@Noah, my steelman case for socialism is basically Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
I think that if Marx were alive and read-in on the last 150 years of history, he would declare that Western and Northern Europe’s social democracies were the closest to his vision of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, because all he had really meant by that infamous phrase was that true democracy would enable the proletariat to dictate terms to capital.
Which is exactly what happened in postwar Europe! Labor slowly chipped away at capital’s power, bargaining its way into now-entrenched social welfare states.
Marx would also declare that the Russian communists had completely lost the script, and that’s why they utterly failed despite giving it a valiant college try.
Marx was an incredibly brilliant and incisive thinker but he lived and wrote for the most part before the second industrial revolution and globalization took off. In 1848 most of Germany was still basically feudal. Modern readers load baggage on his work that would have been unrecognizable to him. See also people championing Adam Smith as some kind of champion of modern capitalism.
Well I also think that a classical Marxian relations-of-production doesn't map neatly onto knowledge work. Straightforward increase to hours worked does not correspond to "more useful software" or "better strategy".
It’s a common sport to stand-up Sanders as a one-dimensional cardboard cutout. I understand that impulse, but let’s look at few things seldom mentioned when Sanders is used in a political/economic discussion. Biden made a very important pivot in the month of July leading into the 2020 election:
Sanders is one of the few Senators who saw and voted against W’s Big Lie in re aluminum tubes and white cake — worst foreign policy decision in decades.
Sanders does something no other losing presidential candidate does: works his ass off in multiple rallies and fund-raisers for the candidates who beat him: he did 43 appearance/fund-raisers for Obama, whereas Hillary did 13 closed-door fund-raisers. When late in the run-up to the Democratic Party Convention, Ted Kennedy told Bill Clinton he planned to endorse Obama, who could forget Bill Clinton’s response: “Fifteen years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags!” Lovely people, The Clintons.
The $15.00 minimum wage is an interesting point. Which candidate in a Democratic Presidential Debate forced Hillary to say she supported a $15.00 minimum wage? Sanders.
When Biden won the Democratic Party Nomination, no other defeated candidate worked harder than Sanders, who attended multiple rallies and fund-raisers.
The back-bench mitten-wearing photo of Sanders sitting alone at Biden’s Inauguration made for a nice internet meme. Biden made clear his view of Sanders, when, at the conclusion of his first State of the Union Address, he made a beeline for Bernie and embraced him in a bear hug. Sanders just happened to have a better seat, down front, on the aisle.
Losing candidates such as Sanders, like it or not, have a positive role to play in elections with razor-thin margins. Stacey Abrams couldn’t win public office in Georgia, but, boy, did she deliver an unexpected one-tie-breaker-vote Senate, using her organization to turn-out the vote.
Both Sanders and Abrams have spent years building organizations that stand the test of time, not the typical ad hoc, this-election-cycle ephemeral entities of many candidates. Like it or not, these organizations are critical. Without that one-tie-breaker-vote Senate, the IRA would be but a pipe dream.
What I will say in Sanders' disfavor is that he's had some absolutely awful judgment in staffing his campaign in hiring people like Briahna Joy Gray and David Sirota who are more interested in being online leftist microcelebrities than achieving real power. But he did pull the US left out of the obscure, cranky pit it has been in since McGovern. What we do with that going forward remains to be seen. (I say, as I feel like alternately a liberal leftist and a far left leaning liberal).
I don’t think you’re being fair to the Hill paper for two reasons. (1) He estimates “dynamic treatment effects for the policy cohort.” Which, as you know, means that a sort of control is how homelessness changed before the increased minimum wage, compared to after. (2) The homeless population is small and especially hard-to-employ compared to low-wage workers generally. So, I don’t see a problem with also saying that it is true that the minimum wage’s disemployment effects are generally undetectable. Disemployment could hit potentially homeless people harder and in ways that are not detectable when looking at the bulk of potential low-wage labor. Maybe the higher minimum wage brings more competitive low-wage workers into the market, which would mask a general disemployment effect.
The reason I say that is $15 minimum wage has been introduced in a number of cities and different states which means this decline in homelessness should probably NOT have happened if this paper was correct.
