Re: "The key point to take away is that every attempt at economic analysis uses a metaphor. Whether the metaphor applies, and how to apply it, is contestable. We should expect disagreement. We should live with uncertainty."
My intuition is that disagreements in economic analysis mainly have causes other than reliance on metaphor.
Arnold's example of coordination involved in airplane production demonstrates that careful analysis and patient explanation can greatly reduce recourse to metaphor.
I would highlight two causes of persistence of disagreement in economic analysis:
1. It is hard to establish causality. Many mechanisms interact. Economists cannot isolate variables by rerunning history and changing just one variable. Comparative history is inadequate because any two examples differ in many ways. 'Natural experiments' usually are similarly imperfect at isolating causes. Controlled experiments typically involve low stakes and unrealistic settings. Causal density at every turn. For example, it is much harder to establish what causes poverty than to identify patterns of poverty.
2. People hesitate to change their minds insofar as rationality in belief-formation is Bayesian. As they say in Missouri, "Show me!" People update their beliefs at various margins, but hesitate to discard a belief that many of their other beliefs rest on. For example, to persuade the socialist sitting next to Arnold on the flight might require a kind of conversion, involving various core beliefs.
Dan Williams has a very interesting essay on G.A. Cohen's camping trip analogy, going beyond the usual economics-inspired criticisms.
"Cohen’s vision of socialism mistakes the self-deceptive stories we tell about cooperation for the motives that actually generate and sustain it. ... The main lesson is this: Like many others, Cohen assumes that capitalism is unusual and objectionable because it relies on human self-interest to sustain cooperation. However, this is the default mode of human cooperation, including cooperation that sustains highly egalitarian social worlds. Spontaneous order—forms of social organisation that result not from intentional design but from strategic interactions among self-interested individuals—is unavoidable. Capitalism is not unusual in featuring this incentive structure; it is unusual in making it undeniable."
On "resources". The so-called resources, from minerals to food, are all energy-related. To get copper as a metal, you are spending energy to reduce the entropy of copper minerals. When you use copper in pennies or as plating, it gets dispersed, and the entropy increases, and with energy inputs, the entropy can be reduced. The element copper never goes away; it just changes form. This energy for reducing the entropy game is part of the nature of life itself.
What happens to energy costs over time determines what happens to so-called resource prices over time. Human creativity is driving down the cost of energy with innovations, as we can see in the cost of most energy sources like gas with fracking and solar with learning while doing. Even nuclear power can have a downward energy cost curve, as shown by China, where the cost curve is downward without the parasitic regulatory cost of the West.
There are only two "resources" that limit humanity: "energy" and "human creativity."
About 45 years ago there was a paper in a special issue of the American Economic Review that said that almost any material was substitutable, if you had sufficient energy.
The airplane story sounds a lot like "I, Pencil" adapted to the situation.
Second and third tier supply chains are also why "lockdowns" are largely a fantasy. Once you start thinking about all the support needed to keep basic services running it quickly becomes apparent that only a small and usually unnecessary subset of the entire workforce can successfully work from home.
What Ritchie misses on the Simon-Ehrlich bet (even though she comes out more on Simon's side) is that even where the real price goes up, it goes up less than income. In terms of time prices (how long you have to work for pay for something), everything is getting more abundant and cheaper.
Re: "She understood the point, but unfortunately, I do not think that she let go of her socialist persuasion."
I think you did a better job of convincing her than you may realize. People virtually never concede a position after hearing a counter-argument. But if you ask a good question, one that they will ponder long after the conversation is over, then you've made a big step toward changing her mind. More on the subject in How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay.
Nickel supposedly makes up about 0.01% of the Earth's crust. This means that it contains very roughly a quadrillion tons of this metal.
Obviously, while there is then technically speaking a finite supply of nickel, in practice the price has nothing to do with the amount of nickel humans have already extracted from the Earth. The limiting factor is the human labor required to locate and extract more nickel.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that this is true with basically every metal, even those that are much less common than nickel. For example, supposedly humans have only ever mined about 0.02% of Earth's total gold reserves.
