#climateDiary
COVID aside, the rate of growth in the US economy has averaged about 2.5% over the last decade.
That’s currently in the region of an annual difference of $700 billion.
Within the last 6 months, Storm Helene and the on-going LA fires are reckoned to have done a combined $220 billion worth of damage.
But I guess the perverse world of economics extremism that operates in the US will see that as a landscape of “creative destruction” and book the rebuild as ‘growth’
…In2018, Nordhaus got the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences – run by the Swedish central bank – after concluding in 1991 that climate change won’t affect the economy too much because it mostly happens *indoors* (https://www.localfutures.org/when-idiot-savants-do-climate-science/)
And US financiers will brush off the shit that happens *outdoors* as opportunities for growth.
Easy to turn a lose lose situation into win win when money is untethered from physical reality
…“To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists … have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth.
The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the ‘market’.”
https://www.localfutures.org/when-idiot-savants-do-climate-science/
@urlyman
Even heterodox economics can have a blind spot.
Take the comparison table of 9 schools of economics by Ha-Joon Chang. It didn't have a column on #EcologicalEconomics so I added one. I haven't checked it lately: these days I might amend it further.
https://steadystatemanchester.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/assumptions-of-ecological-economics-mb.pdf
Blecker and Setterfield states in Heterodox Macroeconomics textbook that for Classical-Marxist theory path-dependence does not matter, and has no theory of aggregate demand.
Quite accurate lol