Re: Judaism and progressivism. The Exodus story is both foundational, as you point out, but also tragically prophetic of the long history of persecution, anti-semitism, and marginalization of Jewish communities.
Consequently, we have a hard earned, atavistic sympathy for the plight of any group that is subject to prejudice based on ethnicity.
There has risen, however, a divide in political leanings between orthodox and non-orthodox Jews with the orthodox population becoming much more conservative/Republican. That's a complex phenomenon involving Israel most prominently.
> Judaism, by contrast, is fundamentally a religion of law
This may be true in practice, but that isn't necessarily reflected in the scriptures of the respective religions. If you look through all of the Old Testament (the Law and the Prophets) virtually nothing Jesus says is original. Especially in the prophets, you see a lot of emphasis on mercy, repentance, valuing virtue and intent above mere religious ceremony.
Further, there is plenty of emphasis on law and justice in the New Testament (Gospels and the Epistles). Jesus Himself says "I come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it". It is in fact God's justice that necessitates we repent and seek forgiveness. Unrepentant sin is not forgiven. We see the consequence of unrepentant sin on full display in the book of Revelation.
> the best way to resolve that conflict is to work toward intergroup equality, and laws and actions should be evaluated in relation to how they resolve that conflict.
The problem is that no two groups have ever been equal, and conflict is exacerbated by those in the woke program by their assumption that oppression is the only possible cause of those inequalities. The truth, as Thomas Sowell points out in his book *Discrimination and Despairities* is that inequalities exist for a whole host of reasons.
Putting on my mind reading cap for the moment, it's not obvious to me that the woke movement actually wants to resolve the conflict. It seems rather more the case they actually want to promote conflict by stoking resentment and envy, in the hopes that it will result in a revolutionary, pseudo-Marxist political order.
I'm not purely mind-reading here: there are plenty of source texts of the social justice movement which state this as an explicit goal.
"Shows what kind of person with economic credentials gets power."
What power? The structure of executive officers is mostly a sham these days. Everything is centralized now and all important policy decisions are made at the White House level. A Secretary only seems powerful, but is just a talking head, mouthpiece, scapegoat, or flak catcher following marching orders. In the case of a credentialed expert, the point exactly is to leverage and abuse that credential to cover for (ie, lie on behalf of) the administration's policy by claiming it is consistent with The Science. A corrupt priest whose job it is to legitimize the actions of the crown as just, righteous, holy.
When I was a kid, no one talked about the concept of learning loss. I hadn't heard of that idea until around 2010. I read an article about it at the time and a light bulb went off like of course that happens that is so obvious. Most of what I have read indicates that it is close to 30% of the content learned during the school year is forgotten during the summer months. That seems to be the case for math especially. I have my kids do worksheets during the summer in order to review the concepts and stay fresh. I find that works very well for minimizing the learning loss.
As a former high school teacher, I can assure you that learning loss occurs during the school year, too. It occurs any time something is learned and not used. Turns out most high school courses are organized to make that happen. One teaches in units that take 2-4 weeks. A test is given at the end, or a project handed in. The information in that unit is then (largely) not touched on again.
One of the saddest events of my teaching career was trying to talk to a student about something we'd done several units ago. He had no idea what I was talking about. "But you knew this", I said. "That was two months ago", he said, as if it was ridiculous to expect him to remember for so long.
Teachers are well aware of learning loss during the summer. A math department joke says, "We spend the first term of Algebra 2 reviewing Algebra 1. It makes us feel important that so much is forgotten when students aren't around us. We don't like to think about learning loss during the school year.
I love Andreessen but I think he misses the risk of AI. The risk is not that AI becomes sentient and takes over the world. The risk is that humans overestimate the infallibility of AI and give it decision making authority that it shouldn’t have. I fear we will become enamored with AI and start to trust it with more and more complex decision making. Once you head down that path it will be difficult to unwind it until it goes horribly, horribly wrong.
> Exodus story is so essential to Judaism, and it is an oppressor-oppressed story.
Being in a diaspora is an oppressor-oppressed story.
Look at Israsel: after a few genreations that socialist state founded by diaspora jews became a place where the the left is electorally hopeless except by positioning as a coalition partner for different flavours of the right.
If conservatives favour traditional mores of the majority (over liberty and equality), and progressives favour equality (over traditional mores and liberty); then it's quite predictable that a diaspora minority will favour the left.