In fact it’s instructive that it’s only CA where homelessness went up (and that generally has by far the most overall homelessness) in that really again shows that it really does go back primarily to housing costs.
I ultimately agree with Noah’s conclusion about a spurious causal association, but I also think he’s too dismissive of other plausible explanations that do not involve a decrease in employment at the city-level. Especially if the labor market is extremely tight at the top of the income distribution, masking rising unemployment at the bottom of the income distribution, as Patrick notes could have happened.
Do we know that there wasn’t also an inflow of low-earning workers at the same time in those cities? And even if the best data suggests there wasn’t, do we know for sure that’s accurate? Raising the minimum wage also increases the amount that under-the-table workers can demand, making a location that raises minimum wage more attractive for undocumented workers looking for work. And CA has a lot of undocumented workers.
Also, immigrants are generally hard to work with too because they don’t speak English and come from a different culture. It all depends how much value they would contribute to the bottom line vs (the inconvenience of working with them, and their wage). And addicts and crazy people vary in home much they can contribute, how annoying they are to deal with.
I'm suspicious of your premise, Patrick, because while immigrants may present challenges linguistically, they are self-selected as highly motivated to succeed (they are the ones who took the risk to transplant their lives), and that motivation seems at least as critical as language. As far as culture goes, immigrants who bring with them strong family and religious structures (I'm thinking of norms associated with Hispanic immigrants) seem to me at a basic advantage.
I'm not sure that broad speculative ideas can really sharpen our understanding, but it would be better to consider factors that work both ways.
But even so, the more they cost in wages, the less likely they are to be employed. If you are paying someone $7/hour, you don’t examine their background as much as you would if you had to pay them double, especially when other employers have to also.
Connecting your view of (1) socialism's decline to (2) Northern Europe vs. North America to (3) swing voters rewarding success, you wrote:
"Americans enjoy higher material consumption than North Europeans, while North Europeans enjoy lower crime, longer lifespans, and more leisure."
Ultimately, isn't that platform of greater safety, better health, and less pressure to work multiple jobs (part of the misery of the impoverished) politically appealing, even if it comes at the expense of higher taxes? And isn't that a move toward socialism along the capitalist-socialism spectrum?
Although i don't see either political party dealing seriously, at least nationally, with any of these issues.
Sorry if I'm a broken record any time this comes up, but I think greater prosperity makes it easier to improve the social safety net over time. In the US, this hasn't worked out for political reasons, but I would still bet on that dynamic. I do think the Democrats have made some decent efforts like the child tax credit, which I still get sad about not being extended.
If anything, I think performative socialist antics are detrimental to more mainstream efforts to redistribute economic gains, even though theoretically these things are all on the left end of the spectrum.
I think the distorting role the EU plays has a lot to do with the bad decade Southern Europe has had. The financial crisis hit them hard because the previous decade had seen the Euro bring them Northern European levels of creditworthiness that fuelled domestic consumption. There's the overhang of that debt. But unlike what they would have done previously to combat a recession they couldn't devalue. So they're stuck with high unemployment and painful restructuring. The other thing you have to discuss is the issue of enlargement. Most of Southern Europe do still receive money from the EU on Net, but obviously the addition of Eastern European countries meant those payments had to be reduced. The EU did some small nominal adjustments, but its the inflation-adjusted numbers that really sting. Today, Greece is getting about $1.5billion less from the EU than it was at the turn of the century. You're talking tens of billions of lost investment over the past twenty years, and that's before you apply an escalator in terms of output generated to that investment.
Interesting read, Noah, thank you. Regarding minimum wage and homelessness, I'd be interested to know if there's usually a fairly rapid increase in homelessness following the wage increase, or if it's more of a slow burn. I'm wondering if the increase is perhaps caused more by an influx of low-earning workers. If, for example city A increased the minimum to $15, while 120 miles away, city B stayed at, say, $7.50, couldn't we expect a large migration of city B's poor to city A? And if that migration was 10 people (who've now burned their last resources) for each available job, would we not expect a rather high spike in homelessness?
