Monthly Archives: March 2010

368. James Lovelock, warms to eco-sceptics

Strong words. Lots of wisdom. Don’t make enemies out of people. Science is too ingrown. The scientific method allows for criticism.. What, I wondered, would be the great man’s view on the latest twists in the atmospheric story — the Climategate emails and the sloppy science revealed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on

367. MAHB seminar at Stanford today

Per person divided from society, say on the order of $20k for everyone whose income is under 100k, after the age 6. Normal social welfare costs could be eliminated through this alternate and easier to manage system. It also deals with student costs. Massively intense industrialization with zero emissions technologies that produce the needed items

366. Continuing UN report on “other worlds are possible.”

There is some real courage in this short book. The metaphor of “other worlds” is right to the core. The write, and quote Since the Second World War, development, so-called, has been as much about power play and geo-politics as it has the improvement of people’s lives. As Chaterjee and Finger write, the Cold War

365. Stanford students.

The topic for the  seminar this last week was “what can happen.” After lots of directions mentioned, we focuses on education, especially in the sense of communities of practice dealing with climate change, and concluded that education would be more important in dealing with climate change than technology. Strong statement, woke me up. Shanks and

364. Obama lost year. a good analysis of why people are so angry, esp on the right.

Many people do not trust te experts. who have brought war, bank failure, population, and increasinglyly thratening technologies they can’t afford. The anger at lost jobs, children dead in the two wars, all add up. here is some first hand reporting about that world. George Packer,   A Reporter at Large, “Obama’s Lost Year,” The

363. Europe On the Ropes An alternate compelling scenario

Good to read it all this is just an exccerpt. I;ve been interested in stories that people feel more compelling than global climate issues. Here is another such. let;s take a closer look at the European banking industry. The following is not pretty reading. I have rarely, if ever, felt this apprehensive about the outlook.

362. and further, back to the 1850′s and electricity

I like it when the frame is extended. Brad DeLong ultimately nailed it in my opinion with the Electrical Revolution starting in 1850. Though he refers back to 1825 when the same problems seemed to occur, I do not think they were as nearly correlated in 1825. By 1850, the electrical revolution was on and

361. Further on “causes”

a further quote in the article. As George Akerlof and I argue in our recent book Animal Spirits, the current financial crisis was driven by speculative bubbles in the housing market, the stock market, and energy and other commodities markets. Bubbles are caused by feedback loops: rising speculative prices encourage optimism, which encourages more buying,

360. Trying to understand the causes of the economics, and the profession

Here is a good attempt..Economist’s View: Shiller: A Crisis of Understanding The causes given were “distributed widely among government, labor, industry, international politics and policies.” They included misguided government interference with markets, high income and capital gains taxes, mistaken monetary policy, pressures towards high wages, monopoly, overstocked inventories, uncertainty caused by the reorganization plan for

359. UN report on need for visions.

This is quite excellent. Very GardenWorld. Other worlds are possible Other Worlds are Possible – the new economics foundation This report argues that our chances of triumphing over climate change will rise dramatically if we change the context within which we ‘fght its fre’. More than that, it suggests that we are already surrounded by