Neoteny wrote:
Pretty much.
Moderator: Community Team
Neoteny wrote:
BigBallinStalin wrote:Neoteny wrote:
Pretty much.
Metsfanmax wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:Neoteny wrote:
Pretty much.
Yep. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm using big complicated words because I like to appear intellectual and not because I give a shit about climate change.
BigBallinStalin wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:Neoteny wrote:
Pretty much.
Yep. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm using big complicated words because I like to appear intellectual and not because I give a shit about climate change.
Uhh..? I'm not implying. The comic pretty much describes much of mainstream economics.
Metsfanmax wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:Metsfanmax wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:Neoteny wrote:
Pretty much.
Yep. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm using big complicated words because I like to appear intellectual and not because I give a shit about climate change.
Uhh..? I'm not implying. The comic pretty much describes much of mainstream economics.
I know. I'm making fun of saxi.
Metsfanmax wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:RE: the first and second paragraphs, it's not that it's difficult; it's rather the case that government has hardly any idea. Individuals know to some degree, after trial-and-error, their specific marginal benefit and marginal cost curves for various activities (e.g. grocery shopping). The problem with PWE is that it postulates a representative individual, whose utility curve + constraint represents the MB and MC curves of all society. (This is impossible to know; it's simply assumed, so the knowledge problem is assumed away by the economist).
It doesn't seem impossible to know in principle. It's true that the government can't know the utility curves of every individual, but it seems more straightforward to ask the question of what the representative individual's utility curve is. This seems doable because when you have a large enough number of people, you can average over all of the quirks that any individual represents. If you can estimate the monetary damage suffered to the society, then you can attribute the cost of that damage equally to everyone who contributes, in proportion to the amount that they contribute, since a molecule of CO2 doesn't care where it came from. So I don't believe that this is a problem with the framework but rather a problem of subjective assessment of total costs. If you think of examples like noise pollution, it's true that it's hard to objectively state what even the average cost to society is. But that's not an indictment of the framework of attempting to internalize externalities, so much as saying that we should only apply the framework when we're confident that we can provide some meaningful estimate of the representative individual's utility curve.
Metsfanmax wrote:The Pigouvian economist can simply imagine huge negative and huge positive externalities which do not exist in reality (e.g. education). Furthermore, individuals don't know the long-term costs of pollution, so there's no way to graph that social MB and MC curves in order to determine the magnitude of the negative externality.
Individuals may not know, but policymakers do have a better idea in this case. Again, the most compelling criticism here is that the policymaker may be way off due to unintended consequences, but that doesn't mean that policymakers can't be more knowledgeable than individuals. They absolutely can be in cases like this. The same is true for education. Individuals won't know for decades after they receive the education whether it was useful to them, so expecting them to be able to assess the value of education to themselves seems to be an absurd approach.
universalchiro wrote:@degaston: whatever dude you win, you have it all figured out. You have out smarted even God.
Metsfanmax wrote:
So every single thing we do know points toward a large warming coming in the following decades. The only bastion for "skeptics" to hold on to is that maybe the entire scientific community missed something big and the whole thing will just end up being no big deal. This is not particularly appealing to me.
Return to Practical Explanation about Next Life,
Users browsing this forum: No registered users