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John Quiggin 
This news item is very timely considering the problems with the progress of the Voice proposal.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-07/yinjibarndi-fortescue-compensation-federal-court-roebourne/102688586
It goes to the issue of the dispossession of native peoples by the colonial process: a process which is part of what Marx called “Primitive Accumulation” because of the way productive land (mainly) was taken from the traditional owners perhaps better termed the traditional guardians and stewards of the land. The dispossession process was called “primitive” because it flourished, mainly (supposedly) in the pre-capitalist medieval, imperial and colonial eras.
In reality, the process of primitive accumulation has never ceased although it has been overlaid by the many more sophisticated aspects of late stage capitalism. The Andrew Forrest / Fortescue Mining case is really a clear and very real story of the ongoing operations of primitive accumulation today, especially in the mining industry. Fortescue Mining took stuff, despoiled and desecrated stuff without any care or concern that there might be other stakeholders with traditional or other ties, cares for and dependencies on the land. It is pure “primitive accumulation plus” which employs modern legalism, the take-stuff-because-you-can power principle and the seemingly endless battle-it-out-in-the-courts rearguard action. This is the standard playbook of many billionaire grifters to this day.
“Adam Smith’s (or John Locke’s? – ed.) account of primitive-original accumulation depicted a peaceful process in which some workers laboured more diligently than others and gradually built up wealth, eventually leaving the less diligent workers to accept living wages for their labour. Karl Marx rejected this account as “childish” for its omission of the role of violence, war, enslavement, and colonialism in the historical accumulation of land and wealth. Marxist scholar David Harvey explains Marx’s primitive accumulation as a process which principally “entailed taking land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation”.” – Wikipedia.
Money for Nothing and Your Legals for Free – essentially since your ill-gotten gains pay for your legals. “That’s not working, that’s the way you do it…” – apologies to Dire Straits.
Climate dictatorship and net zero in Australia by 2030, comment 4
On July 18 I proposed a war economy model for net zero in (test case) Australia, for net zero by 2030. (And two follow-ups so far, links at end). It occurs to me that the argument has so far been based on the incoherent rage that arises simply from watching the news of climate breakdown everywhere and the knowledge that very little is being done to stop the home we share from burning down. This may be too simple for the élite readership of a tony blog like this, so let’s try to restate the argument in Serious form.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 was hailed by many, including me, as a great victory for common sense in the climate wars. Its targets and deadlines were better than most observers had hoped for, and it has served as a rallying-cry and reference point for public and private climate action ever since. The whole world is in the debt of Figueres, Tubiana, Fabius, Kerry and many other negotiators. But, but. It also froze the Overton window at the point of the most that was politically feasible, not what the science requires.
For instance, why is “net zero by 2050” the CW target? Simply because Article 4 of the treaty sets out the aim “to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.” The first year of this period is 2050. QED. It was not a scientific determination, any more than the “well below 2 degrees C” target and the 1.5 degrees C aspiration of Article 2. The success has been bought at the high price of stifling discussion on stronger action.
We can now clearly see that stronger action is indeed required. Heatwaves, wildfires, flood, coral die-offs, disappearing glaciers, bathtub-warm seas, etc etc all point in the same direction, and we are currently only at +1.2 or +1.3C. Reaching net zero in 2050 – and this is not yet assured – means that the climate will get worse for the next 27 years. Probably longer, because of lags. There are no plans at all for the climate to actually start getting better after that, which would require going net negative on a large scale, using unknown technologies. Is this all remotely acceptable?
Speaking for myself, it is not. I am 76. My actuarial chance of still being alive in 2050, at age 103, is too low to show up on online calculators. I would really like to see the turn before I die, for which the mean estimate is 2033.
Everybody will have their own take on this. But I very much doubt if waiting 27 years for any chance of climate stabilisation, let alone improvement, is really acceptable to most people. In fact it is so far ahead as to be psychically indistinguishable from “never”. For action to have perceptible results, it needs to be within a decade. I picked 2030 – seven years ahead – for the shock effect. Let’s argue about it!
I anticipate one likely objection, that human myopia rules this out. No, because myopia argues more strongly against a long-delayed target than a closer one. I am proposing a choice between Plan A, implying mild inconvenience in the short term against a lottery ticket that may pay out in 27 years’ time, and Plan B, implying substantial inconvenience in the short term against a lottery ticket that may pay out much sooner. Neither are an easy sell, but I submit that neither are impossible.
The real difficulty is the collective action / free rider problem. If Australia adopts Plan B, and nobody else does, the effort will have negligible impact on the global climate. True. The nerdy rejoinder is that the Paris Agreement relied on very uncertain social processes – street pressure, élite virtue competition, accumulating scientific evidence, and herd psychology – to become effective. To general surprise, this has actually worked quite well. Current policies get us to about +2.7 C, much lower than the previous projection, and with a bit of plausible technology optimism we can hope for under +2 C. I see no reason why the same processes could not work for more ambitious targets.
Plan B is of course still a very big stretch. Which brings me to the simpler pub rejoinder: got a better plan?
Next instalment: my crude model with wrong numbers, but numbers not sermons.
Previous comments:
1. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/07/18/monday-message-board-running-late/#comment-261523
2. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/07/18/monday-message-board-running-late/#comment-261551
3. https://johnquiggin.com/2023/07/24/monday-message-board-607/#comment-262100
.
I think it sounds like a great idea, and I don’t think Australia would be alone for very long. (Le sigh … I wish *I* lived in a country that could do this. Though I hope we will soon be embarrassed into following.)
James W.,
Basically, I am agreement. Trawling through my old comments on this site would reveal I mentioned, at least once or twice, command economies to win wars as the model for a full effort against climate change disaster. Of course, we can propose all the good ideas we like. The powers that be are not listening, at least not yet. When the disaster gets worse it might frighten them into action or they might be toppled, I guess.