And there's also class interest too (if I may get a bit Marxist): the left has always represented the interest of the professional-manegerial-intellectual class. Many jews are the most famous of the many diaspora communities that gravitate towards that class.
When we have a tax on net CO2 emissions, the gas tax will be superfluous. Maybe we could put it on a downward trajectory now with a corresponding phase in of a miles travelled replacement which would apply to electric vehicles as well. States might then follow.
When a politician is getting attacked for causing a problem they didn't cause, it's hard for them not to try to "fix" the problem in what by definition will be an efficient way. Probably the best thing an economist can do in that situation is try to find the least costly "fix." Hence my hope that we can go toward a miles travelled tax, which could more easily morph into a road use/congestion tax
Wait, don't we want people to switch to electric vehicles? Wouldn't implementing a miles traveled tax obviate some of the benefits electric car owners get from their chosen vehicles? I'm not sure I get your logic here.
We want people t switch to electric vehicles when that is a cost effective investment evaluated using the shadow cost of CO2 emitted in the alternative. The miles travelled is a way of paying for road use. The cost effective discouragement of CO2 emissions is incorporated into the pub price of fuels.
Given that CO2 is essential for biological life, I'd be careful about charging people for creating it.
A carbon tax seems to have just one purpose: Grant government total oversight and claim on all economic activity. And given government's track record at creating bad incentives, how much will such policy ruin the economy?
I think economic micromanaging will cause far more harm than it will help. Consider the sudden realization this year that fertilizer is highly dependent on natural gas, aka methane
The climate fascists hate methane. So what happens when they tax and restrict natural gas? It gets more expensive. It becomes scarce. As that happens the cost of food increases and food becomes scarce. We will have famine and all because some geniuses thought they had to save the planet.
Of course I am not a climate fascist so I only hate methane when it is released into the atmosphere or disliked when burned. :) Urea production requires external energy to drive the process, and for all I know burning natural gas may be the least cost way of supplying it, even with a tax on net CO2 emitted but there is not way that should lead to famine. Leave worrying about famine to the Club of Rome
With climate change being a serious problem, why would you want people to wait for some hypothetical future where there's a meaningful shadow cost of C02 emissions priced into owning a traditional combustion vehicle? We may never get there.
It has always been a challenge for humans to survive the elements. Only in the last century has human existence not been hard and difficult. The source of this new and better way of life was fossil fuels, and in particular petroleum.
So I'm curious about what people who believe in "climate change" actually believe. The messaging appears to be that modern human existence is at risk. That the way humans live now is untenable. The response is to impose drastic reductions in our standard of living. More misery now means a better world later.
I find this ideology peculiar. The great accomplishments of the 20th century were due to humanity striving for a better world both in the present and in the future. I know of no example where a people purposely regressed and practiced self-deprivation and then came out better as a result.
The program to combat climate change is creating greater human misery. It is increasing the cost of life's essentials while reducing the supply and reliability of them! Food is more expensive. Housing is more expensive. Transportation is more expensive.
And for what benefit? How is society helped by making the quality of life worse?
The idea that carbon should be removed from the global economy without a proven substitute in place is asinine. It is senseless. No rational people would do this. China, India, Brazil and Russia are not on board with this insanity. Which means making Americans pay more for less will yield no global benefits now or later.
And how is it that Germany went from having carbon free nuclear power to relying on coal and the burning of wood pellets? How did that happen?
“So I'm curious about what people who believe in "climate change" actually believe.”
Many people believe many different things as do these who do not “believe” in climate change. Some of these beliefs are right and others wrong, in my opinion.
Burning fossil fuels (let’s not leave out coal) has had and continues to have great value. It also has the unfortunate side effect of emitting CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural processes remove it and so the concentration has risen and is continuing to rise. This is unfortunate because CO2 is opaque to infrared radiation and this means that the Earth radiates back out to space a bit less energy in the infrared band than it receives in the visible bands. Cumulatively the raises the average temperature of the planet. The rise in temperature has effects on the climate that on net are costly to human activities, rising sea levels, more extreme hurricanes, rainstorms, droughts*. Climate models show that these costs will continue to rise.
Fortunately, there exist ways of generating energy that do not emit CO2 into the atmosphere (and quite possibly ways to remove it) and their cost is less than the cost of the harms caused by the warming. Hence, investing in these ways of generate energy and removing it from the atmosphere has a positive net present value; it is income maximizing.
