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I really wish people would stop shilling austerian visions in the name of ecology - it is political idiocy, because the austerians are going to loose, and if the green movement ties itself to them, it will drown with them.
What is needed is a vision of eternal prosperity, which is perfectly achivable - All resources save energy are infinitely recyclable and energy is abundant. Oil and coal are convenient but I can name at least 3 technologies that can supply substantially greater-than-current energy use for > a billion years and at reasonable costs, too.
Nuclear fission (Breeders exist and supply grid power at reasonable prices. This makes them proven tech. Assuming 4x current energy use, we run out of uranium sometime after the sun swells and eats planet earth)
Desert solar + HVDC: The sahara is pretty darn big, and pretty darn sunshiny. Why the heck would anyone live a life of energy scarcity when instead you can simply make the solar array bigger? It is not like we are going to run out of sand.
Wind + Serious Storage; I really do want to see small mountains floating on hydralic pistons in my lifetime. Because that would be awesome
I agree, and my biggest problem is the argument that we cannot afford to make the investments to transform out energy infrastructure, despite the fact that the labour requirements would be so massive as to pull us out of the current unemployment crisis. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
the hairshirt brigade is dwindling with every new discovery in PV, and every MW of wind installed.
there is still some truth to the atonement principle, in that huge swathes of land needs to be reclaimed from the ravages of burbis and chem ag monocultures.
if we continue cling to fossil fuels as our main energy drivers instead of using them to help us transition asap, then we could quite well find ourselves in a terrible condition... this is the fear that creates the desire to atone for our past greedy stupidities, like a drunk after a bender.
were we to manage the transition expeditiously, rolling out mass transit and sustainable energy with urgency climate change demands, then we could conceivably keep many of our demands met without too much hiatus.
after we have completely crossed the energy rubicon (20-30 more years?) and definitively left dirty energy behind us, then i think we will be only limited by our imaginations as to how much energy we can play with.
it would do many people good to detox off of many wasteful habits we have in the first world, 1000 mile salads etc, but i think we will be grateful afterwards to have shed some of the excess, like people feel better after losing a few pounds from dieting.
exaggerating the guilt-trip some feel because of our collectively clumsy handling of our environment, needlessly polarises people, imho. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
I really wish people would stop shilling austerian visions in the name of ecology
Who is doing this exactly?
In France, there is the extremely marginal Parti de la Décroissance, who have interesting ideas but zero influence or electoral appeal.
Other than that?
In any case, the notion that frugality is a virtue, and morally better than disposable consumption, seems almost too obvious to discuss. If this is what you assimilate with "austerianism", then I suggest you have Klein bottle syndrome. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
I'd say Eric Zencey and Jerome (see my rejoinder) could both be said to have done that. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
Where Eric, Jerome, I, and various others disagree with you, Jake, and various others (I will not do you the disservice of bracketing you with Thomas the cornucopian sf fan) is that we identify a finite-planet resource problem which precedes (and, arguably, triggers) the financial crisis, and is a graver problem in the long run. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
The ecological austerians want to argue that the current recession is the inevitable pain for living beyong our planet's thermodynamic means.
Both are hangover theories and they share a common conceptual and, yes, moral, frame.
Both are actually wrong in my opinion.
Note that I am not arguing that if there's an ecological collapse in mid-century it won't be an inevitable consequence of ecological overconsumption. I'm just arguing that we actually have the human and material resources to turn around, simultaneously, both the employment situation and the ecological situation. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
As I have said repeatedly, if we allowed ourself monetary inflation we could mobilize the resources (and employ the people) to implement a green new deal and transition our economy to lower resource use while preserving employment.
Instead, we get people arguing that austerity because finite planet and with no money to mobilize the resources (and the currently idle labour) to address the finite planet problem.
So austerity means that business as usual wins. So you shoot yourself in the foor by saying that austerity is the proper answer to a finite planet crisis. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
It seems that this strawman is triggered by a rather convoluted reasoning :
Austerity is primarily about redistributing political power towards rentiers away from workers and the middle classes, and about running national budgets like a kitchen budget.
Some austerians are perfectly capable of believing that austerity is actually expansionary in a general sense.