Something is rotten in the state of Australia.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-08/kpmg-defence-contracts-consultants-four-billion/102699506
And another news story on the ABC website at the same time.
“The path from MP to big business is well trodden — and defence and AUKUS is in their sites” (double sic)
Until all this corruption is cleared out along with the neoliberalism which created it, we have no hope of saving anything of real value in this nation.
Our mainstream media are telling us very little about the floods in China. This is just as they are telling us very little about the COVID-19 deaths and morbidity in China. Of course, the Chinese regime suppresses news. Equally, our system has a stake in suppressing climate change disaster news and COVID-19 disaster news from China and everywhere else for that matter.
If we knew how bad it was in China and elsewhere, we might start demanding changes to our climate change and COVID-19 policies. Our governments couldn’t have that could they? There is seemingly a kind of default collusion between our governments and those of dictatorships. In both systems, the elites have a huge stake in denying and obscuring the facts that serious catastrophes are happening right now all over the globe. In both systems, the elites protect themselves at the cost of many tens of millions of deaths (overall from all disasters of the last several years, not just from floods this year).
“Within ONE Day, Millions of People Are Left Homeless”
Comedic updates
The Dionysia festival of classical Athens, the wellspring of modern theatre, had separate competitions for tragedies and comedies. They were rightly seen as essential complements. In the spirit of Aristophanes, I bring you more cheery tech news.
There is now a Solar Grazing Association in the USA. Website with obligatory cute photos: https://solargrazing.org/ The barriers to entry into this booming niche business are remarkably low, essentially a pickup truck and some sheep. Possibly a dog, and a mower for the weeds the sheep can’t get at, as solar farm owners want a complete plant control service. Future hyperniche business: solar farm sheepdog trainer.
Less amusing but more consequential news from inland shipping.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/china-launches-first-700-teu-electric-containership-for-yangtze-service
Chinese shipbuilder and shipowner COSCO has floated out a 700-container electric cargo ship for river service on the Yangtze, the world’s busiest inland waterway. Fitting out should be completed in September. It will be powered by swappable batteries, naturally in their own containers. (Barnard corrects the battery capacity per container from 50 Mwh to a more credible 5 Mwh). https://maritime-executive.com/media/images/article/Photos/Vessels_Small/N997-Cosco-electric-containership-float-out-stern.jpg
There is nothing speculative about this. It is in principle a complete shovel-ready technical solution for any inland transport waterway: Rhine/Main/Danube, Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio, St Lawrence/Great Lakes, Amazon, Paraná, Nile, Niger/Benue, Congo, Volga, Ob, Yenisei, Amur, Yellow, Mekong, Ganges, sorry nothing in Australia. The container batteries, electric motors, and chargers are standard. The scheme can be readily adapted for bulk transport, pusher tugs, etc, and to the different maximum sizes of ships and barges in different basins. Unlike oceanic shipping, inland waterways can easily instal charging bases at convenient intervals. The reports do not go into costs, but as with heavy trucks, electrification is likely to be economic at any serious imputed carbon price. Network and scale economies are there for the taking, with a little planning and standardisation by river commissions. You also get a modest but handy gain in water quality, reduced air and noise pollution in the many riverside cities and towns, and a general aesthetic improvement in river life. Safety will be a concern, as it is with fossil fuels, but is surely manageable. This is not a business where you can easily evade regulators.
H/t Mike Barnard
Hurray!!!! James, if I knew how, I’d put in one of those unicorn sticker emojis. I really like those. The one with star glasses, I think.
James, your heads up re Cost–Benefit Analysis (CBA) Circular A-4, from US Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is one, if not the, most important recent posts and topic.
Great to see JQ pick it up;
“Utilitarianism comes to benefit-cost analysis”
MAY 20, 2023 by JQ.
This article prompted me to post…
FOR Unrigging the rules:-
Jerry Cayford writes “Let the Unrigging Begin”
– “their Achilles heel was politics”…
– “And the fight is fierce”
– “so that compensation has not been given, and economic progress has accumulated a roll of victims, sufficient to give all sound policy a bad name” (711). ” (^2.)
Which leads to the rabbit hole…
AGAINST Unrigging the rules:-
Nefarious actors – read libertarian free market – are lobbying against:
“Congress Should Halt OMB’s Rewrite Of Circular A-4 Guidance On Regulatory Cost-Benefit Analysis”
Fred L. Smith Jr. Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (^3.)
And before we got out of bed the “American Economic Association
“Apr 7 — Request for Nominations of Experts to Peer-Review Draft Guidance on Conducting Analysis of Federal Regulations”
aeaweb dot org/forum/3635/draft-revised-circular-regulatory-analysis-comments-invited
We can only hope, as you confidently commented James:
“John Quiggin would stand ready to testify in court challenges”. JQ, would you?
A pity it seems any input by JQ has passed. It seems a general concensus the comment period was too short.
*
^2.
“Let the Unrigging Begin”
AUG 7, 2023
By Jerry Cayford
“The rigged rules that govern our economy are being rewritten right now. And the fight is fierce”.
…
“What makes this rulemaking earthshaking is that the people doing it are trying to unrig decades of rigged rules, and getting pushback from powerful players. The magnitude of the stakes can be seen in the public comments on OIRA’s revision of its guidance, Circular A-4. …”
…
“Here is a thumbnail. …”
…
“The new proposal changes the rules. It tweaks CBA to weight the dollars a policy generates according to who gets them (and who pays them), instead of just counting the total. It is not a new idea, but it is a radical one, and the hornets’ nest is buzzing.
“The criterion that CBA uses to judge whether a policy increases social welfare is called the “Kaldor–Hicks potential compensation criterion,…”
…
“Then, very quickly, it all goes wrong. The logic of Kaldor and Hicks was solid, but their Achilles heel was politics. The vulnerability comes from “dividing ‘welfare economics’ into two parts: the first relating to production, and the second to distribution” (Kaldor 551). ”
…
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/08/let-the-unrigging-begin.html#more-238264
*
^3.