Not sure I understand your statement "...I think the socialist movement of the 20th century did a lot of good for the world (and obviously ran off the rails in some places)..."
There are millions of Communist/Socialist victims who were brutally murdered throughout the world under various Socialist "revolutions" or "reforms" of the 20th century. Can't think of a single good thing the socialist movement has brought to humanity!
When I read Noah's post I thought of Labor in the US in the first half of the 20th century.
In general, when someone refers to "socialism" and does not specifically include communism my initial assumption is that actually existing communism is not what they meant. I took Noah's parenthetical to signal just that distinction. (Surely, at the least, it would be odd to think Pol Pot did not fall under that parenthetical.)
This recent (same day?) post on the UK's economic struggles highlights how hard it is to be sure what is even happening or why. (GDP per capita is rising but wages are stagnant, etc, etc).
Degrowth is actually a very good economic strategy. Trade consumption for leisure in rich countries. Net utility about the same probably, maybe higher. Suggest you study Ecology a bit and inventory trends in planetary life support systems. List of items that are, how to say, fucked: oceans, forests, insects, mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, soils, water, climate, ethics (added that after listening to NPR on the Supreme Court ethics bill in Congress). Farmers have been amazing at increasing production, but they are doing it with N made from fossil fuel (which accounts for half of world food production), many other fossil fuel inputs, toxic chemicals, loss of biodiversity, and soil mining. Maybe take a tour of the two dozen or so past empires that are ruins in deserts or jungles, or, in the case of Rome, right there in Rome. Technology is making us collectively stupider due to biased, self-interested information sources. Jim Hansen was right before and he's probably right now. I heard an inexpert journalist remark that climate change will stop when carbon emissions stop. Why? With all the feedbacks the pulse of carbon burning/ice melting/warming may not play out for thousands of years. There's plenty of carbon in forests, soils, oceans, seabed methane clathrates, permafrost, and peat to keep emissions going in a warming world via feedback amplification. Albedo change is another big one to amplify warming. Ignoring facts doesn't make them any less true.
Let’s simplify a bit here. Imagine an economy with 100 factories ( which I will use as a general term for factories or mines or farms or retail) producing N kgs of carbon each. So the economy produces 100N kgs of carbon in total. Let’s say we want that economy to get to 0 kgs of carbon in 30 (or however many) years. There are only two options.
1) stop all industry from producing anything at all.
2) change the energy supply and other inputs and outputs to carbon free.
Option 1) makes everybody unemployed and makes sure that 2) can’t happen. In fact the government will collapse without tax revenue.
Option 2) needs lots of investment. The new Green revolution needs more economic growth, not less.
We're going to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere pretty quickly in the next couple of decades in addition to massively reducing carbon emissions. Climate change has the potential to cause massive harm in the interim, but I think we'll overcome it by leaning into the anthropocene and becoming better stewards of the earth rather than trying to back our way out of it, which is politically impossible. Feedback effects are potentially daunting, but personally I'm confident in technological progress to overcome them.
And growth is actually generally good for the environment, past a certain tipping point. US rivers no longer catch on fire like they used to when we were poorer. Forests in developed countries are mostly growing. Coastal waters around rich countries are recovering.
This also makes sense intuitively. Rich countries can afford to spend money (or forego certain types of opportunities) to protect the environment. Poor countries often can't.
It’s already happening on a small scale, with various startups figuring out how to put carbon into rock, soil, or even green fuel. Companies like Microsoft and Stripe are helping to find the research. Consumers can even buy carbon credits that go towards carbon removal (rather than older ideas like planting trees). The costs are very high right now, like with any new technology, but they’ll come down dramatically with more research and larger scale. As energy from sources like solar gets so abundant that we can’t even use all of it when the sun is shining, we’ll start putting more of that energy into getting carbon out of the air as well.
It’s very optimistic to claim that it will get a great amount cheaper. It’s great that people are trying to discover new technology, but it’s going to be energy intensive no matter how we try to do it, because of chemistry.
Cheap enough energy would make it possible, but the amount required to decarbonize at scale is enormous. Solar won’t be enough anytime soon.
