Month: June 2014
Morning Must-Read: Ezra Klein: Obama’s Climate Change regulations Less Ambitious than Republicans in 2008
Ezra Klein: Obama’s climate change regulations are less ambitious than what Republicans were proposing in 2008: “In May 2008, Sen. John McCain traveled to Portland, Oregon…
…and delivered a speech that no Republican presidential candidate would consider giving today. It doesn’t matter “whether we call it ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming,'” McCain warned. “Among environmental dangers it is surely the most serious of all.” McCain went on to propose a cap-and-trade plan far more aggressive than the power-plant rules the Obama administration is announcing today….
In 2008, it still looked plausible that with American leadership, the world could limit the rise in temperatures to about two degrees Celsius. Today, that goal looks laughable. We’re on track to see temperatures rise by about four degrees Celsius…. The power plant regulations the Obama administration will announce today are far less ambitious than the proposal McCain offered in Oregon in 2008. They’re less ambitious than the proposals Newt Gingrich championed through the Aughts. They’re far less than what’s required to keep the rise in temperatures to two degrees Celsius. But they’re probably at the outer limit of what can be done so long as the Republican Party refuses to even believe in climate change, much less work with the Obama administration on a bill….
“We have many advantages in the fight against global warming, but time is not one of them,” McCain said in 2008. “Instead of idly debating the precise extent of global warming, or the precise timeline of global warming, we need to deal with the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters, and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.”
We’re about to find out.
As I Repeatedly Say: All That the Money the Coal Barons of Eastern Kentucky Gave and That Mitch McConnell Took…
…in exchange for blocking Obama’s attempt to get John McCain’s cap-and-trade environmental plan through congress actually did was to change Barack Obama’s negotiating partner.
Instead of, on global-warming policy, negotiating with Mitch McConnell, he is now negotiating with Anthony Kennedy.
What was the point? Certainly the coal barons would rather have had a sensible cap-and-trade policy that gave them tradeable permits as valuable assets than be under the EPA’s command-and-control regulatory hammer. Yet this was predictable from the Supreme Court’s 2008 (and earlier!) line of thinking…
Yet more things I simply do not understand…
Department of “Huh?!”–I Don’t Understand More and More of Piketty’s Critics: Per Krusell and Tony Smith
As time passes, it seems to me that a larger and larger fraction of Piketty’s critics are making arguments that really make no sense at all–that I really do not understand how people can believe them, or why anybody would think that anybody else would believe them. Today we have Per Krusall and Tony Smith assuming that the economy-wide capital depreciation rate δ is not 0.03 or 0.05 but 0.1–and it does make a huge difference…
Things to Read on the Morning of June 1, 2014
Should-Reads:
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Ian Johnson: “Every spring, an old friend of mine named Xu Jue makes a trip to the Babaoshan cemetery in the western suburbs of Beijing to lay flowers on the tombs of her dead son and husband. She always plans her visit for April 5, which is the holiday of Pure Brightness, or Qingming…. A few days before Xu Jue’s planned visit, two police officers come by her house to tell her that they will do her a special favor. They will escort her personally to the cemetery and help her sweep the tombs and lay the flowers. Their condition is that they won’t go on the emotive day of April 5. Instead, they’ll go a few days earlier. She knows she has no choice and accepts…. On her husband’s tombstone is a poem explaining what killed both men: ‘Let us offer a bouquet of fresh flowers/Eight calla lilies/Nine yellow chrysanthemums/Six white tulips/Four red roses’. Eight-nine-six-four: June 4, 1989…”
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Buce: Underbelly: The Best (Though Incomplete) Case Against the Bailout: “This is where Mian/Sufi get really interesting. They argue that there are really two banking systems at issue here: one, the mundane, boring payment system… the other is the business of mega-borrowing and mega-lending that gives Wall Street so much of it swashbuckling charm. The government did need to step in and save the ‘fluid flowing’ part…. But… once they’d saved the fluid-flowing system, they could safely have let the swashbuckling system just dangle from the yardarm. No, strike that: not only could we have let the swashbucklers go: it would have been good to let them go…. And that, dear reader, is the case. It’s almost elegant, straightforward, and as a contribution to our understanding of the crisis, I’d say it is as helpful as anything since The Banker’s New Clothes by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig. But… I’m not as clear as I would like to be on the relationship between the two parts of the banking system…”
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Suresh Naidu: Capital Eats the World: “The forces that drive the wealthy to accumulate might not just be the realization of future consumption, but instead an insatiable drive for security, sociological pressures, psychological fantasies of future empires, or other structural imperatives. When you start thinking of savings this way, the case for taxing capital becomes much clearer. If the supply of capital is more like immobile real estate and less like footloose cash, basic economics suggests that we can tax it, because it won’t disappear, and you might even be doing some social good. If people are saving to pass inheritances onto their kids, then the cost of taxing capital is depriving some of trust funds, not a comfortable retirement. Not only does it mean that certain standard theories saying optimal capital taxation is zero don’t hold up anymore. It also means that one-off redistributions of assets won’t stay equal for long, so some kind of permanent capital tax is needed…”
Should Be Aware of:
- Brad DeLong (2013): Noise Trading, Bubbles, and Excess Volatility in the Aggregate Stock Market: Noah Smith and Robert Shiller and Andrei Shleifer and Jeremy Greenwood vs. John Cochrane and Gene Fama and Company: Progressive vs. Degenerative Research Programs in Finance
- Peter Rubin: The Inside Story of Oculus Rift and How Virtual Reality Became Reality
- William Davies: After Neoliberalism
- Marcos Otero: The real 10 algorithms that dominate our world
- John Locke: “And a man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity to force him to become his vassal by withholding that relief God required him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and, with a dagger at his throat, offer him death or slavery…”
- Amartya Sen: “Peter Bauer’s rhetorical question (point 9) as to ‘How far back should we go to redress historical wrongs?’ does not really affect those who do not seek moral justification of inherited advantage. It is, on the contrary, peculiarly relevant to the position of those who—like Bauer—do seek it…”
And:
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