“The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. coined the phrase “regulatory dark matter” … has already published both news articles and “study”:
“Congress Should Halt OMB’s Rewrite Of Circular A-4 Guidance On Regulatory Cost-Benefit Analysis”
Clyde Wayne Crews Jr.
Fred L. Smith Jr. Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
May 16, 2023
https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2023/05/16/congress-should-halt-ombs-rewrite-of-circular-a-4-guidance-on-regulatory-cost-benefit-analysis/
CEI’s Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. – what do you call this “paper / study”??? – more like a polemic…
“Congress Must Prevent a Progressive OMB Rewrite of ‘Circular A-4’ Guidance on Preparation of Regulatory Impact Analyses”
31 May 2023
Clyde Wayne Crews Jr.
…
– “The emphasis on “distributional effects,” “equity” and “net benefits” in the Draft Circular A-4 is a recipe for purposefully expanding federal government authority past a point of no return for liberty and constitutional normalcy.
“… The steps that should be taken instead involve regulatory liberalization and shrinkage of bureaucracy. ”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4434081
wikipedia dot org wiki/Competitive_Enterprise_Institute
*
Essentially every US President has a go at OMB Circular A-4 for better or worse.
Trump rule: if 1 new regulation, 2 older regulations must go. “… Executive Order 13771 directs agencies to eliminate at least two existing regulations for every new regulation issued and abide by regulatory budget caps set by OMB.” Executive Order 12866 at end.
wikipedia dot org /wiki/Executive_Order_12866
“Modernizing Regulatory Review
“More information about OIRA’s efforts to fulfill these directives is located below.
…
“4. The preamble to the proposed revisions provides further information as to the nature of the proposed changes. OIRA has also released draft guidance on assessing changes in environmental and ecosystem services in benefit-cost analyses performed pursuant to Circulars A-4 and A-94 and will be accepting public comment on this draft guidance..
[ Links to all Proposals re Circular A-4 ]
whitehouse dot gov /omb/information-regulatory-affairs/modernizing-regulatory-review/
When do we introduce weighting into Australian legislation for Cist Benefit Analysis?
Climate scientist and energy systems analyst, Zeke Hausfather, posted an analysis on Aug 8, now that July 2023 recordings are in as the hottest month on record, in What a record July means for 2023 temperature: Just how likely is 2023 to be the warmest year on record? Considering the state of ENSO, he stated (bold text my emphasis):
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/what-a-record-july-means-for-2023
Leon Simons tweeted on Aug 7:
Climate scientist Dr Ella Gilbert published on Aug 9 another one of her YouTube videos titled Antarctic sea ice: lowest in 7.5 million years??, duration 0:08:27. She talks with climate scientist Zack Labe to discuss the crazy low Antarctic sea ice extent being observed currently. Zack Labe says: “…way less than the 30-year average…“.
And governments continue to encourage and approve more fossil fuel projects…
Moral Gaslighting examples.
1. “Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar…
“Big business is gaslighting us all —they’re hiking prices to make monster profits, plundering people under the cover of a polycrisis.”
“Big business’ windfall profits rocket to “obscene” $1 trillion a year amid cost-of-living crisis; Oxfam and ActionAid renew call for windfall taxes”
“722 mega-corporations raked in $1 trillion a year in windfall profits in 2021 and 2022.”
Published: 6th July 2023
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/big-business-windfall-profits-rocket-obscene-1-trillion-year-amid-cost-living-crisis
2. “The MAGA Mental Health Crisis”
John Pavlovitz
April 15, 2023
“What worse, the GOP’s boundless assaults on human rights, their vicious crusades against science, their continual gaslighting of otherwise sensible people, and their reckless fake news conspiracy theories, aren’t just making those who oppose them prone to head sickness—they’re doing the same to his supporters.”
*
“Moral Gaslighting”
Kate Manne
“Philosophers have turned their attention to gaslighting only recently, and have made considerable progress in analysing its characteristic aims and harms. I am less convinced, however, that we have fully understood its nature. I will argue in this paper that philosophers and others interested in the phenomenon have largely overlooked a phenomenon I call moral gaslighting, in which someone is made to feel morally defective—for example, cruelly unforgiving or overly suspicious—for harbouring some mental state to which she is entitled. If I am right about this possibility, and that it deserves to be called gaslighting, then gaslighting is a far more prevalent and everyday phenomenon than has previously been credited. And it can also be a purely structural phenomenon, as well as an interpersonal one, which remains a controversial possibility in the current literature.”
https://academic.oup.com/aristoteliansupp/article-abstract/97/1/122/7190182
KT2: thanks for the credit. At my age, staying awake at all is a win.
The objections you cite to the OMB’ proposed rule change sound like harrumphing and GOP point-scoring by the usual libertarian suspects, with no citations to academically credible sources. Surely if there were a genuine technical critique, somebody like Nordhaus or Mankiw would have made it by now?
In the American rule-making system, it’s up to the issuing executive agency whether to change the propose rule in response to comments, drop it, or adopt unchanged. I would expect them to go ahead. Then Texas sues and it goes to the Supreme Court. Memo to OMB: start searching the Federalist Papers and the works of Jefferson for gotcha utilitarian quotes.
