8:00 Regarding man's impact on warming. Richard Lindzen, MIT climate scientist, has said that we don't know man's impact on warming because it's in the noise. In other words, we don't have enough precision to know what it is. 2/7/23
Hmmmm. Footnotes! Many from learned Newsmax journals ! The salient fact is Caplan needs to read more , for in the world of publish or perish , 90% of Best Books are, like 90% of peer reviewed science papers, sophomoric crap. As are 95% of the remainder, thanks to the polarization and PR that project polemics into Best Books lists ( Witness the collected works of Al Gore , Steve Koonin, and Insert Name Here. )
This was a pretty good interview, but I didn't like the prefacing of the question of externalities with demanding that Alex agree with your framing lest he be dismissed (by whom?) as an "extremist." Alex is one of the most methodical, clear writers, unambiguous writers in the world today. If you want to know his view on something where you necessarily may disagree, just ask him his view on the subject. You don't need to imply Alex could be a kook until he agrees with the framing of your question.
My main concerns with the externalities argument are: 1. The difficulty or impossibility of determining the most efficient amount of emissions to set the tax or the cap. The best objection to this that I can think of is that in a fully unregulated market you could always gain some efficiency via a very small tax or setting the cap slightly below the current level because it's obvious that the marginal externality is more harmful than the marginal benefit. Again though, I'm not sure you could prove that. 2. Government failure. Even if 1 were possible to determine it's unlikely that the government would implement it properly without grossly overshooting or doing other harmful things in addition that would decrease efficiency (like the world we live in right now). 3. There's an asymmetric impact from pollution that these solutions don't solve. People closer to the pollution source are harmed more than people far away and nobody is actually compensated for the damage to their person or property even if it were not asymmetric. So on the aggregate it may be "efficient" but when you look at the micro level it is not efficient. Some people are bearing the brunt and others are not bearing as much. My solution would be to enforce property rights through common law or arbitration as best as possible for obvious cases of harm.
In _Markets Dont Fail_, economist, Brian Simpson, denies externalities as a scientific concept. He says its an altruist rationalization of the evasion of property rights. Externalities requires govt enforcement for all effects on other people. That would be impossible and end the production of wealth to even try.
It obviously is a scientific concept though, right? The consequences of whatever policy someone might come up with based on it shouldn't factor into that. It's a little like saying that some third world hellhole country might decide to produce light bulbs using slave labour, therefore resistivity isn't a scientific concept.
@@OptimalOwl > It obviously is a scientific concept though, right? And, yet, curioussly, very curiously, you provide no evidence, almost as if your claim is religion. You also evade its evasion of property rights, almost as if youre an opponent of property rights. Why should economics study effects (harms and benefits) where there are no property rights, almost as if mainstream economics is a rationalization of communism? If I have no right to a property, why should govt get involved if there is a harm or benefit?? If I hear some music from a street musician, should govt tax me for the benefit. If I dont like his music, should govt tax the musician? There are externalities ,since everything affects everything, but there are no economic externalities.
I like Robin's comments about "how fossil fuels help nature. For instance, there is a phenomenon where economic development (measured in GDP for instance) progressing from very low to mid sees rising deforestation, but going for medium levels of economic development to high we start to see *re*forestation. Why? Because when you reach a certain level of wealth, the tradeoff to maintaining forests is minimal, but at lower levels it's a matter of feeding your children or cutting down a tree, and in that case, the child wins. There are also issues of having the capital to shift from simple resource extraction. When there's not much infrastructure it's easier to cut down a tree to burn to cook you dinner or heat your home than to get access to gas for a gas stove (or electricity). Once you've reached a certain level of development it can become easy to shift to less environmentally intensive activities. We see this also in the decoupling of carbon emissions from economic growth in the developed world recently.
