The human & economic costs of pollution
A new report identifies the #1 cause of death worldwide: pollution.
Environmental pollution — from filthy air to contaminated water — is killing more people every year than all war and violence in the world. More than smoking, hunger or natural disasters. More than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.
One out of every six premature deaths in the world in 2015 — about 9 million — could be attributed to disease from toxic exposure, according to a major study released Thursday in the Lancet medical journal. The financial cost from pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is equally massive, the report says, costing some $4.6 trillion in annual losses — or about 6.2 percent of the global economy.
Read more here.
DNA for a new economy
Econ4’s David Bollier writes in The Nation:
The energy for serious, durable change will originate, as always, on the periphery, far from the guarded sanctums of official power and respectable opinion. Resources may be scarce at the local level, but the potential for innovation is enormous: Here one finds fewer big institutional reputations at stake, a greater openness to risk-taking, and an abundance of grassroots imagination and enthusiasm.
Beyond the Beltway’s gaze, the seeds of a new social economy are being germinated in neighborhoods and farmers’ fields, in community initiatives and on digital platforms. A variety of experimental projects, innovative organizations, and social movements are developing new types of local provisioning and self-governance systems. Aspiring to much more than another wave of incremental reform, most of these actors deliberately bypass conventional politics and policy. In piecemeal fashion, they unabashedly seek to develop the DNA for new types of postcapitalist social and economic institutions.
Read more here.
Fake infrastructure
Econ4’s Jerry Epstein writes on Trump’s infrastructure “plan”:
Infrastructure investment: it’s that economic policy sweet spot that everyone loves to love.
Fixing bridges, building roads, modernizing airports, improving mass transportation, keeping lead out of our water: nearly everyone can relate to the need for it and can imagine how much better their lives would be with more of it.
Read his post here.
Astrological economics
Mathematics can help to clarify ideas, but it can also put a scientific veneer on a load of bunk. A philosophy professor looks at the emperor’s clothes:
The success of math-heavy disciplines such as physics and chemistry has granted mathematical formulas with decisive authoritative force. Lord Kelvin, the 19th-century mathematical physicist, expressed this quantitative obsession:
When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it… in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
The trouble with Kelvin’s statement is that measurement and mathematics do not guarantee the status of science – they guarantee only the semblance of science. When the presumptions or conclusions of a scientific theory are absurd or simply false, the theory ought to be questioned and, eventually, rejected. The discipline of economics, however, is presently so blinkered by the talismanic authority of mathematics that theories go overvalued and unchecked.
Read the piece here.
Moral equality – and immoral inequality
From Robert Reich’s review of two new books about the perils of concentrated wealth & power:
The greatest threat to Western liberal democracies in the future is more likely to come from extreme inequality than from Islamic extremism. This is because inequality erodes two foundation stones of modern society — openness to new ideas and opportunities, and a conviction that all citizens are morally equal.
Read more here.
Trumped
Bernie Sanders offers an analysis of why Trump came to be president, and where we go from here:
I’m often asked by the media and others: How did it come about that Donald Trump, the most unpopular presidential candidate in the modern history of our country, won the election? And my answer is—and my answer is that Trump didn’t win the election; the Democratic Party lost the election.
Read his speech here.
This changes not much: performance of moral virtue as politics
Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything has attracted many admirers on the left. A thought-provoking exception is economist Peter Dorman, who writes:
[R]edefining politics as the performance of moral virtue rather than the contest for power can provide consolation when political avenues appear to be blocked. Activities of this sort are evaluated according to how expressive they are—how good they make us feel—rather than any objective criterion of effectiveness in achieving concrete goals or altering the balance of political forces.
Read his critique of the book here.
“The tapeworm of American economic competitiveness”
Today’s quiz:
- What rose from 5% of U.S. GDP in 1960 to 17% today?
- What fell from 4% of U.S. GDP in 1960 to 2% today?
Answers:
- Health care costs.
- Corporate taxes.
Extra credit question: Which one’s a drag on the competitiveness of the U.S. economy?
Here’s Warren Buffett’s answer:
“Medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness,” Mr. Buffett said, using a metaphor he has employed in the past to describe the insidious and parasitic costs of our health care system….
Mr. Buffett is a Democrat, but his business partner, Charles T. Munger, is a Republican — and a rare one who has advocated a single-payer health care system. Under his plan, which Mr. Buffett agrees with, the United States would enact a sort of universal type of coverage for all citizens — perhaps along the lines of the Medicaid system — with an opt-out provision that would allow the wealthy to still get concierge medicine.
Read more here.
Thinking about groupthink
Conventional economics has long oversold individual rationality as the basis for how the economy works. Here’s one of the ways:
Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups…. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we cling to these views because of group loyalty.
This poses a conundrum worth thinking about – individually and together:
Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. If you think that you can convince Donald Trump of the truth of global warming by presenting him with the relevant facts — think again.
See this review of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.
Arms race – children’s version 1.0
More than three decades ago, the classic American television show “Mister Rogers” explained the “logic” of arms races – and their social cost – to children. The tapes, lost for years, just resurfaced:
Last week, someone mysteriously uploaded a series of lost episodes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to YouTube. The episodes, called the “conflict series,” originally aired on PBS at the height of Cold War tensions in 1983 and sought to teach children about the dangers of stockpiling weapons.
Sound timely?
Read more here. (The “Neighborhood of Make-Believe” clip begins at the 15:25 mark in the YouTube video embedded in the story.)
Check it out, kids.
