Gore's flaw: He doesn't sound enough like an uptight libertarian wonk

Says uptight libertarian wonk

Posted by David Roberts at 1:04 PM on 26 Oct 2007

Read more about: Al Gore | climate

I don't understand what Steven Landsburg is supposed to be saying here. By his own admission, the position Gore advances is in line with the Stern Review. But Stern showed his work, with a few hundred pages on discount rates and risk assessments, and Gore just made a movie that got seen by tens of millions of people, so Gore is some kind of buffoon and Stern should have gotten the Nobel? That doesn't make any sense. Why should the technical language of economics be the only legitimate way to grapple with climate change? Why not approach it in the language of culture or biology or meteorology or ecology or ethics or myth?

For story: Gore's flaw: He doesn't sound enough like an uptight libertarian wonk
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Pretty Good

I thought the Landsburg article was pretty good, but I think he avoided the issue of "reversibility."

If someone needs help now (in ours or a foreign land), we can help them now or later. But if we are facing some kinds of irreversible environmental change we may have one and only one chance at heading them off.

We (or future generations) can't say, "OK, let's save X" when X is long gone.

... just as we can't say "ok, lets save the already extinct species."

by odograph at 1:31 PM on 26 Oct 2007

substitutability

He relied of course on the economists' view of substitutability. That is, a big-screen TV is as good as species already lost.

by odograph at 1:32 PM on 26 Oct 2007

an economist

an economist is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. This economist thinks that if you have money, your life is complete and valuable. But we are humans after all with more of an attachment to our biology than money. When our body says die, it doesn't matter how much money we have, we die.

owning something expensive has value, but the smile of our kids, not so much. Is that how our lives are valued? beware of people who only value what they can count.

by trock at 4:15 PM on 26 Oct 2007

Of technocrats and philosophers

I agree about the economists having a difficult time with the global warming paradigm, Trock.

But your last sentence gave me pause. Bean counters and policy wonks are both needed and that's how things get done. The "best science available" should drive the policies and the policies feed back to fund the bean counters. It's worked that way for thousands of years.

Gore's problem is that he does not possess the qualities of being a bean-counter or a philosopher, although we can give him credit for being a 100% policy wonk. I suppose the Brits and Mr. Stern were more on the technocrat and philosophy combination which seems to be completely missing in otherwise good American leaders such as Al Gore.

But the Brits and Mr. Stern didn't make a movie which has been seen by hundreds of millions of people. Sure, movies are scripted such as through writers unions, directors, editors, and producers, and all kinds of special effects (and some major half-truths and white lies about climate change) but ... Al Gore did it. He rocked. Get over it.

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 8:41 PM on 26 Oct 2007

economics

Economics is part of human nature. If you don't believe that, pause and consider that proto-economics is part of chimpanzee nature. (Actually the proto-econ experiments bridge a few monkey and ape species.)

So it a useful framework, and one that even a naturalist can love.

Where it goes too far I think is when certain extreme sorts of economists think that econ is the only interesting bit of human nature - or that all of human nature can be represented as econ. Those folks are around the bend.

But as a framework ... you can't really deny that it's there

by odograph at 6:33 PM on 27 Oct 2007

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