21 Comments

What did you think it meant?

Expand full comment

Really, the only truly sustainable path for humanity is the constant advancement of science and technology, which requires constant economic growth over the long term. Straying from this path is suicide.

Frequently, environmental damage is caused by inefficiencies - resources winding up where you didn't intend them. Since inefficiency negatively impacts economic growth, eliminating it to the maximum extent possible serves both the interests of the economy and the environment.

Expand full comment

Surely that wasn't what "pink" was intended to mean!

Expand full comment

However I also point out the decision to eat meat has the same effect as ethanol - grains used to feed people either to cars or to animals instead of people. In terms of "what of the poor" people should become vegetarians to bring the price of food down if they truly care about them.

Expand full comment

First, you should have included a link to this to explain "pink".

Green is almost entirely about diffuse externalities. As it turns out, yes, diffuse externalities (tiny harms to many people) are frequently health issues, hence you may call them "pink" if you wish.

I have no idea why you would list food locality and animal experiments as "green" except perhaps that you imagine that irrational people tend to be environmentalists. And I don't see how concern over air purity and urban sprawl could possibly be considered "far" - these are core immediate quality-of-life issues in many parts of this country.

The remainder of the "green" items on your list can indeed be labeled as "far". I hope you point out to your class that failure to apply appropriate time discounting to "far" objectives is one important way in which many environmentalists fail Econ 101. On the other hand, I hope that you also try to justify a suggestion (should you be tempted to make one) regarding how the appropriate discount rate should be determined for irremediable environmental harms.

And, please, before you teach the class, read some history and find out just how bad our air and water were just a few decades ago before people decided to do something about it.

(About my nym: I'm not really from Peoria, I'm from the Cleveland/Akron OH area.)

Expand full comment

In response to Gil, I don't object to economic forces changing peoples circumstances,but for agriculture ,free markets are always altered for the farm lobbies benefit. I did not volunteer to put gasohol into my SUV. For one thing it gets less miles per gallon. There is little or no reduction in greenhouse gasses. This was all mandated by the government. Ayn Rand would not approve. In addition government policies prevent the farmers in poor countries from taking advantage of the higher prices.( For example,tariffs and price controls.)

Expand full comment

It's important to remember that you are talking about 'green' concerns from the perspective of what you find in economic text books and viewed through the oddities of standard economic reasoning. I would be surprising, shocked even, if economics textbooks did not view environmental concerns as anything but pink.

I agree that environmental concerns are "far." But that's far as in farming and not necessarily far as in cosmology. "far" does not mean not real. "far" does not mean ignorable. Fisheries management and other destruction of the commons issues come to mind. So "far" does not mean it's not manageable today. But that's not the implication in your comment.

Remember: "far" today, gone tomorrow.

Expand full comment

1. Note that the green problems which were "near" have mostly been solved. People used to suffer directly from coal dust, chemicals that produced birth defects, acid rain, and rivers on fire. Those problems were physically local, and relatively tractable -- you just had to regulate industrial production. It was possible to pass that legislation because people cared about the cleanliness and safety of their own surroundings. The environmental problems that remain now are global, uncertain, and long-term, so "green is far" in the 21st century -- but it was not far in much of the 20th.

2. Greens would be the first to tell you that their ideals are far. Have you ever seen Ferngully? The last line is "For our children, and for our children's children." The whole green point of view is that we are a species on a planet, and we want the species and the planet to survive without much damage for at least hundreds of years.

I always used to see things from the far point of view -- how could anybody root for humanity's eventual impoverishment and destruction? More recently I became aware of libertarianism, which is a very close-up view: instead of "do what's necessary to save the planet," it's "don't do anything which violates the rights of even one individual." Each perspective seems absolutely right in its own domain, but it depends what focus you put on the telescope.

Expand full comment

This makes think of Ayn Rand's reply to "what of the poor?" and her reply was something like "don't be poor". A developing society will always be hard to the poor, that is to say to those who are non-productive as opposed to productive people who don't have much money for the time being. When people gets wealthy their tastes become more expensive and this the cost of living becomes more expensive making life all the more harder for the poor. Gee, how many of us could live in the most expensive cities of the world? Hence people like to say a Westerner can live like a King or Queen in the poorest parts of the world because the cost of living is so low.

So what if well-to-do Westerners people want to drive ethanol cars in a way that the rich are basically outbidding the poor for what the use of farm land will be (providing there's no subsidies)? Food becomes more expensive? Aw, too bad. Hence Ayn Rand's line of "don't be poor". After all, the new rich in India and China are similarly screwing their poor because the new rich want the pleasures of eating meat which now means grain that would feed the poor now go to farm animals. Oops! The price of grain goes up when people desire meat to eat! Same thing.

Expand full comment

Green is far, everything is clear now,.

Expand full comment

Pooping over yourself as infants do is "near". Learning to use a toilet is "far". Consider the environmental movement as an effort to potty-train humanity.

Expand full comment

The argument that the environmental concerns are far from ordinary experience doesn't resonate with me yet. I'll think about it more. But I think urban sprawl is very close to me--it's what's led to the oversupply of housing in my area and therefore holds my property value down. Energy efficiency isn't far at all--it's reflected in my air conditioning and heating bills.

If you're saying that most people aren't willing to think hard enough about systems to realize this relationships, then I might agree. But some of us do think graphically and often about the environment, even if admittedly with a human-centered pink streak, as shown in my examples.

Expand full comment

"I remember my professor saying – and reading it in the text – that economics only deals with the concerns of humans. Which to some extent is reconciled by the fact that, yeah, someone has to want to consider the needs of, say, green topics, so in that sense it’s a human concern. At the time though, I was put off by observing that statement as a lack of concern until there is a problem."

Selfish, in what sense? If green in the sense of concern for the planet and all its creatures takes precedence over humanity, is your position defensible? In fact there is already a problem and economists have spotted it. For the past several years world food prices have risen. Part of the problem is instituting sustainable energy. Rising food prices have made it hard on the world's poor. In the developed world there has been a trend towards using food crops such as corn to make gasohol and oil producing plants, such as palm trees to create biodiesel oil that are supposed to be environmentally sustainable. Economists can, using their arcane methods, show that this is not working and demonstrate that it has an unintended negative effect on people, especially the poor. They can perhaps point out economically helpful ways out of these dilemmas. For example, if food is expensive, could poor regions be helped technologically to grow more food and sell it? Call in your economists to do the math. But, will politicians listen? That is the real problem.

Expand full comment

Two issues particularly stick out with me for sustainability. One, the poor generally recycle better than the rich because they have to. Also, how could government even talk about sustainability and then trash perfectly good automobiles just to get a better market for new cars.

Expand full comment

Does this mean we can look forward to an increase in posts on environment/energy issues?

Floccina, the argument for leaving the oil in the ground has to do with global warming which has nothing to do with the sustainability of oil production itself, but of negative externalities from oil use. The argument surrounding sustainability of oil production is that we should reduce the speed of oil use and transition away from it gradually because if a large percentage of our economy is still dependent on oil when production peaks (which will happen a lot sooner than actually running out of oil) then this will cause large transition costs on the economy. For instance, the gasoline problems of the 70s were caused by a combination of US (not global) oil production peaking, OPEC limiting supply to the US, and price controls.

Expand full comment

I recall looking down before landing in Salt Lake City at all of the wonderful development that had taken place. However, considering the surrounding natural features, the city began to look something like a cancer. That thought has stuck with me since.

Expand full comment