Coal fired. What does that mean. I am to under stand that coal pulverised into a substance like flower and blasted through a nosel like oil has a beyter heat and burns at a much cleaner rate
From an extraterrestrial perspective, our present-day atmospheric conditions might appear less conducive to life compared to those during the Cambrian period. During that ancient era, levels of CO₂, methane, and oxygen were significantly higher, coinciding with a remarkable proliferation of life.
"Climate mastery" seems like dubious terminology - for what are more often called climate adaptation and climate accomodation. IMO, the main problem with "climate mastery" is that it has strong implcations of "cloud control", "weather control", etc. It is too specific. Hanson mocks the "mastery" terminology near to 1:33:00
There are many species moving North in the sub Arctic, not because of the warming but because of people living out in the hostile environment and helping their local friends get through the worst seasons. Thanks to fossil fuels! Humming Birds breeding in Alberta. Blue Jays staying further North. The corvids in my yard are marvelous. The deer have magnificent coats despite November this year. Can I leave the subject of mountain lions in the neighborhood alone assuming this is a family channel. Coyotes go into the city, wolves stay away a bit.
The concept of "value" presupposes a valuer. It presupposes the questions: of value to whom and for what? "Sacred" can be the same. Sacred--to whom? If "nature" is just an intrinsic value apart from human beings, then the proper course is to exterminate us, as is the implicit (and often explicit from leaders) goal of environmentalists. We must not tread a toe upon the God. Nature is a value (or is sacred, i.e. an irreplaceable value) only because it is a value TO human beings. A virus is part of nature that ought not to be sacred. Instead, we ought to try to destroy it. Some other animals, canyons, oceans, etc. have a feeling of sanctity because we value them. The concept of a sacred earth apart from and outside of human beings is meaningless. Humans give life meaning, as they give value to other inanimate parts of nature. Robin hit it when he said that if we can show two sacred things to be mutually exclusive, then we have a problem. A child's smile is not possible in an unimpacted world where he starves, shivers in cold and in sickness, and soon dies. Yet beautiful parts of nature are a value to this same child, but only after he is safe and prosperous enough to enjoy them. This is what Alex means when he says that the pro-humanists ought to own the issue of loving nature. We love it--for humans.
Willy Soon and Sun centric theorists would be the only denialists who are worth checking in with. There was an old guy who was known for putting his 'Ocean Cycles' up front even more than Lindzen. Some Geologists ... yeah 10% sounds reasonable for evidence based denialists.
Exactly! My climate mitigation was to delete 'California Emissions' on my diesel (unreliable and pointless in the sub Arctic and I get better mileage now) and installing Air Conditioning. In the center of the continent, solar panels would be useful to power my Air Conditioning as California collapses and stresses the WECC portion of NERC pulling all the marginal MW's on the Western side of North America.
Could you expand a bit on that, Shrugz? Because to my mind, the things he talks about seem more or less orthogonal to altruism vs egoism. The capacity to accomplish more and greater things is equally useful regardless of where the things you want to accomplish fall on the altruism vs egoism frontier. You can use more and cheaper power to make Luxemburg even more affluent, and you can use it to lift another billion starving third worlders out of poverty - and if anything, measures that achieve either one are likely to have positive spillover effects into the other. @@williamanthony915, is your idea that he's anti-altruism because he professes to liking some of Ayn Rand's ideas?
@@OptimalOwl If I may, I'd like to challenge the notion that "the capacity to accomplish more and greater things is equally useful regardless of where the thing s you want to accomplish fall on the altruism vs egoism frontier." Specifically, I'd like to challenge the idea that someone (I assume an investor and/or owner) could "...use more and cheaper power to lift another billion starving third worlders out of poverty." The scenario seems to conflate Altruism with simply being nice, or mutual benefits. For the sake of time, I would briefly define that Altruism means to put others' interests before your own; to sacrifice one's self. An investor/owner could find the correct reasons to invest or operate their power generation in Luxemborg (since there's an economy and potential Return On Investment). But to invest or operate in a third world country, where a billion people are starving, seems like an act of sacrifice. The act of throwing money away to briefly help them (since they're starving, they likely don't have the funds to pay bills and be ratepayers. You'd be essentially running a billion-dollar operation with no ROI. The result would be the destruction of the power generating company, and the return to misery for the third world country. Respectfully, Josh
@@joshuagould548 Why would the expected ROI be zero and the benefit be temporary? Is the idea that the peoples and institutions in those countries are so dysfunctional that there's a near-zero chance that they'll be able to pay for nor maintain any amount of power? Either way, whether it's deregulated fossil fuels or new technology that allows the investor to lower the price of power in Luxembourg, I think there's a decent chance that someone who wants to could use the same thing in Africa or rural India. Whether or not the investor in your example would be the one to do it depends on what the expected ROI would be.