Others only care that it's expansionary for 'investors' - which it often is.
Neither position is about intelligent conservation of scarce resources, or about innovating to work around the need for conservation.
If you really think it is, you haven't been paying attention.
Or are you saying redistribution to the rentiers wasn't the name of the game in the go-go years prior to 2007? tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
peak oil translates into higher prices, which eventually causes lower demand (in those countries which are price sensitive, i.e. mostly the Western world, as a large portion of the emerging economies subside fuels) - and this is accompanied by widespread pain, as people have to do with less, or with more expensive oil, and need to reduce their consumption of everything else as a consequence.
Sure, if I can't afford as much petrol, or food, as before because of price inflation, this can be called "austerity" I guess; but I find it really strange to bracket it with economic Austerianism. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
Economic pain is not unavoidable. Greek parents giving their children up to orphanages is not an unavoidable consequence of peak oil. FFS. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
It's a simple fact that increased oil prices in recent years have impacted the standard of living of the vast majority of Europeans (Norwegians excepted).
Denying this fact on the basis that other factors have caused greater impacts on standards of living, would be rather unsound. On reflection, I don't think this is what you are doing. Rather, I think you are trying to censor all mention of any other causes than Europe's self-inflicted financial crisis.
I don't find this useful. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
Migeru:
I object to being bracketed with what you term "ecological austerians", and your insistence on controlling what can and cannot be debated. After all, it is you, not I, who introduced the "hangover frame", in which I have no interest. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
Thomas:I really wish people would stop shilling austerian visions in the name of ecologyWho is doing this exactly?
(I will not do you the disservice of bracketing you with Thomas the cornucopian sf fan)
By the way, you're free to argue in a biblical literalist frame, too, but I would object to that frame as well, and I would not care in the least if you claimed I was oppressing you for objecting to that frame. After all I am just objecting, not suppressing your ability to argue. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
You're talking about two quite different uses of the word "austerity". Assimilating the two politically, based on nothing more than semantics,
Is what your enemies will do if they hear you using semantics that give them any opening to do so. Because the right wing lies. Pathologically as well as professionally.
It is also what the conventional wisdom will do when it hears you using semantics that gives it an opening to do so. Because attempting to co-opt the politically weaker narrative to reinforce the politically stronger narrative is how the conventional wisdom deals with cognitive dissonance.
Put another way, would you rather have Migeru point out that your spiel can (will) be read that way, or some bad-faith shill from a far-right belief tank present your spiel that way with a straight face?
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
It seems that this strawman is triggered by a rather convoluted reasoning : If we recognise that the planet is finite, this means we have to consume less resources If we consume less resources, this means austerity anyone who thinks this is the same as the monetarist economists who are strangling Europe. Both 2 and 3 are non sequiturs.
No, the argument is that:
This may well be the last purely demand-side crisis for the foreseeable future. But it is a purely demand-side crisis. Pretending that it is a supply-side crisis concedes a point to your enemies that you should not be conceding until and unless a rational response to the crisis absolutely requires you to.
As expected, you arrived to assist Miguel in his beat-up of a strawman.
All I ever claimed is that resource constraints arguably triggered the current crisis; neither I nor, as far as I can tell, anyone on ET has argued that the current crisis is characterised by resource constraints.
In any case, whatever triggered the crisis, we can rest assured that the 1% will continue to use it to further their interests, with shock-doctrine tactics to change the rules to their advantage.
And because the crisis is actually complex and multiform, refusing to consider one aspect of it doesn't actually help in searching for solutions. Miguel's crusade for ideological purity seems to stem from Jerome's observation, among other things, that Portugal's trade deficit from oil imports was far larger than its trade deficit with the rest of the EU. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
But I digress... tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
All I ever claimed is that resource constraints arguably triggered the current crisis
The trigger is totally irrelevant for all practical purposes. If it hadn't been one trigger, it would have been another, because the underlying imbalances were not sustainable. But for what it's worth, the trigger for the current European crisis seems to have been the collapse of Eurodollar liquidity following the American credit freeze in 2008.
And because the crisis is actually complex and multiform
It actually isn't. It's a very, very simple crisis, that can be summed up in a two sentences: Wage suppression is the retarded brother of protectionism. And inequality breaks industrial economies.
