Back

…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

…“Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled ‘Economics’.

The book is considered ‘the standard-bearer’ of ‘modern economics principles’. You’ll find in its pages a circular flow diagram that shows ‘households’ and ‘firms’ exchanging money and goods. This is called the market.
…
The quantity in the flow diagram, in ideal circumstances, is ever expanding…

…“A simple, imperturbable closed system that’s also ludicrous.

In the circular flow diagram of standard economics, nothing enters from the outside to keep it flowing, and nothing exits as a result of the flow. There are no resource inputs from the environment: no oil, coal, gas, minerals, metals, water, soil or food. There are no outputs into the ecosphere: no garbage, pollution or greenhouse gasses. That’s because in the circular flow diagram, *there is no ecosphere, no environment*…

…“‘I taught that foolish little diagram to undergraduates at Louisiana State University for 30 years’, the late Herman Daly, one of the 20th century’s great dissenters from standard economics, told me in an interview before his death at age 84 last year.

‘I thought it was just great. I was well beyond a Ph.D. before it came crashing in on my head that this is a very bad paradigm’.”

…Whenever I see an Economics Editor on TV, or anyone who did PPE, I remind myself that thiskind of shit is the grounding of their ‘expertise’.

@urlyman

Been wrestling through a commented book by John Stuart Mill, 1800's economics. Funny enough, they do recognise that capital and wealth mainly are started by the cultivation of land and the extraction of fuels and metals from the earth.

At that time, pollution and waste are not considered important, but he did not see it as a closed loop system.

A bounded system, yes. Malthusian. But not closed.

@Marrekoo they were closer to the land in those times. It’s my understanding that much of the caution and nuance of Adam Smith is, ironically, lost on London’s Adam Smith Institute.

But the era of Enlightenment and early industrialism could not conceive that the largest weight by far of the output of its thinking would be a greenhouse gas

@urlyman Arrhenius was not that much later.

@Marrekoo later enough though, I guess, for industrial momentum to steamroller it.

And it’s not like the acutely enhanced awareness that James Hansen brought in 1988 has changed the trajectory https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112095290545697095

@urlyman

Which proves your point that economists were primed in the most peculiar way.

@markhburton thanks