So why have (more of) these technologies been put into use? The reason is what economists call an “externality.” Unlike most economic activities the person who emits CO2 into the atmosphere receives the benefits of the energy generation or the industrial process, but does not incur the costs which are spread globally and temporally and so does not have an incentive (or enough incentive) to invest in alternative energy generation techniques or alternative industrial processes.
So, the issue is, how do we earth dwelling humans change the incentives millions of CO2 emitters by enough in the aggregate to bring the cost of more emission down to equal the benefits? Here is where opinions begin to diverge. At one extreme there are those who thing that the only way to do this is to reduce the aggregate level of human activity including perhaps by reducing the number of humans. Perhaps another is that the trajectory of technological progress is such that the relative benefit of CO2 emissions will fall below the needed level with no further incentive. And there are a wide range of opinions in between
Personally, I think the best way to reach the optimum level of net emissions (where marginal costs equal marginal benefits) is with a tax on net emissions which will change over time as CO2 levels change and our understanding of the relationship of CO2 levels with costs and benefits changes.
The fundamental question is are the fears of "climate change" rational or are they ideological? With Covid we watched unalienable rights eliminated by government officials based on fears motivated by crappy, half-assed computer models, that immediately proved to be junk. The facts didn't matter, but rather the illusion of experts and their authoritarian dogma.
And so it is with climate change. We KNOW from the geologic record that the earth has been both much colder and much warmer. And that extreme climate change occured all before humans did anything more than burn sticks, if humans were present at all.
The fears of man made climate change remain a dogma. The fears are not supported by data. Yes, the earth is warmer than it was a century ago. But that is probably a good thing.
Predictions of cataclysmic disruption due to excessive CO2 continue to be "sometime in the future". Many climate doomsday predictions have already demonstrably failed.
So why does the dogma of "the crisis of man made climate change" persist? How many times can the doomsayers be wrong before we stop listening to them? Furthermore, why do we give the "climate fixers" any respect when their solutions have demonstrably failed? Germany proves Green Energy is a fraud. Green Energy cannot supply the needs of an industrial economy. It is an utter failure. Yet the climate dogma says failure at Green Energy just means you keep pursuing it, and you keep failing.
I agree that knowing what the "second best" shadow price for CO2 emissions should be used in an investment decision (when it is know that is will not be applied in others) is not necessarily the same as if it is. Is the increased efficiency of financing road use with a miles travelled vs gasoline used tax (and the non-taxation of use of roads by eclectic vehicles) greater than the reduction in the incentive to shift from non-electric to electric vehicles (and how long with this inefficiency last before we DO have a tax on net CO2 emissions)? My guess is that it is, particularly as I believe the current gasoline tax does not in fact raise enough revenue, but I'll admit I might be wrong.
"until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies"
I think the US and UK at least (the only countries I have much knowledge about) have pretty good balanced, productive and assimilationist policies, particularly for skilled immigrants. We are leaving multiple billions of value on the table by not going all out to attract these immigrants. And even low skilled immigrants find work or start businesses and start moving up into the middle class.
Re: Judaism and progressivism. The Exodus story is both foundational, as you point out, but also tragically prophetic of the long history of persecution, anti-semitism, and marginalization of Jewish communities.
Consequently, we have a hard earned, atavistic sympathy for the plight of any group that is subject to prejudice based on ethnicity.
There has risen, however, a divide in political leanings between orthodox and non-orthodox Jews with the orthodox population becoming much more conservative/Republican. That's a complex phenomenon involving Israel most prominently.
Wow.
All I can do for you is improve your grammar.
You wrote " From reading the Torah, it looks like...."
That's a dangling modifier. You mean "From my reading of the Torah..." or "From reading the Torah, I think it's..."
"Not particularly unique..."
You cannot modify the word unique in this way. Something is or is not unique, meaning one of a kind.
Good day and best wishes to you. Mr.Skunk.
> Judaism, by contrast, is fundamentally a religion of law
This may be true in practice, but that isn't necessarily reflected in the scriptures of the respective religions. If you look through all of the Old Testament (the Law and the Prophets) virtually nothing Jesus says is original. Especially in the prophets, you see a lot of emphasis on mercy, repentance, valuing virtue and intent above mere religious ceremony.