@@OptimalOwl Yes, the idea is that a country with a billion starving people likely has very little in the way of an economy. Basically primitive. They'd be uneducated and unskilled. They couldn't pay a bill because they can barely put food in their own mouths, sadly. The power generating company would essentially be giving this power generation away, which would be very self-sacrificial, i.e. altruistic. Unlike a company acting egoistically, i.e. with a profit motive. Seeking value-for-value, the egoistic company wouldn't invest and establish its business somewhere where the demographics show no return on its investment. I think a population of a billion starving people would fulfil this criteria.
please don't talk over the guest ... I always enjoy Alex's clear thinking...thanks
I was thinking the opposite. He keeps interrupting them in the middle of a question. Let them finish, then answer.
8:00 Regarding man's impact on warming. Richard Lindzen, MIT climate scientist, has said that we don't know man's impact on warming because it's in the noise. In other words, we don't have enough precision to know what it is.
2/7/23
Why would Leftists care about precision? They hate capitalism.
@@TeaParty1776 -- It's just for your edification. It's good to know the truth.
2/25/23
100% best book of 2022. Superbly referenced throughout.
Hmmmm. Footnotes!
Many from learned Newsmax journals !
The salient fact is Caplan needs to read more , for in the world of publish or perish , 90% of Best Books are, like 90% of peer reviewed science papers, sophomoric crap.
As are 95% of the remainder, thanks to the polarization and PR that project polemics into Best Books lists ( Witness the collected works of Al Gore , Steve Koonin, and Insert Name Here. )
This was a pretty good interview, but I didn't like the prefacing of the question of externalities with demanding that Alex agree with your framing lest he be dismissed (by whom?) as an "extremist."
Alex is one of the most methodical, clear writers, unambiguous writers in the world today. If you want to know his view on something where you necessarily may disagree, just ask him his view on the subject. You don't need to imply Alex could be a kook until he agrees with the framing of your question.
you totally didn't cut the technical recording discussion out lol. :)
3 of my favourite ppl, very cool.👶🐥
My main concerns with the externalities argument are:
1. The difficulty or impossibility of determining the most efficient amount of emissions to set the tax or the cap. The best objection to this that I can think of is that in a fully unregulated market you could always gain some efficiency via a very small tax or setting the cap slightly below the current level because it's obvious that the marginal externality is more harmful than the marginal benefit. Again though, I'm not sure you could prove that.
2. Government failure. Even if 1 were possible to determine it's unlikely that the government would implement it properly without grossly overshooting or doing other harmful things in addition that would decrease efficiency (like the world we live in right now).
3. There's an asymmetric impact from pollution that these solutions don't solve. People closer to the pollution source are harmed more than people far away and nobody is actually compensated for the damage to their person or property even if it were not asymmetric. So on the aggregate it may be "efficient" but when you look at the micro level it is not efficient. Some people are bearing the brunt and others are not bearing as much.
My solution would be to enforce property rights through common law or arbitration as best as possible for obvious cases of harm.
In _Markets Dont Fail_, economist, Brian Simpson, denies externalities as a scientific concept. He says its an altruist rationalization of the evasion of property rights. Externalities requires govt enforcement for all effects on other people. That would be impossible and end the production of wealth to even try.
