The Bull in Full

Manzi, Hayek, and climate change

Since Andrew Sullivan came around to opposing the Iraq war and supported Obama, and I can't in any good faith refer to him as a rhetorical opponent in current ideological divisions, Jim Manzi has become my favorite conservative to read and wrestle my disagreements with.  I even had an oblique chance at dialog last year when Sully published a few of my e-mails on climate change, and Manzi responded.  He has consistently been one of those at a considerable ideological distance from me who I enjoy reading thoroughly.

I've appreciated Manzi's rigorous analysis on climate change, and was looking forward to a long form, updated perspective on climate change and carbon regulation as he was guest blogging this week.  Which is why I'm extremely disappointed in today's note on the social cost of carbon as he guest blogs at Sully's place.  This essay, to put it frankly, is an unholy mess.

Manzi is assuredly more versed in Hayek than I am, but my understanding of the basic warning is that more government planning of the economy leads to a decrease in individual liberty, which has a concomitant deleterious impact on productive economies due to the inflexibilities of a rigid state program.  If this is a fair summary, then I find Manzi's argument that carbon regulation is somehow akin to this in any but the most broadly ideological forms extremely underdetermined.

The meat of the post, I would say, offers what I would call a roundly convincing argument that meaningful quantitative analysis of the economic impacts of carbon regulation approaches impossibility, or as Manzi puts it, 'There is no analytical basis on which we can really “put a price on carbon”.'  I might add that he has equally demonstrated that there is no analytical basis on which we can really put a price on the costs of carbon emissions. 

I don't think this is a malicious or intentionally misleading error.  My understanding of Manzi's analytical personality is that his primary impulse is to try to tackle complex issues with highly sophisticated quantitative analytical methods, and shake out strong and useful conclusions.  From what I have read of him, he is remarkably good at it.  However, as the saying goes, when one spends all day using a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail, and in this case, I think Manzi is using his quantitative skills to pound a screw.

For one thing, Manzi brushes the entirity of "social cost of carbon" into the potential decline in world economic product (a loss of approximately 3%).  This not only excludes costs which I would deem "social" such as habitat and species loss, land degradation, and changes in local climate, but also aggregates the risk into a global pool, which is assuredly too crude a measure to make a meaningful judgment.  To take the extreme case, what if the 3% loss were entirely distributed in 6% of the world's population losing half their economic productivity?   The 3% measure looks small on paper, but in this instance 180 million people (over half the population of the US) just had their livelihoods utterly destroyed, to the point that they are now refugees.  While this extreme concentration of risk is certainly fiction, it is patently clear to both the casual reader and the sophisticated analyst that the costs of climate change will not be equally distributed.  The risks to the majority of the 160 million in Bangladesh should be enough to invalidate such crude aggregation of costs.

For another, in his association of all British driving taxes with "anthropogenic global warming (AGW)," he elides the myriad other costs of driving, including public health, land use, public land preservation, safety and enforcement, etc.  Yes, once again these costs are difficult to quantify.  This, however, does not mean they do not exist.

After dozens of paragraphs of analytical spinning, Manzi reaches the third to last, and engages in a breathtaking series of theoretical leaps.  Costs are impossible to quantify, therefore "It becomes pure power politics," and therefore is a state imposition of economic costs without quantitative justification, and is therefore akin to total state planning of the economy.  Excuse me, but WHAT?!? 

To put this as simply as I can, there is a vast universe between "inability to sufficiently quantify" and "a different theoretical justification [for socialism]."  What Manzi is experiencing is not the unearthing of socialist motives, but the limits of the quantitative revolution of the 20th century.  There was a time, as strict Enlightenment rationalism and to a lesser extent, positivism reached their zenith, that we supposed that all complex issues could be solved with sufficient quantitative analysis.  Difficult questions such as the costs of action or inaction on climate change demonstrate this as well as anything, but the lesson to take here is not that we have no analytical tools at all and retreat to pristine ideological tropes.  (In this, I think Manzi is unintentionally making what I might call the Bachmann move -- it's impossible to quantify, and it involves government action, therefore it is the first step towards tyranny.)  Rather, it should be a clarion call to dust off analytical methods tossed aside during much of the quantitative revolution, such as informal logic, deep description, dialectics, rigorous observation, ethics, and comparative studies.  (One can even retain critical rationalism, just without getting lost in numbers.) 

