Choices

My conservative friends like to tell me that poor people are usually poor because they make bad choices. I'm skeptical about the generality of the principle, but it's not hard to find examples. Dropping out of high school, getting caught in criminal activity, heavy drug use, getting pregnant at age 16, majoring in art history - all these things are likely to negatively impact your liftime earnings.

Societies make bad choices too. Germans made a bad choice when they followed Hitler into World War II, and the French made a bad choice when they invested in the Maginot line instead of tank divisions and fighter aircraft. Most egregiously, the person who cut down the last palm tree on Easter Island made a choice which doomed the whole society to mass starvation and collapse. Jared Diamond reports that when he started teaching the contents of his book Collapse, every group he taught wondered what that guy was thinking. We will never know, of course, but some societal mistakes are much better documented.

The classic reasons for mistakes are ignorance, failure to anticipate consequences, and conflicts of interest. The nineteenth century Australians who went to considerable trouble to import rabbits and foxes failed to anticipate the disastrous consequences they would cause. The Icelanders who imported Norwegian farming practices to Iceland were ignorant of the fact that the superficial similarities of the climates and soils of those places concealed subtle but crucial differences that led to catastrophic soil destruction in Iceland. Conflicts of interest are the most complex and difficult. The Easter Islander's interest in obtaining a new canoe or placating the ancestral gods might trump his interest in preserving the crucial palm tree resource for future use.

Diamond has a slightly different taxonomy of errors, but one key one is failure to perceive a problem. He says:

Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to percieve a problem is when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations. The prime example in modern times is global warming. We now realize that temperatures around the world have been slowly rising in recent decades, due in large part to atmospheric changes caused by humans.


He goes on to discuss how this effect is somewhat buried in year to year fluctuations, how it took a long time for skeptical climatologists to recognize the changes, and even how Bush still doubted anthropogenic changes at the time of the books writing. Of course Bush has since changed his mind, and the skeptics have become increasing confined to the lunatic fringe.

A broad sample of that fringe "thought" has been recently assembled by another blogger here. I noticed a couple of interesting things about those samples. For one, none of them contained any substantive criticism of the science that has indicated a key human role in contemporary global warming. The other is that a new meme is propagating in the denialasphere: the claim that the environmentally concerned in general, and the global warming scientists in particular, are some kind of apocalyptic new "religion." One of them goes on to dis some previous prophets, unaccountably leaving out Cassandra (beware of Greek gifts), Daniel Webster (beware of civil war), and Winston Churchill.

There is a note of panic in that increasingly shrill denial, a note of panic that seems to originate more in the psychological arena than the economic. In the case of Exxon Mobil, the climate wars are probably no longer very interesting. Oil prices are high, and likely to stay that way. Also, corporations need to live in the real world. For its hired guns (The American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, JunkScience.com, and Tech Central Station, to name a few), the situation is a bit different. Their funding depends on the perception that crazy environmentalists will economically harm their funders, a perception that oil companies are probably now less willing to share, however much they dislike the idea of a carbon tax. Most interesting are the true believers, who have apparently invested their egos and personal cosmology in some sort of environmental conspiracy. I'm less sure where they are coming from, but I expect it's somewhere near crazytown.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

Uneasy Lies The Head

Book Review: Anaximander By Carlo Rovelli