Edit: I did some math and with current technology it would take about 1/3 of world energy production to capture all the CO2 produced, which is much better than I initially estimated. Bring that down by a power of ten, which seems reasonable with a combination of better techniques and cheaper energy and I can see it making a dent within a few decades.
Thanks for encouraging me to work out the numbers, it gives me hope!
I think your burial of new socialism might be premature.
Some of the individuals involved with the movement are incredibly toxic or annoying but that's true of almost any progressive movement or cause.
There is a wide diversity of opinion among people who consider themselves socialist.
Some would agree with you on 90% of issues and you probably would agree to the same degree.
The decline and rise of movements is sometimes a matter of decades rather than just a few years so declaring 21st socialism is dead might seem a laughable statement a few years from now more laughable than say the end of history.
I don't think it's helpful to label someone who agrees with Noah 90% a socialist. Then it becomes a trendy label instead of actually descriptive. I think that would be a moderate.
Having said that, I do think the whole US will continue to get comfortable with an incrementally higher degree of redistribution as society gets richer, as we should.
"You do see a bit of divergence here between the top performers — the U.S., Sweden, and Germany — and the middle tier of the UK, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands. But the cumulative difference between these groups is not that large, and about half of it just looks like Covid."
Half? The UK has shot itself in both feet over the past decade but I'm not sure how that extends to Switzerland or the Eurozone countries. Meanwhile, how much has Southern Europe and all but a few parts of Europe except Germany been suffering from an overvalued currency that precludes a healthy export sector?
I'm pretty skeptical of any stories about divergence between advanced economies that are about culture or massive macroeconomic trends instead of about proximate causes that snowball under specific conditions. The US is a 330 million strong continent-wide market that's been relatively developed for two centuries. The rise of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is a pretty extraordinary story and so is the fall of Argentina and Uruguay. I'd be interested in a series from you that doesn't lead me to the conclusion that Germany is kind of the villain.
YIMBY vs NIMBY doesn’t fit well into a frame of “Democratic-aligned interest groups vs abundance”. Within the left at least, this is a *policy* dispute in which both sides see themselves as the good guys in a dispute between the public interest (more housing for YIMBYs, protecting environmental amenity and public housing for left-NIMBYs) and characterise their opponents (existing homeowners, greedy developers) as sectional interests. But neither homeowners nor developers constitute a D-aligned interest group who will vote the right way if mobilised.
I'm a former Republican, and I think that supply-side progressivism is possible, but I also share some of Reihan Salam's worries.
There are aspects of Reaganomics that could really help out the abundance agenda right now, specifically deregulation, free trade, and increases in legal immigration.
We could build more factories if we streamlined the permitting process. Our factories could make more stuff if we could import steel without tariffs. And we could build more stuff in America with more workers.
Biden has helped out a bit with legal immigration, but we haven't done permitting reform or gotten rid of the Trump tariffs yet.
Good points, but I think "deregulation" is too broad a category, Mr. Pearce. I think permitting reform is critical, but anti-monopoly regulation need to be strengthened. The notion that "government regulation" is intrinsically either good or bad can be an obstacle to designing pragmatic policy.
is national industrial policy not usually just populist import substitution where commoner garden products become expensive in comparison with poorer folks wages if freer trade prevailed?
@Noah, my steelman case for socialism is basically Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
I think that if Marx were alive and read-in on the last 150 years of history, he would declare that Western and Northern Europe’s social democracies were the closest to his vision of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, because all he had really meant by that infamous phrase was that true democracy would enable the proletariat to dictate terms to capital.
Which is exactly what happened in postwar Europe! Labor slowly chipped away at capital’s power, bargaining its way into now-entrenched social welfare states.
Marx would also declare that the Russian communists had completely lost the script, and that’s why they utterly failed despite giving it a valiant college try.
Marx was an incredibly brilliant and incisive thinker but he lived and wrote for the most part before the second industrial revolution and globalization took off. In 1848 most of Germany was still basically feudal. Modern readers load baggage on his work that would have been unrecognizable to him. See also people championing Adam Smith as some kind of champion of modern capitalism.
Well I also think that a classical Marxian relations-of-production doesn't map neatly onto knowledge work. Straightforward increase to hours worked does not correspond to "more useful software" or "better strategy".
