Pride Goes Before The Fall
I always like buying The American Prospect. It is usually full of smart articles, and it’s nice not to have the checkout guy at Borders sigh mournfully at me the way he does whenever I buy National Review.
The current issue is pretty much a bunch of policy prescriptions to be implemented starting about, say, January 21, 2009. These proposals struck me as an almost-perfect illustration of the kind of hubris that has infected the American political class since the end of the Cold War. This is not limited to one party or faction – the whole governing elite seems to me to be drunk with power.
I’ll take Chris Mooney’s article on global warming policy as an illustrative example, only because this is an issue about which I am informed. While he makes lots of misleading assertions about the problem, I’ll ignore that and focus on his proposed policies. Mooney proposes: an ever-tightening cap on US emissions that will reduce emissions by 80% by 2050; spending $150 billion on a clean energy research “Manhattan Project” over 10 years; erecting large-scale public works preparedness projects, such as building seawalls around New York; and leading the rest of the world, notably India and China, into a global version of an emissions reduction regime.
He is casually calling for radically restructuring the entire energy sector of the US economy, and further assuming that just by passing a law that says we are going to reduce emissions by X amount that we have done something. It’s not like some future Congress will be bound by this. The real, practical, part of this proposal is to institute a new category of (implicit) taxation. Note that this requires us to believe that the threat is not urgent enough that we have to start anything that he considers to be really painful right now, but it’s also not distant enough that we can wait to get more information before starting this new (implicit) form of taxation – we have, by the standards of multi-century forecasting, an exquisitely accurate glidepath that we must get on right now.
Next, consider the $150 billion dollars of energy research. What is money? I think Adam Smith had it exactly right – money is the power to command the labor of others. GDP per labor force participant in the US today is about $86,000. If we assume about a 50 year working lifetime, then this $150 billion dollars translates roughly to the government seizing the lifetime labor of about 35,000 people. This is a Pharaoh’s army of 35,000 souls.
Finally, consider the idea that the US will lead China and India to agree to reduce emissions substantially (without which, the AGW-related benefits of US reductions would be pretty hard to justify). Together, these two countries have more than 2,400,000,000 people and are rapidly-rising world powers. What makes us think that we will have the power to “lead” either one of these countries to do something that is not in its own interests? The US is not some colossus that can dominate the globe. Wouldn’t recognizing prudent limits to American power lead one to at least condition US emissions reduction on reductions by other major emitters (as the EU has discussed)?
Where is the humility about the complexity of society, the inherent difficulty in predicting the future of anything, and the limits to our capabilities? Put differently, where is the sense of how much harder it is to do a thing than to talk about doing it?
Mooney’s article is just an example of the kind of hubris that I think negatively affects most major areas of foreign and domestic politics. There are surely many causes, but a big one must be the lack of the discipline created by an external challenger. I doubt the human propensity to power was any different decades ago, and many academic-types were surely spinning some fantastic schemes, but there’s nothing like an implacable, nuclear-armed adversary to keep the egos of electorates and policy-makers in check. Now, surely it’s better overall not to have the Soviet Union (or Hitler, or the great Depression,…) around any more, but it does call for greater self-discipline on our part.
You have expressed the pragmatic side of my views on American foreign policy obliquely here. My views on foreign policy are unapologetically moralistic— I don’t believe that any coherent political ethic can exempt foreign policy from the dictates of elementary morality. But there is a pragmatic side to it as well, and your penultimate paragraph, to me, expresses it beautifully. It’s impossible to be moralistic without ever being moralizing, and I recognize that there are times when it may seem that I feel that I have sole access to the moral truth regarding American intervention in other countries. But I do recognize that many who share profoundly different views than I do are also compelled by a moral vision, and feel as strongly as I do about the ethical questions of American power. Reihan, for example, is someone who I (respectfully) disagree with a great deal on the projection of American power around the globe. And I think he, and other people who believe in the transformative power of American foreign intervention, should ask themselves just those questions:
Where is the humility about the complexity of society, the inherent difficulty in predicting the future of anything, and the limits to our capabilities? Put differently, where is the sense of how much harder it is to do anything than to talk about doing it?