The solutions are equally simple: Inequality needs to go back down to 1970 levels, and wages need to go back up to 67 % of GDP across the whole EU. There is absolutely nothing complicated about this.
Yeah, solving this crisis will mean that we will have to deal with resource constraints that are currently made less pressing by the fact that we are busy demolishing the factories that would use those resources to make stuff. But that will be then, and this is now.
the trigger for the current European crisis seems to have been the collapse of Eurodollar liquidity following the American credit freeze in 2008
the trigger for the current European crisis seems to have been the collapse of Eurodollar liquidity following the American credit freeze in 2008.
Well - psychologically capitalist recessions and depressions are caused by a loss of faith in the future among the financial class.
Capitalism is inherently manic depressive, with wild and uncontrollable swings between irrational euphoria during boom periods and irrational depression and projected guilt (q.v. austerity) during busts.
Essentially all the markets do is measure faith - in individuals, companies, corporations, and countries. The ultimate capitalist virtue isn't practical output, it's the ability to persuade people they should believe in you.
Markets 'punish' those whom faith has abandoned. And during crisis periods, everyone's faith stampedes towards the door.
You can see here that oil prices spiked just before the crash:
Now - Chris Cook will likely say that this was a result of manipulation. And he may be right.
Practically, it doesn't matter. Enough people were looking at rising energy prices to consider that the chances of getting their (non-viable, multiply leveraged) loans repaid were trending to zero - after a long period during which it was still possible to believed that repayment would be possible eventually.
Something similar happened during the oil panic during the 70s, which is why there was a similar crash then - even though taxation was more evenly balanced and worker compensation was proportionally higher.
So I think it's simplistic and empirically disconfirmed to suggest that all we have to do is return to the redistributive policies of the 70s and resource constraints will drift back down into the economic background noise.
On the contrary, resource constraints would return to the forefront of our economic problems if we (re)turned to unconditional fiscal defense of full employment. Which is what we want to happen: We want the binding constraint on economic activity to be real resource availability, not by the fake constraint of money availability.
But by pretending that real resources are the currently binding constraint, you would be arguing that the crisis is already over as far as fiscal and monetary policy is concerned. All that can be done, then, is industrial and R&D policy to improve resource utilisation.
I agree that we should build an awareness of physical constraints into economic modelling. But that's a much bigger issue of wide-scale rational planning. It's disconnected from the current political need to label a few people super-winners at the expense of everyone else and the carrying capacity of the planet as a whole.
The wide differentials that generates are always followed by a mass crash in confidence. But this is considered a feature, not a bug, because it prevents democratic accountability and is a convenient way to keep working populations repressed.
Economic theory makes as much sense as a drunk does. A drunk will lurch from over-confidence to utter panic for largely trivial reasons, before dying of something stupid and utterly avoidable.
The perception of triggers for emotional states is very distant from intelligent sober analysis.
It's also a feature of the drunken state that important features of reality are ignored.
Nobody's arguing for the specific redistributive policies of the 70s. The point is to put unemployment in centre stage, instead of the preservation of the purchasing power of rentier wealth. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
Capitalism isn't fine, jobs or no. Capitalism is a political feedback loop which always concentrates policy access among a tiny minority. Even if there are jobs, the best you can hope for is a temporary respite from policy monopoly.
In the UK, after a hundred and fifty years of socialist history there were maybe 20 years in total - it could be as few as fifteen - where policy was designed to be politically liberating and bottom up.
The rest of the time, it was top-down and pro-rentier.
Jobs are irrelevant. They're too fragile, too subject to political whims pretending to be economic necessity, and not democratic enough.
The only way to eliminate the rentier model completely is to open project investment to the public, convert corporations into coops, and exclude high net worth individuals from politics.
It's not a simple issue, because our culture is based on economic Social Darwinism, and - apparently - it's important that some people get a lot while others work hard for very little.
My point is that if you stop at the 70s-socialist idea of 'jobs for all' you haven't tackled the underlying issues, and you still have a system that's politically and economically unstable.
If you want a stable system - note how close that is to a sustainable system - you have to build in feedback loops that distribute power and reward intelligent reality-based decision making.