I mean, Marx definitely didn't foresee the digital age.
It’s a common sport to stand-up Sanders as a one-dimensional cardboard cutout. I understand that impulse, but let’s look at few things seldom mentioned when Sanders is used in a political/economic discussion. Biden made a very important pivot in the month of July leading into the 2020 election:
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/21317850/joe-biden-bernie-sanders-task-forces-progressive-agenda
Sanders is one of the few Senators who saw and voted against W’s Big Lie in re aluminum tubes and white cake — worst foreign policy decision in decades.
Sanders does something no other losing presidential candidate does: works his ass off in multiple rallies and fund-raisers for the candidates who beat him: he did 43 appearance/fund-raisers for Obama, whereas Hillary did 13 closed-door fund-raisers. When late in the run-up to the Democratic Party Convention, Ted Kennedy told Bill Clinton he planned to endorse Obama, who could forget Bill Clinton’s response: “Fifteen years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags!” Lovely people, The Clintons.
The $15.00 minimum wage is an interesting point. Which candidate in a Democratic Presidential Debate forced Hillary to say she supported a $15.00 minimum wage? Sanders.
When Biden won the Democratic Party Nomination, no other defeated candidate worked harder than Sanders, who attended multiple rallies and fund-raisers.
The back-bench mitten-wearing photo of Sanders sitting alone at Biden’s Inauguration made for a nice internet meme. Biden made clear his view of Sanders, when, at the conclusion of his first State of the Union Address, he made a beeline for Bernie and embraced him in a bear hug. Sanders just happened to have a better seat, down front, on the aisle.
Losing candidates such as Sanders, like it or not, have a positive role to play in elections with razor-thin margins. Stacey Abrams couldn’t win public office in Georgia, but, boy, did she deliver an unexpected one-tie-breaker-vote Senate, using her organization to turn-out the vote.
Both Sanders and Abrams have spent years building organizations that stand the test of time, not the typical ad hoc, this-election-cycle ephemeral entities of many candidates. Like it or not, these organizations are critical. Without that one-tie-breaker-vote Senate, the IRA would be but a pipe dream.
What I will say in Sanders' disfavor is that he's had some absolutely awful judgment in staffing his campaign in hiring people like Briahna Joy Gray and David Sirota who are more interested in being online leftist microcelebrities than achieving real power. But he did pull the US left out of the obscure, cranky pit it has been in since McGovern. What we do with that going forward remains to be seen. (I say, as I feel like alternately a liberal leftist and a far left leaning liberal).
Agreed. The problem was never Bernie, it was some of Bernie's supporters (including some he put on the payroll, unfortunately)
The piece isn’t dedicated to attacking Sanders, but basically the one mention of his was an attack.
I don’t think you’re being fair to the Hill paper for two reasons. (1) He estimates “dynamic treatment effects for the policy cohort.” Which, as you know, means that a sort of control is how homelessness changed before the increased minimum wage, compared to after. (2) The homeless population is small and especially hard-to-employ compared to low-wage workers generally. So, I don’t see a problem with also saying that it is true that the minimum wage’s disemployment effects are generally undetectable. Disemployment could hit potentially homeless people harder and in ways that are not detectable when looking at the bulk of potential low-wage labor. Maybe the higher minimum wage brings more competitive low-wage workers into the market, which would mask a general disemployment effect.
I think (I suspect) that Noah’s retort would be to cite this Kevin Drum post. https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-homelessness-is-down-everywhere-except-california/
The reason I say that is $15 minimum wage has been introduced in a number of cities and different states which means this decline in homelessness should probably NOT have happened if this paper was correct.
In fact it’s instructive that it’s only CA where homelessness went up (and that generally has by far the most overall homelessness) in that really again shows that it really does go back primarily to housing costs.
I ultimately agree with Noah’s conclusion about a spurious causal association, but I also think he’s too dismissive of other plausible explanations that do not involve a decrease in employment at the city-level. Especially if the labor market is extremely tight at the top of the income distribution, masking rising unemployment at the bottom of the income distribution, as Patrick notes could have happened.
