Scotland Economic Pluralism Climate Change Talk 

Excellent analogy!

We can see this in the US West right now as after 20 years of desperate drought has been given a reprieve with an immense snow pack. Thousands of farms across the West have seen their productivity slashed because they had inadequate water to plant to capacity. Farmers and ranchers have also lost their livelihood entirely. Now comes the floods. Ex: Tulare lake has re-emerged drowning farms and ranches in the central valley in a mini Pakistan flood. Farmers and ranchers have lost their livelihoods now from the opposite of drought. That 3-4x plus snowpack looming in the Sierras will enjoy summer heat waves, the menace of soot from fire (whose risk is moderated from a super wet season) and monsoon like storms that create conditions that rhyme with the sequence that flooded 1/3 of Pakistan. Forest growth from a wet season will become the fuel next year. Whiplash brutalized wheat and rice yields in India by 15% and 5% respectively last year. India is the worlds largest exporter of rice. Brutal heatwaves again retuned this year. With ave temps rising, wheat is not a viable crop above 45C (iirc). For the North American continent, bread basket growing regions will shift to Canada. Canada’s regional soils are poor. Glaciers scraped them away. Russia is the one country that comes out with an advantage in all this, if it even survives. Now let’s talk about wet bulb and its impact on human labor and even survival. Business make get a wake up call as the insurance industry follows data. Auto and mortgage coverage is being suspended due to factors including climate change. In the US a mortgage is contingent on insurance.

reducing abrupt climate change and the subsequent stress to civilization to a minor price increase is insane. we risk war over minor price changes in oil but habitat loss is somehow manageable.

Yes. There's an excellent paper by the philosopher Alan Musgrave in. (1981). "‘Unreal Assumptions’ in Economic Theory: The F‐Twist Untwisted." Kyklos (Basel) 34(3): 377-387. It's reproduced in Milton Friedman: Critical assessments. Volume 3, edited by J. C. Wood and R. N. Woods Routledge 1990

"Economic theory is often criticized for the lack of ‘realism’ of its assumptions. Milton Friedman rebutted such criticism with the famous dictum ‘the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions’. Friedman's position, often called the ‘F‐twist’, stems from his failure to distinguish three different types of assumption. Negligibility assumptions state that some factor has a negligible effect upon the phenomenon under investigation. Domain assumptions specify the domain of applicability of the theory. Heuristic assumptions are a means of simplifying the logical development of the theory. It is argued that Friedman's dictum is false of all three types of assumption. Finally, it is conjectured that what began as a negligibility assumption may be changed under the impact of criticism first into a domain assumption, then into a mere heuristic assumption and that these important changes will go unnoticed if the different types of assumption are not clearly distinguished from one another."

@@ProfSteveKeen I would enjoy a mathematician giving it a treatment, if they could hold their nose. Imagine a Gödel like theorem proving not only is the strategy circumstantially, but completely and utterly wrong. That or not even false. I think this latter condition holds.

@@ProfSteveKeen oh dear, that makes him out to be a con.. yet he had Charles Koch buttering his and McGill Buchanan’s toast. They delivered the kind of theory that served his political agenda and personal delusion. The history of it is depressing enough.

@@ProfSteveKeen If still had the math chip installed I wonder if one other way would be to show his own (ones he directly conjured to support his ideas) statements contradict standard economic identities.. well sheet how about making a really really unrealistic assumption that all the identities are false. But I think then the theory needed to justify it would have to be a super super powerful. So strong in fact non could abide its smell. MF was a pure troll. I dunno if mmt can even be used. In a negative growth environment, which is already evident in India’s (Asia’s) agricultural sector, also in central and S America and will become more so in N America. Onshoring is a survival strategy as the conditions for global trade pass, but even then the conditions of the 70s have passed away as well. There is no Kansas to return to. Rural folks in Bangladesh are adopting a semi aquatic life style and have added raised gardens in response to their conditions. I doubt modernity has that flexibility but that’s what’s needed. We wait for our Divine Kings to bring us EV and other tech magic to keep everything the same.

According to Real GDP figures once seasonally adjusted, the Germany economy is in recession. Government spending has been reduced by about 5% while the ECB have increased interest rates and credit supply from the banking sector is shrinking. The economy has to be in recession. Exports cant save it this time since much of the world is also facing inflation and reductions in real income.

It costs way too much in terms of energy, and it doesn't enable centralised action, which will be the only way we'll have a hope of preventing civilisation collapse from global warming.

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