If humans have mined a lot of the rich and easily accessed nickel veins, then present price will indeed have something to do with how much nickel humans have already extracted.
A lot of widely dispersed metal is, for practical purposes, about the same as a non-existent metal.
Thanks for some sanity on that tedious bet. It’s been a little heuristic all these years perhaps, for telling who is able to think and who not - but that’s hardly worth it, there being plenty of such tells.
I long for a more interesting one (a low bar!) to take its place.
Maybe Matt Y. Could put some money on his proposition that One Billion “Americans” will make all our problems easier to solve. Or more people, fewer problems or whatever it is. More people, more indentured servants, more prisons, more takeout, nail-painting, and strip center sexual services? - kitchen’s closed forever! Not sure. But this would require some shared notion of value or “problem” so can’t see how it would work.
And who would take the “anti”? Conservationists have been driven from the arena - there is no prominent 21st century John Muir or David Brower or Ding Darling or Aldo Leopold or George Perkins Marsh or John D. Rockefeller or T.R. or Ralph Yarbrough or E.O. Wilson or Jacques Cousteau or even a Stewart Udall; and I can think of no one who could figure out how to defend the culture, because they would have to defend the alterations that owe to their opposite in the question.
Kinda perfect: a mono-ideological punditry, and an “unbettable” status quo, forever. I guess we can thank Simon-Ehrlich for contributing to that diminishment.
"there is no prominent 21st century John Muir or David Brower or Ding Darling or Aldo Leopold or George Perkins Marsh or John D. Rockefeller or T.R. or Ralph Yarbrough or E.O. Wilson or Jacques Cousteau or even a Stewart Udall"
Why do you think that is? Is it that "we are all environmentalists now"--or we all pretend to be?
No, we are definitely not all environmentalists now. Although, I believe it tends to poll better than other things, with ordinary people, across time. Open space or ag easement or aquifer protection bond initiatives tend to pass, and with larger margins than other things. (The problem now is finding unfragmented and/or affordable open space on which to spend the money.) Which tells you something when you consider how little discussed conservation is compared to the 20th century. It tells you it's suppressed, for reasons.
In all of Substackland, does it have a champion?
Off the top of my head (and I'm sorry I don't have the time to be concise!) it's a combination of:
1) First, what everyone on the right should know/understand: the environmental movement in the form of its probably most well-known exemplar was deliberately destroyed from the libertarian left (see e.g. https://cis.org/Oped/Farewell-Sierra-Club)
Google "who destroyed the Sierra Club" however - and the first result is amusing. Why, its founder - that nasty John Muir!
You'd have to know what you were looking for to get to the actual name.
Note also the sudden falloff around then of the word "sprawl".
2) But just as crucially: it had already been weakened by the GOP cynically noticing it could co-opt the "humanist" rhetoric of the left in order to open the country's border to cheap labor. It could, in effect, openly wage war on the country *and* be invited to parties, be "right" according to the left's kindergarten-ish scheme for overturning things, forever.
3) The left too ceased to greatly care about the environment - though not altogether. A few "conservative" Democrats still do tend to carry the nation's environmental and wilidlife bills. A major national environmental group announced internally that it had done some marketing and "people, food, sports" were more interesting than nature and would henceforth be the focus. There was the usual institutional capture of the people at the executive level. Pride and email blasts patronizingly explaining Ramadan to people in the field, displaced in great percentage, missives about the actual mission.
Which by no means meant the work didn't go on - but almost it had to go on, at lower levels, in secret, defensively, begging approval, and unappreciated unless it could be made to be "about people! Up with people!"
4) Part of the institutional capture was a truly insane mania, among major mainstream environmental groups, about the oil-and-gas industry. Unhinged hostility that actually interferes with the work in many cases - to the point of not accepting money from said; not accepting money even from mineral rights a conservation group owns and which are being exercised regardless of whether somebody in D.C. has feelings about it! Just pure low-IQ silliness. "Hypocrisy!" is very seldom the correct or even good-faith response to - anything - but it absolutely is here.