Do we know that there wasn’t also an inflow of low-earning workers at the same time in those cities? And even if the best data suggests there wasn’t, do we know for sure that’s accurate? Raising the minimum wage also increases the amount that under-the-table workers can demand, making a location that raises minimum wage more attractive for undocumented workers looking for work. And CA has a lot of undocumented workers.
No, an aggregated national decrease in homelessness does not disprove the Hill paper, which compares cities with and without minimum wage increases.
Also, immigrants are generally hard to work with too because they don’t speak English and come from a different culture. It all depends how much value they would contribute to the bottom line vs (the inconvenience of working with them, and their wage). And addicts and crazy people vary in home much they can contribute, how annoying they are to deal with.
I'm suspicious of your premise, Patrick, because while immigrants may present challenges linguistically, they are self-selected as highly motivated to succeed (they are the ones who took the risk to transplant their lives), and that motivation seems at least as critical as language. As far as culture goes, immigrants who bring with them strong family and religious structures (I'm thinking of norms associated with Hispanic immigrants) seem to me at a basic advantage.
I'm not sure that broad speculative ideas can really sharpen our understanding, but it would be better to consider factors that work both ways.
But even so, the more they cost in wages, the less likely they are to be employed. If you are paying someone $7/hour, you don’t examine their background as much as you would if you had to pay them double, especially when other employers have to also.
Great content to mull.
Connecting your view of (1) socialism's decline to (2) Northern Europe vs. North America to (3) swing voters rewarding success, you wrote:
"Americans enjoy higher material consumption than North Europeans, while North Europeans enjoy lower crime, longer lifespans, and more leisure."
Ultimately, isn't that platform of greater safety, better health, and less pressure to work multiple jobs (part of the misery of the impoverished) politically appealing, even if it comes at the expense of higher taxes? And isn't that a move toward socialism along the capitalist-socialism spectrum?
Although i don't see either political party dealing seriously, at least nationally, with any of these issues.
Sorry if I'm a broken record any time this comes up, but I think greater prosperity makes it easier to improve the social safety net over time. In the US, this hasn't worked out for political reasons, but I would still bet on that dynamic. I do think the Democrats have made some decent efforts like the child tax credit, which I still get sad about not being extended.
If anything, I think performative socialist antics are detrimental to more mainstream efforts to redistribute economic gains, even though theoretically these things are all on the left end of the spectrum.
Thanks Noah for the discussion of Dr. Hill's unemployment paper. It didn't pass the sniff test and your analysis makes sense....
Thanks for sending it! It's always nice to know I can still take a paper apart when the need arises! :-)
I think the distorting role the EU plays has a lot to do with the bad decade Southern Europe has had. The financial crisis hit them hard because the previous decade had seen the Euro bring them Northern European levels of creditworthiness that fuelled domestic consumption. There's the overhang of that debt. But unlike what they would have done previously to combat a recession they couldn't devalue. So they're stuck with high unemployment and painful restructuring. The other thing you have to discuss is the issue of enlargement. Most of Southern Europe do still receive money from the EU on Net, but obviously the addition of Eastern European countries meant those payments had to be reduced. The EU did some small nominal adjustments, but its the inflation-adjusted numbers that really sting. Today, Greece is getting about $1.5billion less from the EU than it was at the turn of the century. You're talking tens of billions of lost investment over the past twenty years, and that's before you apply an escalator in terms of output generated to that investment.
Interesting read, Noah, thank you. Regarding minimum wage and homelessness, I'd be interested to know if there's usually a fairly rapid increase in homelessness following the wage increase, or if it's more of a slow burn. I'm wondering if the increase is perhaps caused more by an influx of low-earning workers. If, for example city A increased the minimum to $15, while 120 miles away, city B stayed at, say, $7.50, couldn't we expect a large migration of city B's poor to city A? And if that migration was 10 people (who've now burned their last resources) for each available job, would we not expect a rather high spike in homelessness?
Not sure I understand your statement "...I think the socialist movement of the 20th century did a lot of good for the world (and obviously ran off the rails in some places)..."