Further, there is plenty of emphasis on law and justice in the New Testament (Gospels and the Epistles). Jesus Himself says "I come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it". It is in fact God's justice that necessitates we repent and seek forgiveness. Unrepentant sin is not forgiven. We see the consequence of unrepentant sin on full display in the book of Revelation.
> the best way to resolve that conflict is to work toward intergroup equality, and laws and actions should be evaluated in relation to how they resolve that conflict.
The problem is that no two groups have ever been equal, and conflict is exacerbated by those in the woke program by their assumption that oppression is the only possible cause of those inequalities. The truth, as Thomas Sowell points out in his book *Discrimination and Despairities* is that inequalities exist for a whole host of reasons.
Putting on my mind reading cap for the moment, it's not obvious to me that the woke movement actually wants to resolve the conflict. It seems rather more the case they actually want to promote conflict by stoking resentment and envy, in the hopes that it will result in a revolutionary, pseudo-Marxist political order.
I'm not purely mind-reading here: there are plenty of source texts of the social justice movement which state this as an explicit goal.
"Shows what kind of person with economic credentials gets power."
What power? The structure of executive officers is mostly a sham these days. Everything is centralized now and all important policy decisions are made at the White House level. A Secretary only seems powerful, but is just a talking head, mouthpiece, scapegoat, or flak catcher following marching orders. In the case of a credentialed expert, the point exactly is to leverage and abuse that credential to cover for (ie, lie on behalf of) the administration's policy by claiming it is consistent with The Science. A corrupt priest whose job it is to legitimize the actions of the crown as just, righteous, holy.
Wow, thanks! I'll try to make it, my schedule is usually very tight.
When I was a kid, no one talked about the concept of learning loss. I hadn't heard of that idea until around 2010. I read an article about it at the time and a light bulb went off like of course that happens that is so obvious. Most of what I have read indicates that it is close to 30% of the content learned during the school year is forgotten during the summer months. That seems to be the case for math especially. I have my kids do worksheets during the summer in order to review the concepts and stay fresh. I find that works very well for minimizing the learning loss.
As a former high school teacher, I can assure you that learning loss occurs during the school year, too. It occurs any time something is learned and not used. Turns out most high school courses are organized to make that happen. One teaches in units that take 2-4 weeks. A test is given at the end, or a project handed in. The information in that unit is then (largely) not touched on again.
One of the saddest events of my teaching career was trying to talk to a student about something we'd done several units ago. He had no idea what I was talking about. "But you knew this", I said. "That was two months ago", he said, as if it was ridiculous to expect him to remember for so long.
Teachers are well aware of learning loss during the summer. A math department joke says, "We spend the first term of Algebra 2 reviewing Algebra 1. It makes us feel important that so much is forgotten when students aren't around us. We don't like to think about learning loss during the school year.
I love Andreessen but I think he misses the risk of AI. The risk is not that AI becomes sentient and takes over the world. The risk is that humans overestimate the infallibility of AI and give it decision making authority that it shouldn’t have. I fear we will become enamored with AI and start to trust it with more and more complex decision making. Once you head down that path it will be difficult to unwind it until it goes horribly, horribly wrong.
Be wary of anyone who willfully is ignorant of biology or physics. Grandparents are a phenomenon in evolutionary biology.
Nietzsche agrees with Arnold.
> Exodus story is so essential to Judaism, and it is an oppressor-oppressed story.
Being in a diaspora is an oppressor-oppressed story.
Look at Israsel: after a few genreations that socialist state founded by diaspora jews became a place where the the left is electorally hopeless except by positioning as a coalition partner for different flavours of the right.
If conservatives favour traditional mores of the majority (over liberty and equality), and progressives favour equality (over traditional mores and liberty); then it's quite predictable that a diaspora minority will favour the left.
And there's also class interest too (if I may get a bit Marxist): the left has always represented the interest of the professional-manegerial-intellectual class. Many jews are the most famous of the many diaspora communities that gravitate towards that class.
When we have a tax on net CO2 emissions, the gas tax will be superfluous. Maybe we could put it on a downward trajectory now with a corresponding phase in of a miles travelled replacement which would apply to electric vehicles as well. States might then follow.