There are others attempting to do their best to apply broader principles to understanding the impacts of climate change.  Manzi's argument over the past 18 months has been to repeatedly emphasize that the correct response to this question is to quantify the costs and the benefits.  He now illustrates that those costs and benefits are impossible to quantify, and therefore takes it as Q.E.D. that we must retreat to extremely abstract arguments (as in, this kind of smells vaguely like Hayek).  This might be forgivable if Manzi put any effort whatsoever into a rigorous consideration of the situation, along the lines of what Hayek actually did in his critique of government planners.  Instead, he makes this jump in a few brief sentences which rely entirely on vague notions.  Unfortunately, I have to say I found this neither convincing nor even challenging.  Instead, it seems to mark for me the end of Manzi's meaningful contribution to the debate, which is really too bad.

If you want mass transit in the Triangle, call Hagan and Burr now

I'd love to write more about this, but time is short, and the time to act is now.

The stimulus package moving its way through Washington is, to be fair, a bit of an ugly monster.  However, there's a lot of good programs in it, many of which are unfortunately the ones that are on the chopping block right now.  Energy efficiency upgrades for government buildings, which one would think would fall into the duh-obvious category for good stimulus, are among those at risk of cuts.  However, what's worse is mass transit funding is at risk too, while both Houses of Congress seem intent on stuffing more and more highway funding into it.

I hate to say I told you so, but a year ago when Bush's stimulus bill was making it's way through Congress, I spilled a bunch of electronic ink on this subject.  Sadly, in one of those, "damn, I wish I'd been wrong" moments, sure enough, huge amounts of new tax breaks did absolutely nothing to stimulate the economy, and just set the stage for the economic collapse of 2008.  With massive government funds getting shipped overseas, the public treasury turned upside down by Bush's tax cuts, and major backlogs in infrastructure left wanting by the crony capitalism of the previous administration, it was no surprise that simply dumping more tax cuts into the economy was about as effective as pushing on a string.

What we needed then, just as now, was infrastructure investment as stimulus.  Early on in the process, it sounded like what this was what the stimulus bill was going to be about.  However, the rotting corpse of the Reagan/Goldwater orthodoxy (which Reagan himself might have even blanched at today) brought out the bellicose GOP and the nervous Nellies from the Democrats, and of course we had to have some largely useless tax cuts in the bill. 

Regardless, while there is a fair amount of infrastructure spending in the bill, what those in Washington seem to be failing at realizing is that, as per Shellenberger and Nordhaus, this is exactly the time we need to be thinking about how to restructure our economy to be less dependent on fossil fuels and more ready to make cuts in our carbon emissions.  Government spending has an enormous effect on shaping the economy, and despite the stammerings from policy mouthpieces of the Right's political machine, nobody in the GOP is doing anything to lessen that impact.  Massive federal spending on highways simply continues to push our economy towards a single passenger vehicle-focused transportation system, when either the absence of federal spending, or less disastrously, greater balance in transportation dollars, would allow for a correction towards less polluting forms of transportation.

The bill from the House originally had $30 billion in road projects and just $10 billion for all mass transit and rail projects.  Thankfully Rep. Oberstar from Minnesota lead a revolt that got a little over $3 billion added in funding.  It's hard to keep everything straight in the swirl of information coming out of Capitol Hill today, but it sounds like the GOP is trying to strip out some of that mass transit funding as part of the "centrist" compromise.  From the reports of the STAC committe, to complete the biggest transit dreams of the Triangle, including passenger rail improvements, local bus expansion, para-transit, and some form of regional rail, whether heavy or light, we'd need about $1 billion in federal dollars to match a combined $1 billion from state and local sources.  (I'll also note that for most highway projects, the Feds pay about %80 of the tab -- yet another way in which highway funding is ridiculously skewed and unproductive.)  Given that we have at least 3/4 complete plans sitting around right now, we'd very likely be excellent candidates to receive this money, which would not only provide jobs in planning and construction of the system, but would likely trigger a building boom near the planned stations, we've got a vested interest in keeping that money in the bill.  But if the hand-wringers among the Democrats and the pro-highway wing of the GOP (including our friends at the John Locke Foundation) get their way, what chance do you think that money has in coming out in the next few years.