5) I've put it five but this is the one I fear may ultimately be the undoing. Nature as a whole was so distant a thing for people who grew up next to identical freeway exits, amid ugliness. ("Where were you built?" Brower used to ask people, a question rarely interesting anymore, so homogeneous is America now (ironically lol).) I used to feel bad about this in connection with "urban youth" who might never see anything else. Now I feel it applies to virtually all youth with their virtual lives.
6) Do issues just have a natural life span, and then die? Perhaps, but I don't think you could have imagined, in 1950, that the country's population would well more than double and yet conservation would actually fall out of favor with the elite.
7) Related to the triumph of a truly radical leftist humanism (which radical humanism is of course shared by your Tyler Cowens and Noah Smiths and Matt Y.'s and Tabarroks and all NYT columnists, whatever their party affiliation is supposed to be):
-- there is what Helen Dale dubbed the Omnicause. Here is what I wrote about the sidelining of environmentalism below her piece:
"I liked this piece very much and it caused me to reflect that the "Omnicause" illuminates a breakdown of the idea of interest groups, or the legitimacy thereof. We now tend to discount the protests of people who are actually impacted by the thing that they protest. I don't find it strange for Jews to be passionate about Israel/Palestine, nor that homosexuals are passionate about gay rights (though their agenda can rather quickly go off the rails). The problem I have with the Omnicause is that it has universally displaced other, including more legitimate, activist causes. There is little focus on conservation any more, at least in the U.S., at least by national-profile groups (preservation efforts go on at the local level, unheralded and inadequately supported). It has been drowned out by Palestine/BLM/Pride/trans etc. There is no longer a Sierra Club; there is only a club that calls itself the Sierra Club and talks about immigration (exclusively, aggressively pro) and Palestine. (Sample headline from their website after 2 second Google search: "Attacks on queer folks are attacks on the environment".) What they don't talk about is conservation; and what they don't do anything about is conservation. All legitimate protest has been co-opted.
I'm not saying that environmental conservation is the only important cause in the world, but I think it's important to recognize this: we can't talk about it anymore."
But it keeps nagging at me that just about everyone seems to say they're an environmentalist (no one says conservationist anymore, not sexy enough?). I've seen so many shows where a developer is trying to build something on a piece of land and a spunky group of kids somehow stops him, and it's made very clear that the kids are good and development is bad.
And of course, if someone is trying to keep something new from being built, a winning strategy is often to say you're doing it for the environment or to "save the earth" or some such.
I’ve not met those spunky kids, but sure - people lie.
And climate has taken up much of the oxygen in the room, or rather - it’s become an industry of its own, farther and farther from species loss and other genuine concerns. Which is a shame. That it should have been controversial is an indictment of all involved.
I know a guy who’s given much of his fortune to preservation of open space. A fortune he made as a developer.
Now he never held out that was being an environmentalist when he was building houses.
But there’s no denying he is one now. He’d be as prepared to stop a development that threatened a natural resource value he cared about, as anyone.
Of course things can be done well or badly.
I remember a development - truly sprawl - that was much demonized in my former city, as putting impervious cover over the recharge zone.
When I drove through that development years later, I thought - compared to what’s come along since, this is so well-done. I mean, there was so much crap in the interim that our villain now seemed like a Michelangelo of developers.
People put so much more energy into polishing up their talking points - and this is a true failing of seemingly clever people on the right - than on looking into facts, details, what really is.
I thought of that this week when all these people were spouting their anti-enviro talking points, as ever - and I thought, surely these guys ought to be smart enough to look at a map. But no.
The interest in reality, the physical, isn’t there. They’d rather polish and polish their glib meta commentary. You could move them to the moon and it would make no difference, they’d not notice.
I thought also of that once-idea, of the urban boundary. That sort of planning could not be more anathema to the right, and increasingly - to the left (all those people they brought in, necessarily fuel sprawl; ergo, sprawl is not a thing).