— Freddie · Jan 8, 10:17 PM · #
So you think we should write about how hard it is to do anything about climate change, rather than writing about what we might do? That’s pretty meta, man. Far out.
— sal mineo · Jan 8, 10:25 PM · #
The virtue in crisis is resolve. The virtue in prosperity is temperance.
Or something like that.
— JA · Jan 8, 11:03 PM · #
sal mineo (awesome ID, by the way):
I’ve written a fair amount about what I think we ought to do about global warming.
The only point of this post vis-a-vis global warming was that, in my view, we should be humble about our ability to predict and control the future, and therefore, should always look for opportunities to hedge our bets on as many dimensions as possible.
— Jim Manzi · Jan 8, 11:17 PM · #
I don’t really understand this post. First of all, it’s hard not to mislead when you start doing goofy arithmetic transformations with money spent. I.E, with 300 million Americans, I can just as easily say it’s $50 per person per year. Suddenly then, it doesn’t sound like that big of a deal. But really, it’s just $15 billion a year for a decade, or $150 billion total. That’s an enourmous sum of money. Yet it’s proportionate to a lot of other major projects our nation has undertaken. And it’s for something that the public at large, as well as many political thinkers takes to be among the most important issues facing our nation. You disagree, which is fine, and you have some interesting arguments. But those arguments are independent of weird comparisons with “seizing the lifetime labor of 35,000 people.” That’s really an overwrought comparison.
— Justin · Jan 9, 01:08 AM · #
“I think Adam Smith had it exactly right – money is the power to command the labor of others.”
Interesting. Marx agreed with Smith about this. No respectable economist does.
— t · Jan 9, 06:30 AM · #
t. —
Nice faux erudition. Hope that works out for you.
Freddie:
I don’t actually believe in the “transformative power” of, say, invading Iraq. I think invading Iraq was a mistake. But I also don’t believe in the transformative power of withdrawal, which puts me at odds with those who believe (a) Iraqis will suddenly get alone once we’re gone, (b) the region will remain utterly calm once we’re gone, and © we’ll be much better off withdrawing rather than staying. Perhaps we should withdraw. But I don’t think the answer is obvious.
I’ll just add that I this post is really perceptive and correct about the left and the right.
— Reihan · Jan 9, 11:29 PM · #
Note that this requires us to believe that the threat is not urgent enough that we have to start anything that he considers to be really painful right now, but it’s also not distant enough that we can wait to get more information before starting this new (implicit) form of taxation – we have, by the standards of multi-century forecasting, an exquisitely accurate glidepath that we must get on right now.
But…this formulation seems to be the right approach to the problem. It’s fairly easy to chart the trajectory of atmospheric levels of CO2, and it does actually appear as though the window for action is not particularly large. If it makes you feel better, we did just take a nice eight-year breather on environmental regulations under the present administration. During that eight years, the scientific picture got a lot more clear — and unpleasant.
In the meantime, if we have 40ish years to address the problem, both for political and technological reasons we’d want to chart a fairly smooth course. There’s nothing silly or self-contradictory about that.
— Saul · Jan 10, 05:54 AM · #
Saul:
…if we have 40ish years to address the problem…
But that “if” is the really the big question, isn’t it? James Hansen thinks we haze zero years to address it. The Stern Review think swe should move along something like the glidepath recommended in the TAP article. My analysis of the IPCC climate science says that if the central tendency of current climate models is correct, we don’t ever have to institute aggresive coerced emissions reduction. We have a very limited ability to correctly predict the future.
— Jim Manzi · Jan 10, 07:08 PM · #
This is the most exactly topsy-turvy, opposite-day, wrongest possible thing I have read today. As much humility as is called for in managing the economy, orders of magnitude more are required to manage the environment—a much larger and more complicated system.
The path of hubris is our current path—to dump as much CO2 as we can into an atmosphere we don’t really understand. The path of caution and bet hedging would be modest measures to reduce CO2 output as more data is gathered. Consider which side of Pascal’s Wager you’re on here. It is those who oppose regulation who are depending on an ability to predict the future. The term “conservative” is a misnomer for these folks.
— Consumatopia · Jan 13, 04:19 AM · #