It obviously is a scientific concept though, right? The consequences of whatever policy someone might come up with based on it shouldn't factor into that.
It's a little like saying that some third world hellhole country might decide to produce light bulbs using slave labour, therefore resistivity isn't a scientific concept.
@@OptimalOwl > It obviously is a scientific concept though, right?
And, yet, curioussly, very curiously, you provide no evidence, almost as if your claim is religion. You also evade its evasion of property rights, almost as if youre an opponent of property rights. Why should economics study effects (harms and benefits) where there are no property rights, almost as if mainstream economics is a rationalization of communism? If I have no right to a property, why should govt get involved if there is a harm or benefit?? If I hear some music from a street musician, should govt tax me for the benefit. If I dont like his music, should govt tax the musician? There are externalities ,since everything affects everything, but there are no economic externalities.
@@TeaParty1776
Are you having a stroke?
@@OptimalOwl Focus your mind
I like Robin's comments about "how fossil fuels help nature.
For instance, there is a phenomenon where economic development (measured in GDP for instance) progressing from very low to mid sees rising deforestation, but going for medium levels of economic development to high we start to see *re*forestation.
Why? Because when you reach a certain level of wealth, the tradeoff to maintaining forests is minimal, but at lower levels it's a matter of feeding your children or cutting down a tree, and in that case, the child wins.
There are also issues of having the capital to shift from simple resource extraction. When there's not much infrastructure it's easier to cut down a tree to burn to cook you dinner or heat your home than to get access to gas for a gas stove (or electricity). Once you've reached a certain level of development it can become easy to shift to less environmentally intensive activities.
We see this also in the decoupling of carbon emissions from economic growth in the developed world recently.
Best book 22 hands down!!
Coal fired. What does that mean. I am to under stand that coal pulverised into a substance like flower and blasted through a nosel like oil has a beyter heat and burns at a much cleaner rate
What do economists think about the "global greening" that's been occurring for 30 years due to higher atmospheric CO2?
From an extraterrestrial perspective, our present-day atmospheric conditions might appear less conducive to life compared to those during the Cambrian period. During that ancient era, levels of CO₂, methane, and oxygen were significantly higher, coinciding with a remarkable proliferation of life.
Based
"Climate mastery" seems like dubious terminology - for what are more often called climate adaptation and climate accomodation. IMO, the main problem with "climate mastery" is that it has strong implcations of "cloud control", "weather control", etc. It is too specific. Hanson mocks the "mastery" terminology near to 1:33:00
Mans life requires mastery over nature, not the mindless adaption of animals. Environmentalism is a nihilist hatred of man.
Even the Celts and the Druids did not separate themselves from 'the sacred' of nature. Ponds full of swords et al.
There are many species moving North in the sub Arctic, not because of the warming but because of people living out in the hostile environment and helping their local friends get through the worst seasons. Thanks to fossil fuels! Humming Birds breeding in Alberta. Blue Jays staying further North. The corvids in my yard are marvelous. The deer have magnificent coats despite November this year. Can I leave the subject of mountain lions in the neighborhood alone assuming this is a family channel. Coyotes go into the city, wolves stay away a bit.
The concept of "value" presupposes a valuer. It presupposes the questions: of value to whom and for what? "Sacred" can be the same. Sacred--to whom? If "nature" is just an intrinsic value apart from human beings, then the proper course is to exterminate us, as is the implicit (and often explicit from leaders) goal of environmentalists. We must not tread a toe upon the God.
Nature is a value (or is sacred, i.e. an irreplaceable value) only because it is a value TO human beings. A virus is part of nature that ought not to be sacred. Instead, we ought to try to destroy it. Some other animals, canyons, oceans, etc. have a feeling of sanctity because we value them. The concept of a sacred earth apart from and outside of human beings is meaningless. Humans give life meaning, as they give value to other inanimate parts of nature.