I thought of how different firefighting (or fire-leaving-to-burn-out) would be - if the city had had a stable edge; a buffer; and wildland.
They might have planned for that quite as much as they planned* to import people.
Or: the anti-NIMBY building program so beloved of "market libertarians" - could have enjoyed a natural assist from such an urban boundary.
Or maybe people prefer to rebuild every 40 years.
In re "trying to keep something new from being built" - while I think that on a first pass it is right that one gives greater respect to the "doers" in the world, versus the "thinkers" (when they are not met in one individual, as occasionally happens) - it is ludicrous to take this to the extreme of supposing that "building something, anything" is always worth the doing. We all know that's not true however much the pendulum has swung one way or another.
*The word "planning" is so hated on the right but if an entity doesn't plan it must inevitably submit to some other entity's plan, however outwardly haphazard it may look.
Rush Limbaugh. He needed a bogeyman to do his act. I don't know exactly when he started but my guess is around the mid-80s?
Communism would have been that bogeyman, I think. But all of a sudden the threat from the USSR passed.
He looked around. He saw trees. He'd found his bogeyman. Every day, for years and years, the same drumbeat.
He was so successful, I believe he inspired a copycat guy who went around college campuses - he came to mine -delivering lectures about how there was no such thing as pollution because "it's all just rearranging atoms within the atmosphere". I believe he was paid for this, yes.
At any rate, one might suspect that many economists are justifiably leery of prophesying about the path of the economy under the next administration: Yogi Berra's wisdom about predicting the future seems evergreen.
Re: "The key point to take away is that every attempt at economic analysis uses a metaphor. Whether the metaphor applies, and how to apply it, is contestable. We should expect disagreement. We should live with uncertainty."
My intuition is that disagreements in economic analysis mainly have causes other than reliance on metaphor.
Arnold's example of coordination involved in airplane production demonstrates that careful analysis and patient explanation can greatly reduce recourse to metaphor.
I would highlight two causes of persistence of disagreement in economic analysis:
1. It is hard to establish causality. Many mechanisms interact. Economists cannot isolate variables by rerunning history and changing just one variable. Comparative history is inadequate because any two examples differ in many ways. 'Natural experiments' usually are similarly imperfect at isolating causes. Controlled experiments typically involve low stakes and unrealistic settings. Causal density at every turn. For example, it is much harder to establish what causes poverty than to identify patterns of poverty.
2. People hesitate to change their minds insofar as rationality in belief-formation is Bayesian. As they say in Missouri, "Show me!" People update their beliefs at various margins, but hesitate to discard a belief that many of their other beliefs rest on. For example, to persuade the socialist sitting next to Arnold on the flight might require a kind of conversion, involving various core beliefs.
Dan Williams has a very interesting essay on G.A. Cohen's camping trip analogy, going beyond the usual economics-inspired criticisms.
"Cohen’s vision of socialism mistakes the self-deceptive stories we tell about cooperation for the motives that actually generate and sustain it. ... The main lesson is this: Like many others, Cohen assumes that capitalism is unusual and objectionable because it relies on human self-interest to sustain cooperation. However, this is the default mode of human cooperation, including cooperation that sustains highly egalitarian social worlds. Spontaneous order—forms of social organisation that result not from intentional design but from strategic interactions among self-interested individuals—is unavoidable. Capitalism is not unusual in featuring this incentive structure; it is unusual in making it undeniable."
https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/socialism-self-deception-and-spontaneous
On "resources". The so-called resources, from minerals to food, are all energy-related. To get copper as a metal, you are spending energy to reduce the entropy of copper minerals. When you use copper in pennies or as plating, it gets dispersed, and the entropy increases, and with energy inputs, the entropy can be reduced. The element copper never goes away; it just changes form. This energy for reducing the entropy game is part of the nature of life itself.
What happens to energy costs over time determines what happens to so-called resource prices over time. Human creativity is driving down the cost of energy with innovations, as we can see in the cost of most energy sources like gas with fracking and solar with learning while doing. Even nuclear power can have a downward energy cost curve, as shown by China, where the cost curve is downward without the parasitic regulatory cost of the West.