Some days, it is difficult to remind oneself to unglue from the screens and the screeds, and to get out into the day out there. Other days, one is left wondering why the Bejesus certain organisations used a person’s email address as their user name, for goodness sake. Doesn’t take much thinking to realise that email addresses can expire, etc. What software engineer would countenance email-as-user-Identity, rather than uniquely assigned identifiers, maybe 40 digit numbers that have little chance of running out. But email addresses? That’s just pure laziness and corner cutting. Anyway, I am now fighting through the 46+ organisations and companies with which I have email addresses as a vital part of the communication pipe (despite mobile phones and text messages supposedly taking over that role), and especially dealing with the companies who thought my email address was a great idea for identifying me in their customer database. And yeah, I could resort to using a Redirect Service, but why would they be more likely not to cave to the pressures of Capitalism, and to fold or on-sell their business, thus eventually losing the domain name? I foresee a sudden massive surge of people onto google Gmail (not that the google company manages Gmail as such), or other similar providers, like Proton Mail. Right now in Australia, the TPG group of Internet Service Providers have decided to exit the email provision business; since they all use the same company for the provision of the email box and email server provisioning, this is an easy exit for them. For their (perhaps unsuspecting) customers, not so much. I only found out about the September switch-over the other day, when I tried to update my VISA card’s expiry date with my ISP. Well, well, well. They send me a monthly notification by email that I have a new monthly invoice, and if they could do that much, why the freaking heck couldn’t they email me (after all, they clearly know my email address, being the freaking provider of it) months in advance that they were doing an Opt-In program to migrate their customers’ email boxes to be under the full control of this recent ABN company called “The Messaging Company,” or something. I can’t feign interest in even getting their name right. Anyway, even Telstra are no longer taking on new email clients, so I have been told. It seems pretty clear that there is going to be a major pulse of migration work for this babe of a company, and boy, if they don’t have a good scale plan for temporary bulge of applications, changes, etc., there will be a freaking disaster, come September 2023.
Put it this way: how many email client mail boxes (both personal and business related) did Internode host? Three million? Five million? I seriously don’t know the answer, but we can be sure it is beyond a couple of million clients. Now, most of them will either not be aware there is this Sep 15 2023 date beyond which their accounts are temporarily archived, pending deletion at the end of December 2023. Sure, once they go what the freaking hell happened to my business’s email account, they’ll suss all this out. Or maybe not. As for occasional email users, they mightn’t notice until well after their mail box has been permanently deleted at the new company’s end. And since the legal matter has already shifted to that company, the tacit Terms-of-Agreement we all click on, they won’t even apply, for the negotiated agreement of how to handle these semi-quiescent accounts would be between the company getting out of emails, and the extremely new company that has claimed it would take this on. No, I don’t trust this one little bit. Not because I personally know anyone at the new company, but precisely because I have no more information about them than a webpage anyone could have manufactured in their kiddy’s room, and I literally *have no means* of assessing the risk of my email address being migrated to this new, untested, corporation.
I will note that the email boxes were already physically under the provision of the Atmail company, and therefore there is no reason to think there are actually physical moves of mailboxes across. It’s more like a software switch, a new database that keeps track of all the “new” clients the new company receives through the Opt-In registration process. Trouble in my mind is that if you create a company from scratch, and expect that company to manage a massive inflow of clients, even if they only need tick a box on the web portal’s page, there is enough going on behind that for it to require a very good estimate of the temporary surge, to provision application servers for that inevitability of the migration process.
Maybe they’ll do a brilliant job, and maybe my above scratchings are unfounded. I spent a lot of my working life looking at risk, and the ways we duck out of accepting the existence of major risks, in particular. I was no expert, but I did figure out a thing or two. This massive migration of several million of Australian email addresses over to a single new company, and in a fairly aggressive time frame, *and* with at least one corporation failing to properly inform its customers and clients of the forthcoming need to opt in or lose the email box (including all emails still saved with them, or still sitting in their provisioned email inbox), I foresee a major shazbut, to put it in Mork and Mindy terms. Maybe a single minister of this government could get a brief on this, and pronto. Maybe they could consider the privacy and security factors of companies just using email addresses as the Personal Identifier for an individual. Maybe.
Finally, I foresee another issue: this is that the Black Hats have become well aware of this massive switchover, and that a lot of people will take the moment to ditch their old proprietary email domain names their provider gave them, and to pick another provider that seems much more likely to remain in the business. I’ve mentioned a couple, but it’s a guess they stay in the game. So, the problem is that the DB sneaks who flog a database from a corporation and then use it to crack super funds, bank accounts, etc, are almost certainly well appraised of the current fluidity of email domain names in Australia, and will make real attempts to intervene, spoofing people changing account domain names, switching to an old gmail account, and so on. If this involved only a few thousand accounts, there would be little cause for concern. But, if a few million accounts are migrated, you can bet your bottom dollar that there’ll be many hundreds of thousands of people/companies who look ahead, and they want to be well and truly free of their old domain name email addresses. That’s the perfect spot for a man-in-the-middle attack, or for a spoofing of details in order to shift legitimate accounts (say a super fund, or a bank account) across to a black-hat’s account, and then blam, siphoning of money ensues. Perhaps that sounds Conspiracy Theory, well, no, it’s already occurred before, but this migration is on a scale of something I’ve never seen before, not in my professional life.
Well, at least nobody is firing missiles at my building…unlike Ukraine, where this is an almost hourly occurrence. I’ve met many Russians, and been friends with quite a few; same for Ukrainians, including the Russian Ukraine. This war is so freaking stupid, it makes my eyes bleed. It’s pretty challenging to think of how so many people with family connections between the two countries are now left with fractured family lines, either physically, or politically. What was the bloody point, beyond a single guy feeling a bit like a normal male with tackle attached, for invading another country? Is it that simple? A matter of some individual’s personal need to reaffirm their manhood? Goddamn it.
Nordhaus academically credible? Credible in any way? To who? Making news again…
https://michaelwest.com.au/report-claims-super-funds-are-lying-to-their-members-on-climate-risk/
…Many of the funds use the same consultants, so UniSuper isn’t the only one with a questionable estimate of how much climate change will cost. Keen’s report primarily focuses on UK pension funds, but a cursory look at some Australian super funds reveals some interesting numbers.
A 2021 climate change report by the Health Employees Superannuation Trust Australia (HESTA) concludes that warming of 4°C would lead to a loss in value on returns of 15-20 per cent by 2100.
However, that estimate assumes HESTA makes “no change to the investment strategy in response to those [climate change] risks.” This suggests that the fund might be able to protect its members’ savings in a 4°C warmer world by reallocating investment into sectors in which damages will be less severe.
