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Open thread Jan. 5, 2015

Dan Crawford | January 5, 2016 8:19 am

Tags: open thead, open thread Comments (2) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
2 Comments
  • Denis Drew says:
    January 5, 2016 at 11:32 am

    Climate Catastrophe? Not to Worry
    http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2016/01/climate-catastrophe-not-to-worry.html

    [excerpt]
    “The short of it is that, according to these worthies, the worst case scenarios painted by climate science are small change once the economists get through with them. We are talking about the shutdown of the ocean thermohaline circulation, the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, ocean acidification, and potentially massive changes in the earth’s biomes under a new climatic regime.”

    Denis Drew said…
    Global dimming has been 10-30% over different regions over the past few decades. That’s uncontroversial. One of the biggest contributors — maybe the biggest — has been jet airliners leaving vapor trails. Have retarded the effects of global warming. Seems to me that over the decades earthlings ought to be able to put up some kind of similar effect on purpose that is grand enough to contain global warming within tolerable bounds.

    Related: a recent article in Wired Magazine predicted that 30 years from now the fans in airline engines will be run on batteries. I always knew that 5/6ths of the air in a fan jet ran around, not through, the engine — but it came out in the comments that most of the thrust comes from the fans too (interesting). So future earthkind may not be able to rely on any input from polluting airline engines to do their part in containing global warming. 🙂

  • Denis Drew says:
    January 5, 2016 at 1:28 pm

    Re: The Closed Marketplace of Economic Ideas – Federico Fubini
    ” … you might wonder what to make of Robert Lucas’s view that rational expectations enable perfectly calculating “agents” to maximize economic utility.”
    https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/top-economists-rankings-unchanged-by-federico-fubini-2016-01

    Not totally on topic but, the rational expectations thing triggers this response from me: Economists as a whole (including too many progressives?) fail to appreciate what can truly be likened (explanation below) to a “black hole” of monopsony that the vast majority of American “economic agents” (a.k.a., employees) are (doubly) sucked into, unable to escape.

    A black holes works on a vicious circle of increasing mass which in turn increases gravitational acceleration which in turn increases mass — it all starts when a neutron star creates gravitational acceleration at a fraction of the speed of light that is able to increases its mass.

    Simpler labor market explanation: one buyer (an employer) unopposed by one monopoly (a collective bargaining unit) pays subsistence-plus wages: subsistence plus an increment or increments more depending on added increments of value to be gained from labor — to be sold as cheaply as possible to the (ultimate) consumer. Unorganized labor for its part cannot escape whatever such wage scale employers lay out without LITERALLY starving to death. Wheels within wheels of monopsony.

    To round out the picture: the check on the balance of monopoly v. monopsony should be the (ultimate) consumer of the mutually produced product. First balance off the power to trap and hold labor (which accounts for the vast majority of “economic agents”) — then rational expectations theory might better represent reality.

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