There are only two "resources" that limit humanity: "energy" and "human creativity."
About 45 years ago there was a paper in a special issue of the American Economic Review that said that almost any material was substitutable, if you had sufficient energy.
The airplane story sounds a lot like "I, Pencil" adapted to the situation.
Second and third tier supply chains are also why "lockdowns" are largely a fantasy. Once you start thinking about all the support needed to keep basic services running it quickly becomes apparent that only a small and usually unnecessary subset of the entire workforce can successfully work from home.
What Ritchie misses on the Simon-Ehrlich bet (even though she comes out more on Simon's side) is that even where the real price goes up, it goes up less than income. In terms of time prices (how long you have to work for pay for something), everything is getting more abundant and cheaper.
Re: "She understood the point, but unfortunately, I do not think that she let go of her socialist persuasion."
I think you did a better job of convincing her than you may realize. People virtually never concede a position after hearing a counter-argument. But if you ask a good question, one that they will ponder long after the conversation is over, then you've made a big step toward changing her mind. More on the subject in How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay.
Nickel supposedly makes up about 0.01% of the Earth's crust. This means that it contains very roughly a quadrillion tons of this metal.
Obviously, while there is then technically speaking a finite supply of nickel, in practice the price has nothing to do with the amount of nickel humans have already extracted from the Earth. The limiting factor is the human labor required to locate and extract more nickel.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that this is true with basically every metal, even those that are much less common than nickel. For example, supposedly humans have only ever mined about 0.02% of Earth's total gold reserves.
If humans have mined a lot of the rich and easily accessed nickel veins, then present price will indeed have something to do with how much nickel humans have already extracted.
A lot of widely dispersed metal is, for practical purposes, about the same as a non-existent metal.
Yes, like I said, the limiting factor is not how much nickel exists, it's the labor required to find and extract that nickel.
Yes, the labor and capital and anything else required to find and extract that nickel.
Thanks for some sanity on that tedious bet. It’s been a little heuristic all these years perhaps, for telling who is able to think and who not - but that’s hardly worth it, there being plenty of such tells.
I long for a more interesting one (a low bar!) to take its place.
Maybe Matt Y. Could put some money on his proposition that One Billion “Americans” will make all our problems easier to solve. Or more people, fewer problems or whatever it is. More people, more indentured servants, more prisons, more takeout, nail-painting, and strip center sexual services? - kitchen’s closed forever! Not sure. But this would require some shared notion of value or “problem” so can’t see how it would work.
And who would take the “anti”? Conservationists have been driven from the arena - there is no prominent 21st century John Muir or David Brower or Ding Darling or Aldo Leopold or George Perkins Marsh or John D. Rockefeller or T.R. or Ralph Yarbrough or E.O. Wilson or Jacques Cousteau or even a Stewart Udall; and I can think of no one who could figure out how to defend the culture, because they would have to defend the alterations that owe to their opposite in the question.
Kinda perfect: a mono-ideological punditry, and an “unbettable” status quo, forever. I guess we can thank Simon-Ehrlich for contributing to that diminishment.
"there is no prominent 21st century John Muir or David Brower or Ding Darling or Aldo Leopold or George Perkins Marsh or John D. Rockefeller or T.R. or Ralph Yarbrough or E.O. Wilson or Jacques Cousteau or even a Stewart Udall"
Why do you think that is? Is it that "we are all environmentalists now"--or we all pretend to be?
No, we are definitely not all environmentalists now. Although, I believe it tends to poll better than other things, with ordinary people, across time. Open space or ag easement or aquifer protection bond initiatives tend to pass, and with larger margins than other things. (The problem now is finding unfragmented and/or affordable open space on which to spend the money.) Which tells you something when you consider how little discussed conservation is compared to the 20th century. It tells you it's suppressed, for reasons.
In all of Substackland, does it have a champion?