There are millions of Communist/Socialist victims who were brutally murdered throughout the world under various Socialist "revolutions" or "reforms" of the 20th century. Can't think of a single good thing the socialist movement has brought to humanity!
I recently re-read "To Destroy You Is No Loss". Anybody that thinks a single positive came out of Pol Pot and his band of Brothers is delusional.
When I read Noah's post I thought of Labor in the US in the first half of the 20th century.
In general, when someone refers to "socialism" and does not specifically include communism my initial assumption is that actually existing communism is not what they meant. I took Noah's parenthetical to signal just that distinction. (Surely, at the least, it would be odd to think Pol Pot did not fall under that parenthetical.)
re: Europe's economic struggles
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-british
This recent (same day?) post on the UK's economic struggles highlights how hard it is to be sure what is even happening or why. (GDP per capita is rising but wages are stagnant, etc, etc).
Gdp per capita rising and wages falling isn’t impossible, more money is going to capital.
Yes, I read the link that I posted.
Weird reaction. Did you expect there to be no discussion on what you linked?
Degrowth is actually a very good economic strategy. Trade consumption for leisure in rich countries. Net utility about the same probably, maybe higher. Suggest you study Ecology a bit and inventory trends in planetary life support systems. List of items that are, how to say, fucked: oceans, forests, insects, mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, soils, water, climate, ethics (added that after listening to NPR on the Supreme Court ethics bill in Congress). Farmers have been amazing at increasing production, but they are doing it with N made from fossil fuel (which accounts for half of world food production), many other fossil fuel inputs, toxic chemicals, loss of biodiversity, and soil mining. Maybe take a tour of the two dozen or so past empires that are ruins in deserts or jungles, or, in the case of Rome, right there in Rome. Technology is making us collectively stupider due to biased, self-interested information sources. Jim Hansen was right before and he's probably right now. I heard an inexpert journalist remark that climate change will stop when carbon emissions stop. Why? With all the feedbacks the pulse of carbon burning/ice melting/warming may not play out for thousands of years. There's plenty of carbon in forests, soils, oceans, seabed methane clathrates, permafrost, and peat to keep emissions going in a warming world via feedback amplification. Albedo change is another big one to amplify warming. Ignoring facts doesn't make them any less true.
Let’s simplify a bit here. Imagine an economy with 100 factories ( which I will use as a general term for factories or mines or farms or retail) producing N kgs of carbon each. So the economy produces 100N kgs of carbon in total. Let’s say we want that economy to get to 0 kgs of carbon in 30 (or however many) years. There are only two options.
1) stop all industry from producing anything at all.
2) change the energy supply and other inputs and outputs to carbon free.
Option 1) makes everybody unemployed and makes sure that 2) can’t happen. In fact the government will collapse without tax revenue.
Option 2) needs lots of investment. The new Green revolution needs more economic growth, not less.
We're going to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere pretty quickly in the next couple of decades in addition to massively reducing carbon emissions. Climate change has the potential to cause massive harm in the interim, but I think we'll overcome it by leaning into the anthropocene and becoming better stewards of the earth rather than trying to back our way out of it, which is politically impossible. Feedback effects are potentially daunting, but personally I'm confident in technological progress to overcome them.
And growth is actually generally good for the environment, past a certain tipping point. US rivers no longer catch on fire like they used to when we were poorer. Forests in developed countries are mostly growing. Coastal waters around rich countries are recovering.
This also makes sense intuitively. Rich countries can afford to spend money (or forego certain types of opportunities) to protect the environment. Poor countries often can't.
Why do you think we are going to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere?
It’s already happening on a small scale, with various startups figuring out how to put carbon into rock, soil, or even green fuel. Companies like Microsoft and Stripe are helping to find the research. Consumers can even buy carbon credits that go towards carbon removal (rather than older ideas like planting trees). The costs are very high right now, like with any new technology, but they’ll come down dramatically with more research and larger scale. As energy from sources like solar gets so abundant that we can’t even use all of it when the sun is shining, we’ll start putting more of that energy into getting carbon out of the air as well.
