- The second instalment of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)‘s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), titled “Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability”, is to be released in Tokyo tomorrow. There have been lots of leaks, but I would prefer to read the actual report before commenting on it further. Nonetheless, we have seen some good climate change reporting over the last week in the run-up to IPCC publication; for example, “Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land” in The New York Times, an article looking at the plight of Bangladeshis displaced by rising sea levels.
- I frequently quote Joseph Tainter‘s “The Collapse of Complex Societies” and now NASA has created a research project that tackles the same theme. The Guardian has a good introductory article here, and the academic paper introducing the HANDY model looking at ‘collapse’ is here. It is not a million miles away from the World3 model which sat behind “The Limits to Growth” report to the Club of Rome way back in 1972.
- The economist Tim Hartford is a past master at doing a hatchet job on the latest intellectual fad. Here he is in The Financial Times (access to the article after free registration) putting the boot into ‘Big Data’, in particular, its claim to be both more accurate yet still remove the need for statistical sampling, model building and an understanding of causation. I will quote Hartford: “Unfortunately, these four articles of faith are at best optimistic oversimplifications. At worst, according to David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge university, they can be “complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense.”” I have blogged on Robert Gordon before (here), an economist who takes the hype behind these new technologies with a pinch of salt. Big Data, driverless cars, nano-technology, 3D printer— the list goes on. The first and second industrial revolutions produced steam power and the internal combustion engine, which together have put us into a climate crisis. I am still to be convinced that the technologies of the third industrial revolution (encompassing everything from the integrated circuit to Big Data) will get us out.
- There was a time when economists looked down their noses at psychologists as being ‘woolly’; this is ironic since psychology, rather than economics, is far more amenable to the application of controlled experiments, a key component of the scientific method. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were pioneers in applying psychological experiments to economic questions, and together they helped invent the discipline of behavioural economics. Tversky died in 1996, but Kahneman is still going strong and has just passed his 80th birthday. His influence has never been higher, helped by the success of his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” which brought his ideas to a general audience outside of economic academia. The Edge has an interesting article in which a series of thought leaders from a variety of disciplines explain how they were influenced by Kahneman’s work. For myself, Kahneman made me reevaluate how I look at risk and also helped me understand why humans find themselves unable and unwilling to respond to the clear and present danger of climate change.
- Salon has lovely article by a son trying to deal with a father lost in the hatred and bile of Fox News. Thankfully, I never experienced such a dilemma with my dad; he was a mildly grumpy conservative, but with a lasting affection for the NHS within which he worked as a doctor for the best part of 40 years. Of course, The UK has The Daily Mail, which thrives on a diet of righteous indignation (and stories of how the country is going to the dogs), but the UK has no real broadcast equivalent of Fox News. Thankfully.
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Interesting paper on HANDY, thanks for the link. Like LTG the issue is surely how to deal with technological change – which HANDY appears to side-step with a quick mention of Jevons paradox. LTG was overly-reliant on its assumption of how resource extraction costs move as depletion progresses – sensible assumption of low capital costs at low depletion and high capital costs at high depletion but guesswork in-between, buried by exponential growth swamping the role of technical progress leaving the economists free reign to cry “foul”. It is sad to see how LTG might have been developed if the Club of Rome had not made such a mess of its publication and subsequent management and if IIASA had bothered to fill the vacuum they left behind.
I think the Ayres/Hall/Kummel work on replacing the Solow Residual with a measure of fossil fuel’s contribution to growth provides a better starting point to understanding our predicament, and the limits of technology. I guess the HANDY work will appeal to ‘The Spirit Level’ brigade but that this will prove to be a distraction it could do without.
I broadly agree with you here that inequality is the secondary problem, albeit a very large one.