime of, and for the convenience of not walking two blocks to the 7-11 for my Cheetos". Thanks, IOZ, for bringing it to our attention.
Ahem. IOZ is probably pretty close about the stupidity factor. To make a point with a longer quote --
"How much do we—or should we—care about future generations? Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate for economics, argued long ago that you (and I) should care exactly as much about a stranger born 1,000 years hence as we do about a stranger who's alive today. Phelps' view has been highly influential among economists, who now take it as more or less the default position. But even economists are sometimes wrong, and there are powerful arguments for "discounting" the welfare of future generations. First, many people (myself excluded, however) believe we should care more about our countrymen than about a bunch of foreigners—hence the sentiment for a border fence. If we are allowed to care less about people who happen to be born in the wrong country, why can't we care less about people who happen to be born in the wrong century? And second: Few of us feel morally bound to churn out as many children as we possibly can, which means we think nothing of denying future generations the gift of life. If it's OK to deny them their very lives, shouldn't it be OK to deny them a temperate climate?"
Using an economist to get ideas about ethics and morality is like going to a moralist and ethicist to get ideas about quantum physics. Imaginative, but not relevant.
Shaving 1 percent off long-term economic growth means quite a lot. It is a nearly unimaginably large cost, in fact.
No, it means all that if and only if one makes a rather large series of entirely unsupportable assumptions about long-term economic growth per se.
Which is to say: It doesn't mean any fucking thing at all.
Tra-la-la...
Okay, I think I've figured it out: The fundamental problem people have with the article is the title, probably chosen by a sensationalist Slate headline-writer rather than Landsburg. See, this article isn't actually about "What Al Gore doesn't understand about climate change", and if you read it expecting it to answer that question, it does indeed look stupid.
What the article is actually about is why Sir Nicholas Stern's contribution to our collective understanding of the global warming issue is arguably more useful to public policy (and hence, according to Landsburg, Nobel-worthy) than Al Gore's contribution.
There were some other mistakes - but that was the biggie. Well, that and some degree of oversimplifying. (For instance, he's only preaching to the choir when he brings up the asteroid - non-economists won't realize what he's trying to do there.)
Yes. For you will find no stronger hold of Albert Dumblegorian strongholding than Who Is IOZ?
Glen, when you reach the bottom of the hole, it's time for a ladder, not a shovel.
My god, that's awesome. Tribal thinking on steroids. "I'll see your murderous indifference to brown-skinned people living anywhere but my own postage stamp of land and raise you my own fucking grandchildren!"
Because, you know, if EVERY sperm isn't sacred, we're free to screw the zygotes.
Suppose we spend everything we can possibly afford right now addressing global warming. One consequence is that after doing so we can't afford to spend much to address other potential threats that might arise. Like diverting an incoming asteroid, or recovering from one that hits us and doesn't entirely wipe us out, or responding to a new supervirus or a nuclear exchange or whatever.
So maybe we shouldn't spend everything we can possibly afford right now on addressing global warming. Maybe we should spend less than that - a little now, a little more gradually over time - keeping some spare capacity as an insurance policy.
That's why we apply a healthy discount rate to addressing long-term potential problems. It's not saying "I don't care about my grandkids", it's saying "I care about saving my grandkids from other potential threats in addition to climate change."
Ahhh, Glen, now I see -- if an asteroid hits the Earth, then only non-economists will be killed, because all of the rest of us failed to sufficiently pre-capitalize the optimum allocation ratio of market-driven disaster profit investment incentives.
Of course, the whole economic objection falls apart when one considers that the U.S. is likely to make money hand over fist, creating numerous jobs, by developing anti-carbon technologies, exactly like the U.S. has done by early-adopting virtually every other technological advance of the last 100 years.
Crusader Axe observes:
Using an economist to get ideas about ethics and morality is like going to a moralist and ethicist to get ideas about quantum physics. Imaginative, but not relevant.
Yep. But if memory serves (I haven't looked at Slate in a year), that is and has always been Landsburg's entire schtick. Though I don't think he's ever been all that imaginative -- he just carries the Slate ethic into freshman-level economics.
Now as far as stupidity per column-inch measures go, I think the proper question is, "Does this exceed even the average stupidity per column-inch of any given issue of Slate?" Because if the answer's "yes", that is one hell of an achievement. Since Slate is still publishing the likes of Kaus and Weisberg and Hitchens, I gotta say that the jury's still out on Landsberg's effort. He certainly gets at least an honorable mention, though.
But I do look forward to a learned American Enterprise Institute white paper that really riffs on that novel "An asteroid's gonna hit us in a few centuries anyway, so why sweat it?" argument.
-- sglover
Just to keep beating a dead horse, but in non-economist's language: it's amusing how glibly an economic argument that we can't afford to do everything possible to avert global warming -- morphs into an belief that we mustn't do anything at all to avert global warming. And from there, people loudly go further to proclaim that Al Gore's thermodynamic equations must obviously be all wrong, because my economic equations say that petroleum is still profitable.
the implications...float off into the atmosphere like a balloon.
let me know when we're unable or unwilling to 'adapt' to climate change. fuck. ya'll obviously don't work with our infrastructure. the only thing holding it together sometimes is belief. half of the work I do is so I won't have to do more work.
this post was supposed to be funny, people. maybe that paranthetical caveat fooled them, Msr.
This is my favorite part:
"If it's OK to deny them their very lives, shouldn't it be OK to deny them a temperate climate?"
Deny "them" their lives??? Who is "them"-- my hypothetical, never-created children (I have some already, but I could always have more I guess)? Say what the fuck? So by not making as many babies as I possibly can (and who ever does that? Even if you make a baby per year with your spouse, you always could be dropping baby batter into some other chicks' ovens on the side, right?), I am preemptively murdering untold numbers of unborn hypothetical people, so who am I to get on my high horse about the murder, degradation, and erosion of quality of life of a bunch of actual, created people? Whoa man, the scales have fallen off my eyes. If I am future-murdering a person every single moment I am not impregnating someone, to hell with saving the environment, nevermind getting that movie back to Blockbuster on time.
Will Durst must have read the same Slate article:
Al Gore and his 'Blue Sky Theory'
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