An excellent diary at Daily Kos made a fantastic point.  Obama's best campaign slogan, by my lights, was, "We are the ones we've been waiting for," with a close second being, "I'm not asking you to believe in my power to change government, I'm asking you to believe in yours."  If you want transit in the Triangle, now is the time to call.  Here are the office numbers.  The lines are understandably a bit busy, so keep trying:

Kay Hagan
202-224-6342

Richard Burr
202-224-3154

Because rail and transit are STILL stimulus where we need it.

More transit funding in the stimulus package

Elana Schor at TPM has a good note on environmentalists pointing out that way too much money in the stimulus package is going towards highways, potentially large new highway projects, rather than towards rail projects.  While I'd be thrilled if a little of that ended up in the East End Connector, my guess is that most of those highway projects are not quite so oriented towards dense development and are likely loop roads and other sprawl inducing projects.

Given the choice, I'd be much happier of some of that transit money came in and hit the bus system or jumpstarted the TTA's rail plans.  James Oberstar of Minnesota is making quite the fuss over this, and just needs some backup.  I don't know our representatives' positions on this, but a phone call to tell them that you support more transit and less highway funding in the stimulus bill certainly can't hurt.

Websites (with phone numbers on them) of our representatives:

David Price

Richard Burr

Kay Hagan

Dude, what happened to your blog?

So this happens to be a question (paraphrased) I've been asked a few times recently.  I know there's been radio silence here, so I thought I might try to briefly explain.

First of all, in addition to working in an office which is currently rather severely understaffed, there's an item which will probably make a more regular appearance here if I do start blogging more often.  I've alluded obliquely in the past to my involvement in the effort to start a new cooperative grocery in Durham.  Now is probably as good a time as any to elaborate a little on that, and hopefully with a few more updates in the future.

Here's the basics: this venture is now officially incorporated as an agricultural products cooperative with the state, with the working name of Durham Central Market.  The steering committee, which I've been a part of since the beginning, has now transformed into an official board of directors.  And here's where my absence from the blog comes in -- I've somehow ended up as President of the board, which doesn't mean a whole lot other than just being a board member, except that I have a few more responsibilities to call board meetings and to a limited degree be the person that talks to the media and other folks with questions about it.  I've promised Monica Chen at the Herald-Sun that I'll give her the scoop (in exchange for her holding off snooping around earlier this year when we were still going through the motions of forming, and really weren't ready for a full load of publicity), but the general gist of the status right now is that we're busy putting together the business plan, working on the website (which is what I'll be doing immediately following finishing up this post), continuing to do preliminary location investigation, but most of all, gearing up for an ownership drive.  (If you know me personally, expect to be hit up for a share purchase sometime in the next few months.  On the other hand, if you want to just hang out, I'll be just about living at our booth at the Festival for the Eno in a few weeks.)

The coming debate on global warming

On an unrelated note, I can't resist sharing a bit of internet debate that I managed to get into the middle of recently.  I've mentioned before my daily guilty pleasure of reading Andrew Sullivan's blog (now hosted at The Atlantic Monthly's site) -- it's frequently the first thing I read in the morning.  Anyway, he linked  to and quoted something from the National Review's Jim Manzi talking about the drawbacks and failures of cap-and-trade regulatory programs.  Manzi is a conservative who actually acknowledges anthropogenic climate change, yet still opposes the current regulatory framework.  I e-mailed Sullivan a response, which he actually published in full on his site, along with another reader's response, and linked to some guy named Sonny Bunch's blog post on it.  (Due to the ease of forging e-mail, Sullivan publishes all e-mail anonymously, so you just have to trust me that I wrote it -- hey, I did write something similar here last year.)

I have to admit, I was rather gratified that Manzi both responded to my piece via Sullivan, and posted a response of his own at the National Review's The Corner*.  Manzi essentially agrees with my framing of the coming debate, and expresses his confidence that conservatives will ultimately win on this issue.  (As a final link in the debate, Sullivan links to a gent named Ryan Avent, who thinks Manzi's confidence is bunk.)