Currently you have feedback loops that reward aggressive selfishness above all other social values.
This is not a good thing. It's not only not sustainable, it actually destroys collective intelligence.
High energy costs, and high uncertainty on future energy costs, are a brake on productive investment - this is quite rational, and took a few years to percolate through into market perceptions. If, on the other hand, market sentiment perceives plausible prospects for a trajectory towards sustainable energy at predictable prices, then that ought to restore confidence.
Of course, if we need one of those bipolar mood swings for capitalism to pull itself up by its bootstraps, this illustrates the extent to which our governments have disempowered themselves. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
All the more so because the lack of confidence in future economic growth which has driven markets over the last few years is not only entirely justified, but well overdue,
You're conflating nominal and real growth here.
Nothing about resource constraints says that you can't have nominal growth, which is all you need for financial stability. Well, nominal growth and a properly functioning central bank.
Banks don't care about real growth. They care about getting their money back. Which means nominal growth.
High energy costs, and high uncertainty on future energy costs, are a brake on productive investment - this is quite rational
Not necessarily. "Productive investment" includes investments that make energy cheaper (like insulating houses and building wind farms), which in any rational world should be encouraged in the face of expensive energy.
The point about nominal growth is well taken; therefore, the markets need to be convinced that the monetary authorities will ensure nominal growth. (are we there yet?...)
Likewise, my prescription for restoring faith in real growth, or at least a sustainable market environment, requires instilling faith in the markets that energy needs will be catered to at predictable prices. This requires clear public policy, and probably massive public investment. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
High energy costs, and high uncertainty on future energy costs, are a brake on productive investment
yes, but investment has been growing notwithstanding, in enterprises that are meeting the future head on, not trying to pretend we can go on for ever in the old way.
Jerome is proof of that. yes there would be much more investment, IF governments could get their heads out of their keisters and stop sending such mixed, stop-and-go signals to the sustainable energy market, with their tie-in tariffs, incentives etc.
as for trying to cleave some daylight between the two political clusterfucks we have going on right now, unemployment and peak oil, i'm not sure there's any point really. a bit like worrying whether you're going to get hit by the front or the back of a bus. neither one is going to go away by itself, and banks, hedge funds, credit markets have no interest in solving any problems that plague everyone else but them, in fact they can profit off all the volatility and keep distracting us with their power to send whole countries to hell, while they amass their baubles.
as tbg consistently reminds us, we are not dealing with ration -let alone decent- human beings here, rather a sad parade of our worst psychological aberrations, nothing to admire except the boneheaded tenacity with which they clutch the banana in the jar, and their shapeshifting talents in spinning themselves as responsible, serious people voters and shareholders can trust, in that they are masters.
why cut the bus in two by arguing? it's heading for us, upside down and spinning, we don't know which end hitting us will be worse, and without fossil fuel supplies running low we don't know for sure whether we'd still be having such worrying divisions between rich and poor, and vice versa.
everyone here is describing the same elephant, just from different angles.
financial wealth-poverty continuum is a vertical polarity, with ever less people in the middle. where we are greedy and we need to be more austere, fine no problem, as long as the sacrifices are (perceived to be) across the board.
due to expert marketing, we have a collective stockholm syndrome that keeps voters trusting tough, no-nonsense' leaders, and only challenging them with insipid milquetoast alternatives, both sides of the dyad serving the same masters, counting on the lapdog media to throw the juicy morsels of xenophobia and gossip, celeb-adulation and sports into the baying crowd of low-info voters, while a few educated folk trade possible solutions on blogs like this.
you're all making great points, and i think there's a fundamental agreement on most of them.
they own the airwaves, the masses are confused, so the numbers against intelligent change -whether consciously or brainwashed into abetting the status quo- remain dauntingly superior.
so the only way to beat them will be quality of ideas, which is generously represented here at ET.
we could mobilize the resources (and employ the people) to implement a green new deal and transition our economy to lower resource use while preserving employment.
the nub's right there... the question is how to spread that idea to where it's most needed, ie the electorate, who then must demand valid leaders with reality-based policies instead of the current wankfest.