It’s very optimistic to claim that it will get a great amount cheaper. It’s great that people are trying to discover new technology, but it’s going to be energy intensive no matter how we try to do it, because of chemistry.
Cheap enough energy would make it possible, but the amount required to decarbonize at scale is enormous. Solar won’t be enough anytime soon.
Edit: I did some math and with current technology it would take about 1/3 of world energy production to capture all the CO2 produced, which is much better than I initially estimated. Bring that down by a power of ten, which seems reasonable with a combination of better techniques and cheaper energy and I can see it making a dent within a few decades.
Thanks for encouraging me to work out the numbers, it gives me hope!
Yes. I'm concerned about the next decade or two, but after that the power of compounding rates of improvement takes over. :-)
I think your burial of new socialism might be premature.
Some of the individuals involved with the movement are incredibly toxic or annoying but that's true of almost any progressive movement or cause.
There is a wide diversity of opinion among people who consider themselves socialist.
Some would agree with you on 90% of issues and you probably would agree to the same degree.
The decline and rise of movements is sometimes a matter of decades rather than just a few years so declaring 21st socialism is dead might seem a laughable statement a few years from now more laughable than say the end of history.
Maybe!
I don't think it's helpful to label someone who agrees with Noah 90% a socialist. Then it becomes a trendy label instead of actually descriptive. I think that would be a moderate.
Having said that, I do think the whole US will continue to get comfortable with an incrementally higher degree of redistribution as society gets richer, as we should.
"You do see a bit of divergence here between the top performers — the U.S., Sweden, and Germany — and the middle tier of the UK, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands. But the cumulative difference between these groups is not that large, and about half of it just looks like Covid."
Half? The UK has shot itself in both feet over the past decade but I'm not sure how that extends to Switzerland or the Eurozone countries. Meanwhile, how much has Southern Europe and all but a few parts of Europe except Germany been suffering from an overvalued currency that precludes a healthy export sector?
I'm pretty skeptical of any stories about divergence between advanced economies that are about culture or massive macroeconomic trends instead of about proximate causes that snowball under specific conditions. The US is a 330 million strong continent-wide market that's been relatively developed for two centuries. The rise of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is a pretty extraordinary story and so is the fall of Argentina and Uruguay. I'd be interested in a series from you that doesn't lead me to the conclusion that Germany is kind of the villain.
YIMBY vs NIMBY doesn’t fit well into a frame of “Democratic-aligned interest groups vs abundance”. Within the left at least, this is a *policy* dispute in which both sides see themselves as the good guys in a dispute between the public interest (more housing for YIMBYs, protecting environmental amenity and public housing for left-NIMBYs) and characterise their opponents (existing homeowners, greedy developers) as sectional interests. But neither homeowners nor developers constitute a D-aligned interest group who will vote the right way if mobilised.
I'm a former Republican, and I think that supply-side progressivism is possible, but I also share some of Reihan Salam's worries.
There are aspects of Reaganomics that could really help out the abundance agenda right now, specifically deregulation, free trade, and increases in legal immigration.
We could build more factories if we streamlined the permitting process. Our factories could make more stuff if we could import steel without tariffs. And we could build more stuff in America with more workers.
Biden has helped out a bit with legal immigration, but we haven't done permitting reform or gotten rid of the Trump tariffs yet.
Good points, but I think "deregulation" is too broad a category, Mr. Pearce. I think permitting reform is critical, but anti-monopoly regulation need to be strengthened. The notion that "government regulation" is intrinsically either good or bad can be an obstacle to designing pragmatic policy.
is national industrial policy not usually just populist import substitution where commoner garden products become expensive in comparison with poorer folks wages if freer trade prevailed?
That was the case in many countries in the 1970s, but this approach is no longer common. Now it usually focuses on attracting FDI and exporting.
Peter Coy claims in the New York Times that there are reliable indicators of a recession coming-- Can you answer his arguments?
https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=228&emc=edit_pc_20230724&instance_id=98326&nl=peter-coy&productCode=PC®i_id=191440926&segment_id=140151&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2Ffd6cb830-c343-5f8c-aa6e-a407e7bffafb&user_id=ce1478ce2e51de14ed53104496dd6d2c