2 Comments

I recommend the most commonsense school of economics, the Austrian Economics: LV Mises, F. Hayek, M. Rothbard, among others. Less intervention, more individual freedom...

Expand full comment

The debate over climate cost models is definitely in my wheelhouse. The core critique of DICE seems to boil down to "it's absurd" and "the roads will be gone," which isn’t persuasive on its own, but there are definitely better arguments made

A key comparison to set a baseline is DICE vs. PAGE. PAGE includes more tipping points, a more non-linear cost curve and non-temperature costs, yet produces fairly identical results up to 4°, with a clear difference by 8°. A strong critique of DICE should explain the match with PAGE, and also why somehow a global change in economic and political system is inevitable when the admittedly controversial but far more possible alternative of putting reflective particles into the stratosphere exists and is already cost effective for mitigating warming costs at current temperatures and cost assumptions

This looks like systemic pessimism as a base (as opposed to Chris's Eastern European defensive pessimism) leading to other claims that don't make much sense, like that the world that largely signed the Paris Accord actually believes twice as much warming is fine

The growth uncertainty argument is really good. Frontier economies have been growing at 2% for 300 years but that's not actually very long. It would make a very significant difference to any model to include a loss of growth factor to the discount rate. But if growth halts decarbonization becomes harder, making solutions like reflective particles more material than replacing the economic and political system!

Expand full comment