to combat the current propaganda, and catapult a reasonable set of alternatives... that's the challenge, much more than microanalyses of what's correlation and what's causation. they are necessary and fascinating, but we can't really afford the luxury of over-intellectualising, not with a climate clock ticking, and especially if disagreements add extra drag to our progress and creat factions, when we know unity in slamming home the message mig summed up in one pithy phrase, a phrase you don't need any wonkiness to understand, even the lowest-info citizen can get it....if he hears it at all...
somewhere between yelling it from the rooftops, and silently wishing people would connect the dots by themselves, without any added pressure from us.
that middle way, not scaring people with doomery, not getting them excited about utopia, just patiently explaining what's going down, and how to ask for what we need. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
In which case, we can be in complete agreement.
Once we have solved this crisis (har), with resumed economic growth, we will indeed be back in the (relatively) comfortable position of looking for solutions for the underlying resource-constraint crisis, which will have been exacerbated by the resumption of growth.
More to the point : we should employ a bit of shock-doctrine tactics of our own. Both these crises illustrate the urgent need to reduce economic inequalities, to restart the economy (purchasing power to the people who need to spend) and to afford the transition to sustainability. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
So you think that JakeS in particular doesn't belong to the group of people who identify a finite-planet resource problem which precedes (and, arguably, triggers) the financial crisis, and is a graver problem in the long run?
Clearly that's wrong. From his comments, Thomas is also mightily worried about climate change and fossil carbon energy technologies (though some people involved with wind consider him a troll), so he might also be in that group.
Therefore what distinguishes you, Jerome and Eric from Jake, Thomas and me can only be that you identify a finite-planet resource problem which precedes (and, arguably, triggers) the financial crisis, and is a graver problem in the long run. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
It's obvious we do have finite resources issues, what with many resources being - you know - finite.
Of course it's possible that in a different universe we might have solved them by asteroid mining, magic space unicorns, or in some other way.
It would be nice to think solutions are at least possible.
But - your argument makes no sense, because empirically we're limited by political frames that guarantee flawed and self-destructive decision making.
I'd suggest it's impossible to solve resource issues until we have more reality-based decision-making.
And since that seems to be in no danger of happening, and since no one here has any idea how to make it happen (I certainly don't) any argument about what might be possible in a different reality is moot.
Practically, it's not even obvious that better decision-making would solve the problem. We're not lacking in IQ collectively, but we've had very limited success doing anything practical here.
And that's after seven years or so.
Would we really be any better at running the world? Possibly we would - I'm not sure I'd want to lay odds either way.
But dealing with a potentially hostile population and an even more hostile capitalist nomenklatura is not a trivial challenge.
Which is why I find mystifying and not a little frustrating when you use ecology as a wedge issue to differentiate us. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
Where Eric, Jerome, I, and various others disagree with you, Jake, and various others (I will not do you the disservice of bracketing you with Thomas the cornucopian sf fan) is that we identify a finite-planet resource problem which precedes (and, arguably, triggers) the financial crisis,
What triggers a financial crisis is usually uninteresting. When your financial or monetary system is built broken and you allow it to generate massive imbalances, then it will experience a crisis. Focusing on what triggers the crisis is an exercise in futility. Partly because you cannot know what causes the crack ferrets to begin their scurry for cover, and partly because if this trigger had not triggered the crash, then something else would have.
In the basic logic, it is akin to blaming the SEC for shutting down the Ponzi who was scamming you. The reason you lost money was that you bought into a Ponzi game, not that the SEC happened to bust it before you punted your share to a greater fool.
and is a graver problem in the long run.
Austerity prevents effective action against that problem. Therefore, flying rhetorical air support for the austeritarians Is Not Helpful. The austeritarians want people to believe that the crisis is inevitable rather than a political decision to favour creditors over productive enterprise. Repeated emphasis on the exogenous constraints on the economy supports this narrative.
I really don't understand why this is so difficult to grasp.
Desert solar + HVDC: The sahara is pretty darn big, and pretty darn sunshiny. Why the heck would anyone live a life of energy scarcity when instead you can simply make the solar array bigger? It is not like we are going to run out of sand. Wind + Serious Storage; I really do want to see small mountains floating on hydralic pistons in my lifetime. Because that would be awesome
yes it would. easy to insure too... 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
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