Steve Keen finds super to be dicey. Add that to dodgy.
I followed my own advice for once and looked up Jefferson on utility. I found this weird letter to Madison against intergenerational debt, and even perpetual landed property: https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%20Author%3A%22Jefferson%2C%20Thomas%22%20Recipient%3A%22Madison%2C%20James%22&s=1111311111&r=118
It naturally exhibits his hypocrisy on slavery, an inequitable intergenerational burden if ever there was one.
He does not consider diminishing marginal utility, which is surely a part of the solution to the problem of intergenerational equity, including in cost-benefit analysis and dealing with environmental externalities.
The only topic worth a long technical debate and a big national effort putting all societies resources into it is producing the 23 best football players to form a world cup winning team! Childrens football training needs to be optimiced to have the best professionals at the end, health or fun are only of marginal importance. In the name of emancipation (and bad worldcup results) there is an urgent need to make sure female teams also function like that.
James Wimberley et. al.,
If I may make a joke about the inheritance of a damaged environment. Because of the usus we are now fructus.
Debts are a notional thing. Environmental damage is a real thing. Notional or formal things can be made one way or another. They may, by the stroke of the pen following a whim of the mind, be created from nothing and extinguished back to nothing. Real stuff does not exhibit this characteristic of course. It might made more ordered by useful work or it might be reduced to waste or wreckage. This is something different of course from the ex nihilo, ad nihilum operations of formal systems.
The problem of managing use and production was allotted to a notional system, a figment of the mind. The notional system is of course the complex of rules of property law, finance, money and markets. Managing real stuff with notional rules and notional chits was always bound to end in final failure. Valuing in the numéraire is not the correct way to manage real stuff. It does not and can not make equitable, efficient or sustainable allocations.
If we can’t radically envision the obsoleting of capitalism, we don’t stand a snowball’s hope in hell or a human’s hope on earth. Of course, I won’t convince anyone. People will cling to capitalism until it collapses completely. The only issue then will be: can anything be reconstructed from the ashes?
Hix,
That’s a nice piece of irony. Yes, we are still playing absurd games in giant competitions which are costly to stage. Playing games while the world burns. Each US NFL stadium costs at least 1 billion to 3 billion dollars, about half of which is usually subsidized by the tiers of government so that the billionaire owners can make even more money and avoid even more taxes. That would build a lot of hospitals and probably vaccinate every person in the US.
Victoria, Australia and now Alberta, Canada have pulled out of Commonwealth Games hosting for cost reasons. I wouldn’t blame you for asking, “What are they?” The point is that costly games will become impossible to hold as we run out of spare resources. Everyone will be just trying to survive and their governments will spending mostly on war and domestic repression.
Note, I have nothing against absurd games that are cheap to stage. People may continue to pull out the chess boards and scrabble boards and while the kids play in the park. At a community level there is nothing wrong with foot races, bike races and even amateur soccer games in the park. All such games are good mental and/or physical exercise. But elite sports are a huge waste of resources which soon we will be unable to afford. And people suffer greatly, albeit in a hidden way, from the misallocation of resources entailed.
Common? Wealth games? What’s the word on that?
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2023/08/10/gina-rinehart-commonwealth-games/
The cheaper than a Vogon billionaire brand that lost the Diamonds netball team cheap brand exploitation is now prowling on the cheap to pick up more cheap sport branding.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/9085842/Gina-Rinehart-pens-universes-worst-poem.html
Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe.
The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria.
https://redflag.org.au/article/can-science-explain-gina-rinehart%E2%80%99s-poetry
It was once the case that the very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth. However with the reconstruction of the planet the very worst poetry of all is again to be found on Earth. The very worst of it on a brass plaque pinned to a thirty ton iron-ore boulder located in a Western Australian shopping mall. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison (apologies Douglas Adams).
https://loonpond.blogspot.com/2014/03/in-which-pond-expresses-concern-for.html
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. – Oscar Wilde
She’ll “help” but not with a single dollar. LOL.
Below is the world’s worst poem, although Gina’s should get a (dishonorable) mention.
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/tay-bridge-disaster/
Mind you, some of my juvenilia was even worse. Lucky I burned it… all those years ago.
Glowing consumer report from Ukrainian paratroopers on one of the handful of Bushmaster AFVs that Australia gave them. Send more!
Perhaps we can use a perceived evil to solve a real one. The use of AI has caused much angst in some areas. But does it have a role to play in averting a climate catastrophe that could be terminal for human life. The complexities of global warming seem to be beyond the collective human intelligence. Humans live too much in the past. It may be time to give artificial intelligence a chance to crack this dilemma. Mind you there is one obvious solution to global warming but I am sure most humans would not like that particular solution.
Considering agricultural waste as a feedstock for aviation fuel, what is the amount of CO2e emissions from inputs like on and off farm transport, fertilizer, stock feed, marine stock feed harvesting and processing and storage and transport, farm practices including soil practice, farm machinery, farm electricity consumption, and from all additional upstream and life cycle embedded emissions, and from the conversion processes such as the CO2 emitted during alcohol production?
How much extra pressure shall there be from cashed up aviation sector demands for increased land solely for biofuel production during a period of shrinking productive farmland area? How much adverse pressure on wild lands, and on food and fibre farm production?
https://inqld.com.au/insights/2023/08/10/pie-in-the-sky-or-could-farm-waste-create-fuel-for-600000-flights-a-year/
How much “pie in the sky” as in opportunities to generate FUD and greenwash?
Is there a problem?
29 June 2022, latest IMF and World Bank PPP based global GDP ranking. Russia is now the largest economy in Europe and 5th largest in the world, displacing Germany in both slots. UK falls to 10th, and may soon fall out of the top 10 forever. There are other losers in Europe. A convergence approaches of northern hemisphere winter and Putin’s Ph.D in economics given for a thesis on strategic planning of the mineral (fossil fuel) economy.