Off the top of my head (and I'm sorry I don't have the time to be concise!) it's a combination of:
1) First, what everyone on the right should know/understand: the environmental movement in the form of its probably most well-known exemplar was deliberately destroyed from the libertarian left (see e.g. https://cis.org/Oped/Farewell-Sierra-Club)
Or: https://cis.org/Immigration-Studies/Brief-Chronology-Sierra-Clubs-Retreat-ImmigrationPopulation-Connection-Updated
Google "who destroyed the Sierra Club" however - and the first result is amusing. Why, its founder - that nasty John Muir!
You'd have to know what you were looking for to get to the actual name.
Note also the sudden falloff around then of the word "sprawl".
2) But just as crucially: it had already been weakened by the GOP cynically noticing it could co-opt the "humanist" rhetoric of the left in order to open the country's border to cheap labor. It could, in effect, openly wage war on the country *and* be invited to parties, be "right" according to the left's kindergarten-ish scheme for overturning things, forever.
3) The left too ceased to greatly care about the environment - though not altogether. A few "conservative" Democrats still do tend to carry the nation's environmental and wilidlife bills. A major national environmental group announced internally that it had done some marketing and "people, food, sports" were more interesting than nature and would henceforth be the focus. There was the usual institutional capture of the people at the executive level. Pride and email blasts patronizingly explaining Ramadan to people in the field, displaced in great percentage, missives about the actual mission.
Which by no means meant the work didn't go on - but almost it had to go on, at lower levels, in secret, defensively, begging approval, and unappreciated unless it could be made to be "about people! Up with people!"
4) Part of the institutional capture was a truly insane mania, among major mainstream environmental groups, about the oil-and-gas industry. Unhinged hostility that actually interferes with the work in many cases - to the point of not accepting money from said; not accepting money even from mineral rights a conservation group owns and which are being exercised regardless of whether somebody in D.C. has feelings about it! Just pure low-IQ silliness. "Hypocrisy!" is very seldom the correct or even good-faith response to - anything - but it absolutely is here.
5) I've put it five but this is the one I fear may ultimately be the undoing. Nature as a whole was so distant a thing for people who grew up next to identical freeway exits, amid ugliness. ("Where were you built?" Brower used to ask people, a question rarely interesting anymore, so homogeneous is America now (ironically lol).) I used to feel bad about this in connection with "urban youth" who might never see anything else. Now I feel it applies to virtually all youth with their virtual lives.
6) Do issues just have a natural life span, and then die? Perhaps, but I don't think you could have imagined, in 1950, that the country's population would well more than double and yet conservation would actually fall out of favor with the elite.
7) Related to the triumph of a truly radical leftist humanism (which radical humanism is of course shared by your Tyler Cowens and Noah Smiths and Matt Y.'s and Tabarroks and all NYT columnists, whatever their party affiliation is supposed to be):
-- there is what Helen Dale dubbed the Omnicause. Here is what I wrote about the sidelining of environmentalism below her piece:
"I liked this piece very much and it caused me to reflect that the "Omnicause" illuminates a breakdown of the idea of interest groups, or the legitimacy thereof. We now tend to discount the protests of people who are actually impacted by the thing that they protest. I don't find it strange for Jews to be passionate about Israel/Palestine, nor that homosexuals are passionate about gay rights (though their agenda can rather quickly go off the rails). The problem I have with the Omnicause is that it has universally displaced other, including more legitimate, activist causes. There is little focus on conservation any more, at least in the U.S., at least by national-profile groups (preservation efforts go on at the local level, unheralded and inadequately supported). It has been drowned out by Palestine/BLM/Pride/trans etc. There is no longer a Sierra Club; there is only a club that calls itself the Sierra Club and talks about immigration (exclusively, aggressively pro) and Palestine. (Sample headline from their website after 2 second Google search: "Attacks on queer folks are attacks on the environment".) What they don't talk about is conservation; and what they don't do anything about is conservation. All legitimate protest has been co-opted.
I'm not saying that environmental conservation is the only important cause in the world, but I think it's important to recognize this: we can't talk about it anymore."