Since I had the chance to jump into this discussion, I'll put up one bit of response here.  Manzi notes -- correctly, I think -- that if the debate really does go there, it boils down to a conversation about industrial policy, and in that regard falls along some familiar lines, e.g., what kind of government involvement in economic development is appropriate.  Where Manzi is sanguine that along these lines, conservatives have won the day and will win it in the future, I think he misreads the political landscape.  The ascendancy of Goldwater/Reagan domestic economic policy wasn't due to the inherent logical superiority of their framework, it was tied up in a confluence of political factors (as most things in politics are), naturally including the backlash to the civil rights movement and the advent of the southern strategy.  If I had  to grossly generalize the last century of American public sentiment over federal economic policy, I would say that while the left likely overreached with the Great Society, and that it's unlikely that strong federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Welfare will unlikely ever be seen again in the same strong form, the FDR/Eisenhower-era policies of widespread federal investment in basic infrastructure were on the whole extremely popular on their own, and the rollback of this sort of involvement during the Reagan-Bush peak of conservatism represents as big an overreach on the other side. 

It is my hope, as well as that, I think, of Shellenberger and Nordhaus, that with the specter of another era of Democratic dominance, that we may see a resurgence in federal investment in the economy, but more in the restrained end of providing fundamental infrastructure and its reviving its traditional role in helping to fund research.  This isn't somehow "revolutionary," of the sort that Manzi uses de Toqueville to scold, although it does go pretty staunchly against the predominant neoliberal paradigm of the past 20 years (and which S&N have a bad habit of falling into).  Rather, it represents a basic economic pragmatism apart either from grand reformist visions or ideologies of free market purity.  But it does, at the root, represent an opportunity to think about and encourage a more economically sustainable, and yes, less carbon-intensive society.

Despite the protests of the free marketeers, the last century of American dominance did not emerge with the federal government sitting on its hands.  The very economic and geographic shape of the country only emerged with utterly massive influence from a number of key government programs, in transportation, in the form of the US and Interstate highways systems, airports, and port and shipping channel investments; in public health, in the form of extensive and long-running federal grants to local water and sewer authorities, disease management, vaccine programs, food safety, and nutrition programs; and in research, with projects such as the internet, thousands of pharmaceuticals, advances in building materials, and much of America's commercial airline industry owing its existence to federal programs.  The impact of federal programs is not etched, but gouged deeply into our economic landscape.  Obama alluded to this in his 2004 convention speech, and has recently made infrastructure and develpment key pieces of his economic proposals.

So if, as I suspect, we're likely to see a resurgence of federal investment in economic fundamentals, why not try to shape that economic investment in a more carbon-friendly way?  When investing in energy research, which we already do, focus that research on renewable energy.  When we invest in transportation, which we already do, focus it on rail and shipping instead of on the highway system (which as much as anything is at the root of our auto-centric culture).  When we invest in engineering, which we already do, focus it on programs that could help lower emissions and create jobs at the same time.  Don't go out to the end products of the economy and try to regulate back from there, build your carbon-neutral goals into the government programs you already have.

And if Manzi thinks the conservatives can win that debate with the same lower taxes and less regulation arguments, I suspect this is the way many Americans will see it.

Here we go...

Al Gore's movie, combined with a very well timed warm winter nationwide, finally pushed global warming into the consciousness of Americans at the level it deserved.  This has been a long time coming, of course -- the IPCC reports of 1990 and 1992 along with the follow-up assessments of 1994 and after have been steadily building up the drum beat.  In 1995 I took a course in International Environmental Law and Politics taught by a visiting professor.  We focused on the three great international environmental threats of the day: ozone depletion, climate change, and biodiversity.  While the ozone layer hasn't fully recovered, chlorofluourocarbons, the otherwise completely benign chemicals that were causing its depletion, have largely disappeared from widespread usage, with barely anyone noticing except when they need an old car air conditioner serviced.  Call it the international environmental crisis of the past.  The loss of biodiversity is a real concern, but since the biodiversity conference in Rio in the 90s, there's been a lot of work done to realize that we don't even have the theoretical means to approach the problem yet.   It's a real problem that won't go away any time soon, but barring more severe spasms of idiocy from the current administration, we can afford to not solve it immediately.  Call it the international environmental crisis of the future.

In 1995, in that classroom in Northfield, MN, global climate change was still a problem for the future.  While we'd been measuring it for years at weather stations, and we'd started to see minor evidence of its effects in very localized, very sensitive ecosystems, the world-changing problems were still a long ways off.  In 1995, climate change was also a crisis for the future.

Today, a little reminder of how close that future is showed up in the newspaper.