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search?q=gdp%20data&start=0&sort=
Click to access GDP_PPP.pdf
A convergence approaches of northern hemisphere winter and Putin’s Ph.D in economics given for a thesis on strategic planning of the mineral (fossil fuel) economy.
Re Svante’s post above.
If my use of the calculator is correct, the PPP figures imply:
Russia – $37,250 per capita GDP.
Japan – $45,364 per capita GDP.
Australia – $63,329 per capita GDP.
These figures look implausible. Is Russia’s real per capita GDP 82% of Japan’s? Is Australia’s real per capita GDP 140% of Japan’s? Is there such a thing as “real GDP” and could it be measured?
Also note that note “h” means:
“Based on data from official statistics of Ukraine and Russian Federation as well as the United Nations; by relying on these data, the World Bank does not intend to make any judgment on the legal or other status of the territories.”
We have to bear in mind how some (all?) governments cook the books and how flawed economic metrics are in general, both in methodological terms and data collection terms, to understand how meaningless GDP numbers really are.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gdp-is-the-wrong-tool-for-measuring-what-matters/
* * *
As for Putin’s economic PhD? TLDNR? It doesn’t meet the standards of being about economic or of being a PHD. In addition, from the PDF Svante cites:
“So in short, part of the dissertation is plagiarized. Someone cut corners here. Was it Putin himself? Or was it someone who “assisted” him in the writing?
…
This is clearly the product of some diploma-mill type operation of which there are so many in Russia. This is a dissertation paid for, made to order. If he didn’t
write it, who cares whether or not it’s plagiarism?” – “The Mystery of Vladimir Putin’s Dissertation” Igor Danchenko and Clifford Gaddy, The Brookings Institution
[Edited versions of presentations by the authors at a Brookings Institution, Foreign Policy
Program panel, March 30, 2006
Topical.
“GDP at 70: why genuinely sustainable development means settling a debate at the heart of economics
EDITORIAL
09 August 2023
“Researchers advocating reform of the world’s main measure of growth have an opportunity to participate in the process that sets the rules.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02509-5
“This is clearly the product of some diploma-mill type operation…”
History appears to debunk Brookings. Again.
In 2006 Qatar was, still is, generously funding Brookings. It’s not a little matter in the long term controversies concerning how funders pay and Brokings delivers that often receive much US msm and legislature coverage. In 2007 Brookings opened one of their three international centres in Quatar. In 2000 Qatar, the major US ally in the Middle East then and now, first proposed a $10B gas pipeline to Europe transiting through Syria. The US/NATO and Brookings elite hubristic dreamers of course, backed Qatar. Syria declined that and backed an alternative pipeline from Iran that bypassed ticket clipping NATO Turkey. Russia backed Syria. In later msm reporting that I recall from some twenty years ago, such as The Guardian quoting confidant gung-ho US military middle east commanders, that pipeline and the subsequent “Syrian” war were part of the US “long war” planned from the top then unfolding against Russia. Those sources went quiet pretty quick. Later instances are the Arab “spring”, Libya, Georgia, etc, etc. The US elite’s “long war” runs on … and on.
There can be no doubt that Brookings 2006 attempt at disparaging Putin’s Ph.D. is lame. Comments for cash, anyone? However, pathetic as it is it likely played a significant part in the untold amount of suffering and human misery that follows still.
History shows in this century prior to 2006, and since, that Russian strategic planning of the mineral (fossil fuel) economy certainly has more than dumb luck working for it.
“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria. It is important to note that this was well before the Arab Spring-engendered uprising against Assad….” – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 23/02/2016 – with much more well informed and articulated background on that… https://www.politico.eu/article/why-the-arabs-dont-want-us-in-syria-mideast-conflict-oil-intervention/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institution#1980%E2%80%932022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institution#Funding_controversies
20/07/2023 https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/russian-war-economy-macroeconomic-performance
04/08/2023 https://www.intellinews.com/moscow-blog-oil-sanctions-have-failed-after-budget-revenues-surge-as-russia-completes-the-switch-from-european-to-asian-markets-286793/?source=blogs
“These figures look implausible. Is Russia’s real per capita GDP 82% of Japan’s? Is Australia’s real per capita GDP 140% of Japan’s? Is there such a thing as “real GDP” and could it be measured?”
Don´t think those are particular unrealistic or worthless numbers. They just also show that ppp gdp does not give the full picture about standard of living and in the Russian case they are not particular sustainable either. Inequality is one obvious aspect regarding Russia. Demography should be a non trivial aspect regarding Australia vs Japan.
Notwithstanding the great faults of the imperfectly democratic allies, there are no good reasons for supporting outright dictators like Putin or even would-be dictators like Trump.
I will leave that debate there.
As to the sustainability of Russia’s trajectory, economically and militarily, I will await empirical outcomes. I do predict that Russia’s economy will worsen a great deal from this point and that it will eventually be kicked out of all Ukraine’s pre-conflict territory including Crimea. Russia will suffer a comprehensive conventional defeat, I predict. Of course, I’ve been wrong before, many times about many things. As I say, I await the empirical outcome. I certainly hope for the defeat of the Putin regime.
The limited nature of Russia’s offensive indicates its relative weakness. When waging wars of conquest in their hemisphere, very great powers typically wage total war against all-comers on all fronts. Napoleon’s France and Hitler’s Germany come to mind. A limited war (or campaign) indicates limited power as much as it indicates limited objectives. Indeed, limited power conditions for limited objectives. Alliances with multiple members and multiple interests tend to arise and cooperate with each other, albeit with coordination and command problems, against the attempted dictatorial hegemony.
In the battles of one versus all, the “all” typically win in the end. Tyrants never seem to understand this… until the end.