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
But it keeps nagging at me that just about everyone seems to say they're an environmentalist (no one says conservationist anymore, not sexy enough?). I've seen so many shows where a developer is trying to build something on a piece of land and a spunky group of kids somehow stops him, and it's made very clear that the kids are good and development is bad.
And of course, if someone is trying to keep something new from being built, a winning strategy is often to say you're doing it for the environment or to "save the earth" or some such.
I would call myself an anti-environmentalist. Not anti-environment.
I’ve not met those spunky kids, but sure - people lie.
And climate has taken up much of the oxygen in the room, or rather - it’s become an industry of its own, farther and farther from species loss and other genuine concerns. Which is a shame. That it should have been controversial is an indictment of all involved.
I know a guy who’s given much of his fortune to preservation of open space. A fortune he made as a developer.
Now he never held out that was being an environmentalist when he was building houses.
But there’s no denying he is one now. He’d be as prepared to stop a development that threatened a natural resource value he cared about, as anyone.
Of course things can be done well or badly.
I remember a development - truly sprawl - that was much demonized in my former city, as putting impervious cover over the recharge zone.
When I drove through that development years later, I thought - compared to what’s come along since, this is so well-done. I mean, there was so much crap in the interim that our villain now seemed like a Michelangelo of developers.
People put so much more energy into polishing up their talking points - and this is a true failing of seemingly clever people on the right - than on looking into facts, details, what really is.
I thought of that this week when all these people were spouting their anti-enviro talking points, as ever - and I thought, surely these guys ought to be smart enough to look at a map. But no.
The interest in reality, the physical, isn’t there. They’d rather polish and polish their glib meta commentary. You could move them to the moon and it would make no difference, they’d not notice.
I thought also of that once-idea, of the urban boundary. That sort of planning could not be more anathema to the right, and increasingly - to the left (all those people they brought in, necessarily fuel sprawl; ergo, sprawl is not a thing).
I thought of how different firefighting (or fire-leaving-to-burn-out) would be - if the city had had a stable edge; a buffer; and wildland.
But that would require a stable population, and talk about "too many people" is now anathema.
They might have planned for that quite as much as they planned* to import people.
Or: the anti-NIMBY building program so beloved of "market libertarians" - could have enjoyed a natural assist from such an urban boundary.
Or maybe people prefer to rebuild every 40 years.
In re "trying to keep something new from being built" - while I think that on a first pass it is right that one gives greater respect to the "doers" in the world, versus the "thinkers" (when they are not met in one individual, as occasionally happens) - it is ludicrous to take this to the extreme of supposing that "building something, anything" is always worth the doing. We all know that's not true however much the pendulum has swung one way or another.
*The word "planning" is so hated on the right but if an entity doesn't plan it must inevitably submit to some other entity's plan, however outwardly haphazard it may look.
Oh yes, I've one other:
Rush Limbaugh. He needed a bogeyman to do his act. I don't know exactly when he started but my guess is around the mid-80s?
Communism would have been that bogeyman, I think. But all of a sudden the threat from the USSR passed.
He looked around. He saw trees. He'd found his bogeyman. Every day, for years and years, the same drumbeat.
He was so successful, I believe he inspired a copycat guy who went around college campuses - he came to mine -delivering lectures about how there was no such thing as pollution because "it's all just rearranging atoms within the atmosphere". I believe he was paid for this, yes.
One physics metaphor that has been used to describe economics is the three body problem. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-01-02/politics-economics-and-markets-create-a-2025-three-body-problem
One wonders if that metaphor how much further that metaphor might be expanded.
It is interesting too that a bette noire of Dr Kling's has recently celebrated some new found humility among economists and apparently has a forth coming article on the metaphor of the invisible hand. https://www.understandingamerica.co/p/first-assume-the-can-opener-is-broken?r=4u5d0n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
At any rate, one might suspect that many economists are justifiably leery of prophesying about the path of the economy under the next administration: Yogi Berra's wisdom about predicting the future seems evergreen.