The market won’t deal with global warming? You don’t say!

 

Can you spew out a torrent of sophisticated sounding words which boil down to statements of the blitheringly obvious? Then you’d do well as a journalist.

One of the central points in this long article in the Financial Times entitled “Kim Stanley Robinson: a climate plan for a world in flames” is the above alleged “insight”, namely that the market won’t deal with global warming – see section entitled “And don’t think that the market.”

Well I have news. Economists are famous for disagreeing with each other, but if there’s one thing they agree on, it’s that free markets do not deal well with what are called “externalities”, i.e. the temptation for firms in a free market to load costs onto the community at large. A factory which pours pollutants into a river is a classic example. So Robinson’s “insight” is actually no insight at all.

But with a view to trying to making his non-insight look super  sophisticated (remember that’s important if you’re to get your article published), Robinson says “That whole notion of rule by market was a catastrophic example of monocausotaxophilia, “the love of single causes that explain everything”, Ernst Pöppel’s joke neologism for a tendency very common in all of us.”

Well there’s a teensy flaw in Robinson’s mockery of “monocausotaxophilia”, namely that science actually attaches HUGE IMPORTANCE to monocausotaxophilia. Why were Einstein’s theory of relativity or Newton’s laws of motion held to be important? Reason (much to the disappointment of Robinson) is that those laws were SIMPLE explanations for a LARGE VARIETY of different phenomenon.!!!

Looks like Robinson is talking thru his rear end, at least on the subject of monocausotaxophilia.

Incidentally Ann Pettifor seems to be impressed by Robinson’s take on monocausotaxophilia. But no big surprise there: as regular readers of this blog will know, I don’t have a high opinion of Ann Pettifor, though she is of course brilliant at appearing plausible.