Queensland keeps showing zero covid deaths when other large states, by population, are still showing tens and even scores of deaths per week. Is this credible or is Queensland faking its figures? I think the figures are fake. They are not credible week after week, after allowing for delayed reporting and delayed summed counts. Annastacia Palaszczuk’s
Queensland Qld, government is clearly ahead as the country’s most dishonest government on health matters and probably on everything else as well. Though no doubt Albanese’s government would give it a run on rampant dishonesty.
I call total BS on Qld’s current Covid-19 numbers. There is NO WAY that NOBODY is dying of Covid-19 in Qld., as a single or significant contributing cause, week after week.
11 Aug 3,075 0
04 Aug 3,075 0
28 Jul 3,075 0
21 Jul 3,075 7
14 Jul 3,068 0
07 Jul 3,068 14
30 Jun 3,054 21
Total BS!
Only the Greens, Teals, Independents and Socialists are showing any signs of political honesty in this country. I am not saying they are perfect but at least they aren’t totally dishonest and corrupt like all our major parties and politicians.
I happened across a segment broadcast on ABC TV’s The Drum on Wednesday, Aug 9, that included an interview with author Jeff Goodall on his latest book published in July 2023 titled The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. For some reason, the ABC has not posted a video of The Drum for Aug 9 (or Aug 8 too).
Goodell said that you can’t air-condition all of the environment, the oceans, the animals & plants, etc. Most people around the world don’t have access to air-conditioning. The hotter it gets, the bigger the divide between the cool and the damned.
Goodell suggests that heat-related deaths are under-reported because there are usually no tell-tale indicators in most instances. Generally, heat-related deaths may be attributed to just heart failure (or some other organ failure) if the circumstances (i.e. was the victim exposed to extreme heat for a period of time?) leading up to the death is unknown.
The interview prompted me to look elsewhere.
The Guardian published an article by climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani, headlined Racism at heart of US failure to tackle deadly heatwaves, expert warns, reporting on an interview with Jeff Goodell. The article included quotes from Jeff Goodell:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/06/jef-goodell-heatwaves-racism-the-heat-will-kill-you-first-book
You may wish to check out the YouTube video titled Jeff Goodell — The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, published Aug 4, duration 1:03:05. Watch author Jeff Goodell ‘s book talk and reading at Politics and Prose book store in Washington, D.C. There’s also included a Q&A with the audience.
“Notwithstanding the great faults of the imperfectly democratic allies…” perhaps especially those of the crooked Clintonite proven plagiarist Biden safely “leading” from the rear.
“wage total war against all-comers … Napoleon’s France and Hitler’s Germany come to mind.” – a rather different game pre-nukes, and pre ongoing cold war proxy wars.
“await the empirical outcome.” – short of nuclear apocalypse, is further US elites engineering ongoing war elsewhere/everywhere for resources.
“In the battles of one versus all…” – is not at all the situation.
Maybe RFK Jr. can end it as his father tried to do before paying the ultimate price?
Ikon, “I call total BS on Qld’s current Covid-19 numbers. There is NO WAY that NOBODY is dying of Covid-19 in Qld”.
BullS… maybe, but Total BS?
How would they know? And it is society’s fault now, not the government’s “… with far fewer people getting tested, and many who do test positive not notifying Queensland Health”
Seems to me more like a libertarian capitalist Humphrey Appleby than Machiavelli… a snafu situation.
“Queensland Health stopped reporting COVID statistics in their previous form on its own website in May, diverting people to the federal health department’s websitewhere regular updates are published.”
*
From:
“Queensland’s COVID reports don’t look like they used to, weekly reports soon to stop
Posted Thu 13 Jul 2023
…
“But COVID case numbers aren’t as accurate a picture as they used to be — with far fewer people getting tested, and many who do test positive not notifying Queensland Health, it’s a much less reliable indicator of the levels of the virus present in the community.
“We’ve transitioned away from case numbers as a useful metric because we know so few people are getting tested, and those that are using rapid antigen tests are probably not reporting those results,” Dr Griffin said.
…
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-14/queensland-health-no-longer-reporting-covid-case-numbers/102550600
Dolly has it covered.
“World On Fire”
Dolly Parton
…
“Don’t get me started on politics
Now how are we to live in a world like this
Greedy politicians, present and past
“They wouldn’t know the truth if it bit ’em in the ass (Whatcha gonna do?)
Now tell me what is truth? (Whatcha gonna do?)
Have we all lost sight (Whatcha gonna do?)
Of common decency? (Whatcha gonna do?)
Of the wrong and right?
“How do we heal this great divide?
Do we care enough to try? Liar, liar the world’s on fire
What we gonna do when it all burns down?
…
https://www.lyrics.com/lyric-lf/11619610/Dolly+Parton/World+On+Fire
A heads up and warnings for those who write Books on Economics by Sanjit Das. Ouch.
“Longitudinal – Reflections On Recent Economic Writing
August 11, 2023
“Yves here. Please thank Satyajit Das for sending another informative piece after allowing us to publish his in-depth series on the prospects for a (less than painful) energy transition. Das roused himself to read a large sample of recent economic books so you don’t have to.
…
“… A lack of direct experience or domain knowledge is no obstacle…. One Australian Treasury Minister with no known economic or financial expertise prepared for high office by reading Ferguson’s Ascent of Money over a weekend. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have helped as the appointee’s tenure was short and disastrous, anticipating British Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s more recent misfortunes.
“Journalists tasked with covering economic and financial matters, after their obligatory stint covering flower shows, harbour authorial pretensions, with attendant speaking and consulting opportunities. Some have even used their publishing history to find marginally more useful employment in financial institutions.
“The books themselves have changed. Economics, intellectual rigour and facts are subordinate to story-telling. Narratives and sensation are paramount. The text requires larger-than-life ‘characters’ who can be centred around standard tales of quests, heroes and villains. This means the books are essentially a sequence of mini-biographies of central figures, which bear a remarkable resemblance to their Wikipedia page. … The same anecdotes are recycled across multiple books, providing comfort for the senile reader. Titles are chosen for click-bait value. The book’s bare premise must be a compact tweet-able attention grabbing statement. A compact ‘[insert your topic] for Dummies’ list of solutions is mandatory, preferably easy, simple and generally useless.
