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进步中的悲观

Jan 6, 2022 J. Bradford DeLong

伯克利—今天，人类总体上比历史上任何时候都更加富裕。然而，从流行病短期挑战到全球变暖的生存威胁，人们普遍认为事情正在严重恶化。新年伊始是充满希望的时刻，但是否悲观才是更合适的默认值？

要回答这个问题，应该在更广泛的背景下考虑当前的状况。在农业发明后的最初一万年里，无论你怎么定义“乌托邦”，人类都没有任何实现的机会。然后，在我们父母和祖父母的有生之年，人们看到了接近这一理想的希望。但我们却一再错失了它。我已故的朋友马克斯·辛格（Max Singer）曾经说过，在我们弄清楚财富分配的政治之前，一个真正的“人类世界”是遥不可及的。

直到几代人之前，人类还在遵循马尔萨斯的节奏。技术进步缓慢，死亡率极高，因此人口规模就是一切。世界上有近三分之一的老妇没有幸存的儿子和孙子，因此也没有社会权力，因此在生育年龄要生更多孩子的压力是巨大的。由此产生的人口增长（在农地规模没有相应增长的情况下）抵消了源自更好的技术的生产率和收入收益，典型的生活水平保持低水平停滞状态。

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J. Bradford DeLong

Writing for PS since 2002
238 Commentaries

J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was Deputy Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, where he was heavily involved in budget and trade negotiations. His role in designing the bailout of Mexico during the 1994 peso crisis placed him at the forefront of Latin America’s transformation into a region of open economies, and cemented his stature as a leading voice in economic-policy debates.

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Avraam Dectis Jan 13, 2022

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Everyone wants to evolve to something better but few if any suggest the mechanisms to get there.

First you need a mechanism to ensure that all groups are fairly represented and that we do not overlook political talent:

https://link.medium.com/bp2Pxnc3Lmb

Then you need a system to continuously refine governmental systems to ensure that they function properly:

https://link.medium.com/OvrgGRj3Lmb

That at least increases the possibility of healthy evolution.

Our current hidebound system needs an overhaul.
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Mirek Fatyga Jan 10, 2022

I noticed that most contributions by Prof DeLong seem to have have a paragraph in there that calls for more global governance to solve all of our problems. He may not have noticed the recent difficulties of governance in the United States? Never mind going global?

Before going any further, lets briefly examine basic premises of this contribution:

Assertion:
We are no longer living in Malthusian times (as he put it), but in the golden age of plenty. If we only had a better redistribution of wealth ... . The population growth is no longer a problem, since trends are reversing with urbanization.

Reality:
We are not living in the Club of Rome world, but neither are we living in the age of plenty. The world population has tripled in my lifetime, with most of the growth occurring in the developing countries. This growth occurred for well understood reasons: a culturally sudden collision of Malthusian cultures (adjusted to high mortality) with western medicine which brings this mortality to near 0%. In the absence of cultural adjustment, populations roughly double with every generation. The trend may be abating, but the consequences of past growth are with us and are likely to dominate the rest of this century. For example, if one wanted to extend current use of oil per capita in North America to 8 billion people, the world production of oil would have to increase by ~600%. To the EU level, by ~300%. Neither one is very likely to happen. The consequence can be found here: https://oilprice.com/ . The price of oil just crossed $80/bl, with Omicron surge raging worldwide.

Assertion:
we need global governance to solve global problems, like climate change.

Reality:
An assertion that a trace gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, controls world climate is scientifically implausible and no compelling evidence to prove this assertion has ever been produced. In fact, plenty of evidence to the contrary has been produced and is readily available for an inquiring enough mind. This is not to say that climate does not change. It does and it has in my lifetime. I do remember fears of new ice age in 1970-ies (allegedly brought about by particulate pollution), so I am grateful that the climate has warmed by a fraction of a degree celsius since then for reasons that, frankly, nobody understands in detail. We are not even making an effort to understand this rise since climate science has been emasculated by the improbable dogma of carbon dioxide as a source of all evil, ruthlessly enforced by funding agencies.

I am personally grateful that we have no global governance that would try to enforce this dogma worldwide, particularly by coercive measures. What is happening in the developed world is bad enough.

What the world actually needs is developing substitutes for scarce resources, fossil fuels among them. This cannot be done by some sort of global governance, since one cannot expect developed societies to voluntarily collapse to support worldwide brotherhood of humanity. What does need to happen is that the developed world proceeds to develop alternatives, driven by rising prices of raw materials, and leaves fossil fuels that remain to help the developing world develop. Again, this is very unlikely to happen through global governance, but self interest brought about by higher prices.

In fact, global governance that would somehow ban fossil fuels would, in the end, amount to neocolonialism that the developing world will (hopefully) not succumb to. The reason that all the COPXX conferences are failing is that suppressive measures offered at these conferences are not terribly popular and thus not politically realistic in the developed world. "Compensation" to the developing world could easily turn into a bribe given to various autocrats in these countries to stop developing, so that the developed world can quietly sequester their resources for itself, a well established practice for couple of centuries.

One could go on, but I will stop here. We do not need global governance, but return to scientific and political integrity in the developed world. Much is made, for a good reason, out of rapidly developing Fascism on the Right of the political spectrum. Unfortunately this rise is partly fueled by the Left abandoning common sense and general intellectual discipline in favor of its own ideological flights of fancy. Both lead to the same place. A tragedy of energies of progress diverted to unproductive use which, in the end, could lead to a broad civilizational collapse, with or without the nuclear war.
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Thaomas H Jan 8, 2022

With the appropriate incentive -- a tax on net CO2 emissions -- the investments required to slow and eventually reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are not large. My concern is more a collective loss of nerve to undertake big projects -- attracting millions of immigrants, reducing the regulatory barriers to deployment of new technologies, overcoming NIMBY objections to more dense urban development, a truly progressive tax on personal (not business) income.
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