Paradise paved
Reviewing a new book by Henry Grabar, Bill McKibben writes:
By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the US than there is housing for each person. This devotion to the storage of automobiles comes with many costs… in Grabar’s words,
in the rent, in the check at the restaurant…. It was hidden on your receipt from Foot Locker and buried in your local tax bill. You paid for parking with every breath of dirty air, in the flood damage from the rain that ran off the fields of asphalt, in the higher electricity bills from running an air conditioner through the urban heat-island effect.
All this amounts to a subsidy to drivers in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Read more here.
Real people are complex
From an interesting Boston Review forum:
A large body of empirical and experimental work shows that moral and social considerations strongly shape economic and political preferences. These preferences often do not align with standard economic views about self-interest, incentives, and “rationality.” For example, many progressives have been stumped as to why so many of Donald Trump’s voters would take positions that appear to be against their so-called self-interest. Yet, to researchers studying moral psychology, Trumpian narratives on social spending, immigration, trade, and climate change all use a common frame of reciprocity violations that stimulates moral outrage and motivates collective behavior. The typical progressive strategy of appealing to self-interest (cuts in social spending will hurt you, immigration and trade are good for the economy, climate change is bad) is thus doomed to fail because people are not processing these issues in narrow self-interested cost-benefit terms, but rather as issues of moral fairness. Only when progressives begin addressing issues in those terms will they stand a chance of reconnecting with these voters.
Read more here.
A big win in Montana
A ruling in a lawsuit brought by young people in the state of Montana makes history:
A group of young people in Montana won a landmark lawsuit on Monday when a judge ruled that the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was unconstitutional….
“As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos,” said Julia Olson, the founder of Our Children’s Trust, a legal nonprofit group that brought the case on behalf of the young people. “This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate. More rulings like this will certainly come.”
Read more here.
What’s wrong with this picture?
If you can’t see it, you’re either rich or a neoclassical economist:
Read more here.
How to steal $47 trillion
A new study from the RAND corporation reveals some startling numbers:
In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies.
Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality?
If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 TRILLION DOLLARS.
Read more about how it happened here.
Positive developments for a change
Scientists are discovering how to harvest electricity from the air:
A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter. The research appeared in the journal Advanced Materials.
And inventing ultra-white paint that cools buildings and reflects solar heat into space:
Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, didn’t set out to make it into the Guinness World Records when he began trying to make a new type of paint. He had a loftier goal: to cool down buildings without torching the Earth.
In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.
Beyond ‘deliverism’
The widespread assumption among progressives that the way to win robust support is simply to deliver economic improvements in people’s lives – an assumption reminiscent of commodity fetishism – is fatally flawed. It’s not that economic improvements aren’t important, it’s just that people need something more:
Solving the authoritarianism challenge requires a progressive program and organizing strategy that speak directly and persuasively to the wave of unhappiness and despair and are rooted in the texture of everyday life—what people actually talk about, care about, and worry about. Such an approach will continue to foreground economic security and rights, but it must also affirm other aspects of human flourishing that have long been emphasized by diverse social movements, including the importance of collective care, community, belonging, and solidarity. The task for progressives at this historical juncture is not to find the magic message or to deliver more popular policies. Rather, it is to offer a compelling, energizing, persuasive vision of the good life and to organize mass-based organizations through which people shape and live out those values in the here and now. Read more here.
Another good reason to end fossil fuel addiction
Those with the oil make (and break) the rules:
President Biden vowed during his quest for the White House to make the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a “pariah” over the killing and dismemberment of a dissident. He threatened the prince again last fall with “consequences” for defying American wishes on oil policy.
Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator, called Prince Mohammed, the oil-rich kingdom’s de facto ruler, a “wrecking ball” who could “never be a leader on the world stage.” And Jay Monahan, the head of golf’s prestigious PGA Tour, suggested that players who joined a rival Saudi-backed league betrayed the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — carried out by hijackers who were mostly Saudi citizens.
Now, their words ring hollow.
Mr. Biden, visiting Saudi Arabia last year, fist bumped Prince Mohammed when they met and regularly dispatches officials to see him — including his secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, this past week. Senator Graham grinned next to the prince — known by his initials M.B.S. — during a visit to Saudi Arabia in April. Also this week, Mr. Monahan jolted the world of professional golf by announcing a planned partnership between the PGA and the upstart Saudi-backed LIV Golf league, suddenly giving the kingdom tremendous global influence over the sport.
“It just tells you how money talks because this guy sits on top of this oil well and all this money, so he can basically buy his way out of everything,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, the Saudi director for the Freedom Initiative, a rights group in Washington and a vocal opponent of the monarchy.
Read more here.
The benefits of immigration
Idrees Kahloon reviews the literature in The New Yorker:
Although the dismal science is rife with disagreement on many topics—from microeconomists butting heads about the irrationality of human preferences to macroeconomists arguing about how to quell inflation—there is a broad consensus that immigration is largely beneficial to migrants and their hosts alike. In 2017, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released a mammoth report titled “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.” It found that, although immigrants tend to earn less than native-born workers and are therefore a bit more costly to governments, their children exhibit unusually high levels of upward mobility and “are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population.”
Read more here.
Firefighters conference afraid to mention water
Rutger Bregman calls out the hypocrisy of ultra-rich “philanthropists” in Davos:
Read about it here.