“Your humble writer has shunned economic works for years for the above reasons as well as laziness. Recently, masochism led him to delve into several newish economic books, selected with a careless randomness.
“In order of publication (to avoid any suggestion of fear or favour), the books were:
Disorder Hard Times in the 21st Century Hardcover by Helen Thompson (Oxford University Press UK 19 May 2022)
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle (Oxford University Press USA 28 June 2022)
The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor Atlantic Monthly Press (16 August 2022)
A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961–2021 by Alan S. Blinder (Princeton University Press 11 October 2022)
Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis by Carl Wennerlind and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (Harvard University Press 2 August 2023)
We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years by Stephen D. King (Yale University Press 21 July 2023)
The Economic Government of the World: 1933-2023 by Martin Daunton (Allen Lane 15 August 2023)
“The striking thing is the longitudinal flavour. King and Chancellor delve across millennia. Others confine themselves to mere decades. The relevance of the past to the present is implicit ignoring J.P.Hartley’s oft quoted maxim that the past is another country. Chancellor and King are narrow in their focus while the others work through ‘big ideas’, sometimes across disciplines.
…
[Separate book discussions and more]
…
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/longitudinal-reflections-on-recent-economic-writing.html
© 2023 Satyajit Das All Rights Reserved
Amongst other suggested titles and links in comments, “Peter Whyte…”Another series worth watching is Adam Curtis’s “The Century of the Self” from the 1990’s; it examines the psychological aspect of economics going back 100 years. Find it on youtube”
The Mandate of Heaven – Chinese Style.
1. A new dynasty is born.
2. Everything works better in the empire for a while.
3. The government becomes corrupted.
4. Famine and natural disaster destroy the commoners’ faith in the government.
5. Commoners become tired of all the problems in the empire so they revolt.
6. The Dynasty is considered to have lost the Mandate of Heaven.
7. The current emperor is defeated and a new one takes his place.
The Mandate of Government – Aussie Style.
1. A new government is elected.
2. Nothing works any better in the country than it did before.
3. The government starts out corrupt and becomes more corrupt.
4. Low incomes, inflation and disasters destroy the commoners’ faith in the government.
5. Commoners become tired of all the problems in the country and adopt cynicism.
6. The government is considered to have lost the mandate of the people.
7. The current government is defeated and another one no better takes its place.
Ikon said: “7. The current government is defeated and another one no better takes its place.”
The Teals are crying out. And David Pocock. And unfortunately you are probably correct Ikon. But this current government is surely better than LibNat lot.
But as an example, Madeleine King has to go – “primary vote of 50.2% and a 66.71% two party preferred vote (10.05% swing)”, but not for a while.
“King hails carbon capture but won’t back projects”
AFR Companies › Energy. 15 May 2023
“Federal Resources Minister Madeleine King has emphatically backed carbon capture and storage as the best way for the resources industry…”
“King faces backlash over Narrabri support – Mining Weekly
15 June 2022 · “… Minister Madeleine King is facing backlash following her support of oil and gas major Santo’s controversial Narrabri gas development”
Madeleine King can talk for 5 mins and say nothing. Then deliver two sentences as an absolute fait accompli. A lawyer. As in “The Mandate of Government – Aussie Style.”
*
There are plenty of books for the China mandate – just one below -, yet “The Mandate of Government – Aussie Style.” … is a book title I’d love to see you write Ikon.
“Challenging the mandate of Heaven : social protest and state power in China”
by Elizabeth J. Perry
https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/28457
Elizabeth J Perry
“Perry was born in Shanghai, shortly before the Chinese Communist Revolution, to American missionary parents who were professors at St. John’s University. She grew up in Tokyo, Japan in the 1950s and participated in the 1960 Anpo protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty.[4]
…
“Perry’s research focuses on the history of the Chinese revolution and its implications for contemporary politics. Although she earned all her degrees in political science, much of her research focuses on history and its links to contemporary issues. She observes that contemporary China consciously sees itself as an outgrowth of its long history, and Chinese political leaders are keenly aware of history, even if they may misunderstand it. As a result, history is highly consequential in the study of contemporary politics.[4]
“She had been sympathetic with the Cultural Revolution as a student, and joined the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group that opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War. After witnessing the inequality in Communist China and hearing people’s personal accounts about their suffering during the period, her views on the Chinese revolution and Maoism changed fundamentally.[4]”
…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_J._Perry
*
Madeleine King is definite starter for “The Mandate of Government – Aussie Style”.
Madeleine King has a mandate to “Australia is contributing $12 million to promote better understanding of the US”.
A better understanding of the US for $12 mil. And they say climate scientists are after funding.
Wikipedia – Madeleine King:
“Immediately prior to entering parliament she was the chief operating officer of the Perth USAsia Centre, a think tank based at UWA.[3]”
…
“Following the 2022 election King was re-elected for a third term with a primary vote of 50.2% and a 66.71% two party preferred vote (10.05% swing).
“In June 2022, King was appointed to cabinet as Minister for Resources and Minister for Northern Australia in the Albanese government.[3]
“She is a member of the Labor Right faction.” [No kidding]
USAsia Centre
“Australia is contributing $12 million to promote better understanding of the US, with a four year funding deal to the United States Studies Centre (USSC) and Perth USAsia Centre (USAC).”
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/aust-gives-12m-for-us-education-body/3wzm8vuge
Sortition or similar please.
Get the accounting giants out of the economy altogether, please.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-14/australia-big-four-audit-decline-quality-fear-corporate-collapse/102718744
and
“How the big four accounting firms infiltrated governments, earning more than $10b over a decade while taxpayers are in the dark.” – ABC.
(Sticking to my one link per post limit. People can google of course.)