Robin hit it when he said that if we can show two sacred things to be mutually exclusive, then we have a problem. A child's smile is not possible in an unimpacted world where he starves, shivers in cold and in sickness, and soon dies. Yet beautiful parts of nature are a value to this same child, but only after he is safe and prosperous enough to enjoy them. This is what Alex means when he says that the pro-humanists ought to own the issue of loving nature. We love it--for humans.
Good episode but too much talking over each other. Spoiled it a little.
Willy Soon and Sun centric theorists would be the only denialists who are worth checking in with. There was an old guy who was known for putting his 'Ocean Cycles' up front even more than Lindzen. Some Geologists ... yeah 10% sounds reasonable for evidence based denialists.
Exactly! My climate mitigation was to delete 'California Emissions' on my diesel (unreliable and pointless in the sub Arctic and I get better mileage now) and installing Air Conditioning. In the center of the continent, solar panels would be useful to power my Air Conditioning as California collapses and stresses the WECC portion of NERC pulling all the marginal MW's on the Western side of North America.
In every Alex Epstein interview, it's like the conversation is yearning for discussion of Altruism. He never brings it up. This must be on purpose.
What is there to discuss relating to Altruism? He doesn't believe in it and it seems irrelevant to his ideas.
Could you expand a bit on that, Shrugz?
Because to my mind, the things he talks about seem more or less orthogonal to altruism vs egoism. The capacity to accomplish more and greater things is equally useful regardless of where the things you want to accomplish fall on the altruism vs egoism frontier. You can use more and cheaper power to make Luxemburg even more affluent, and you can use it to lift another billion starving third worlders out of poverty - and if anything, measures that achieve either one are likely to have positive spillover effects into the other.
@@williamanthony915, is your idea that he's anti-altruism because he professes to liking some of Ayn Rand's ideas?
@@OptimalOwl If I may, I'd like to challenge the notion that "the capacity to accomplish more and greater things is equally useful regardless of where the thing s you want to accomplish fall on the altruism vs egoism frontier."
Specifically, I'd like to challenge the idea that someone (I assume an investor and/or owner) could "...use more and cheaper power to lift another billion starving third worlders out of poverty."
The scenario seems to conflate Altruism with simply being nice, or mutual benefits. For the sake of time, I would briefly define that Altruism means to put others' interests before your own; to sacrifice one's self.
An investor/owner could find the correct reasons to invest or operate their power generation in Luxemborg (since there's an economy and potential Return On Investment).
But to invest or operate in a third world country, where a billion people are starving, seems like an act of sacrifice. The act of throwing money away to briefly help them (since they're starving, they likely don't have the funds to pay bills and be ratepayers. You'd be essentially running a billion-dollar operation with no ROI. The result would be the destruction of the power generating company, and the return to misery for the third world country.
Respectfully, Josh
@@joshuagould548
Why would the expected ROI be zero and the benefit be temporary? Is the idea that the peoples and institutions in those countries are so dysfunctional that there's a near-zero chance that they'll be able to pay for nor maintain any amount of power?
Either way, whether it's deregulated fossil fuels or new technology that allows the investor to lower the price of power in Luxembourg, I think there's a decent chance that someone who wants to could use the same thing in Africa or rural India. Whether or not the investor in your example would be the one to do it depends on what the expected ROI would be.
@@OptimalOwl Yes, the idea is that a country with a billion starving people likely has very little in the way of an economy. Basically primitive. They'd be uneducated and unskilled. They couldn't pay a bill because they can barely put food in their own mouths, sadly.
The power generating company would essentially be giving this power generation away, which would be very self-sacrificial, i.e. altruistic. Unlike a company acting egoistically, i.e. with a profit motive. Seeking value-for-value, the egoistic company wouldn't invest and establish its business somewhere where the demographics show no return on its investment. I think a population of a billion starving people would fulfil this criteria.
Epstein reslly flys off the handle about an hour in, and starts regurgitating energy storage cost bunk from K Street and the usual Texan think tanks.
What did he say that was wrong?