When a politician is getting attacked for causing a problem they didn't cause, it's hard for them not to try to "fix" the problem in what by definition will be an efficient way. Probably the best thing an economist can do in that situation is try to find the least costly "fix." Hence my hope that we can go toward a miles travelled tax, which could more easily morph into a road use/congestion tax
Wait, don't we want people to switch to electric vehicles? Wouldn't implementing a miles traveled tax obviate some of the benefits electric car owners get from their chosen vehicles? I'm not sure I get your logic here.
We want people t switch to electric vehicles when that is a cost effective investment evaluated using the shadow cost of CO2 emitted in the alternative. The miles travelled is a way of paying for road use. The cost effective discouragement of CO2 emissions is incorporated into the pub price of fuels.
"the shadow cost of CO2"
Given that CO2 is essential for biological life, I'd be careful about charging people for creating it.
A carbon tax seems to have just one purpose: Grant government total oversight and claim on all economic activity. And given government's track record at creating bad incentives, how much will such policy ruin the economy?
I think we do not have the same definition of tax on net CO2 emissions.
I think economic micromanaging will cause far more harm than it will help. Consider the sudden realization this year that fertilizer is highly dependent on natural gas, aka methane
The climate fascists hate methane. So what happens when they tax and restrict natural gas? It gets more expensive. It becomes scarce. As that happens the cost of food increases and food becomes scarce. We will have famine and all because some geniuses thought they had to save the planet.
Of course I am not a climate fascist so I only hate methane when it is released into the atmosphere or disliked when burned. :) Urea production requires external energy to drive the process, and for all I know burning natural gas may be the least cost way of supplying it, even with a tax on net CO2 emitted but there is not way that should lead to famine. Leave worrying about famine to the Club of Rome
With climate change being a serious problem, why would you want people to wait for some hypothetical future where there's a meaningful shadow cost of C02 emissions priced into owning a traditional combustion vehicle? We may never get there.
It has always been a challenge for humans to survive the elements. Only in the last century has human existence not been hard and difficult. The source of this new and better way of life was fossil fuels, and in particular petroleum.
So I'm curious about what people who believe in "climate change" actually believe. The messaging appears to be that modern human existence is at risk. That the way humans live now is untenable. The response is to impose drastic reductions in our standard of living. More misery now means a better world later.
I find this ideology peculiar. The great accomplishments of the 20th century were due to humanity striving for a better world both in the present and in the future. I know of no example where a people purposely regressed and practiced self-deprivation and then came out better as a result.
The program to combat climate change is creating greater human misery. It is increasing the cost of life's essentials while reducing the supply and reliability of them! Food is more expensive. Housing is more expensive. Transportation is more expensive.
And for what benefit? How is society helped by making the quality of life worse?
The idea that carbon should be removed from the global economy without a proven substitute in place is asinine. It is senseless. No rational people would do this. China, India, Brazil and Russia are not on board with this insanity. Which means making Americans pay more for less will yield no global benefits now or later.
And how is it that Germany went from having carbon free nuclear power to relying on coal and the burning of wood pellets? How did that happen?
“So I'm curious about what people who believe in "climate change" actually believe.”
Many people believe many different things as do these who do not “believe” in climate change. Some of these beliefs are right and others wrong, in my opinion.
Burning fossil fuels (let’s not leave out coal) has had and continues to have great value. It also has the unfortunate side effect of emitting CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural processes remove it and so the concentration has risen and is continuing to rise. This is unfortunate because CO2 is opaque to infrared radiation and this means that the Earth radiates back out to space a bit less energy in the infrared band than it receives in the visible bands. Cumulatively the raises the average temperature of the planet. The rise in temperature has effects on the climate that on net are costly to human activities, rising sea levels, more extreme hurricanes, rainstorms, droughts*. Climate models show that these costs will continue to rise.
Fortunately, there exist ways of generating energy that do not emit CO2 into the atmosphere (and quite possibly ways to remove it) and their cost is less than the cost of the harms caused by the warming. Hence, investing in these ways of generate energy and removing it from the atmosphere has a positive net present value; it is income maximizing.
So why have (more of) these technologies been put into use? The reason is what economists call an “externality.” Unlike most economic activities the person who emits CO2 into the atmosphere receives the benefits of the energy generation or the industrial process, but does not incur the costs which are spread globally and temporally and so does not have an incentive (or enough incentive) to invest in alternative energy generation techniques or alternative industrial processes.
So, the issue is, how do we earth dwelling humans change the incentives millions of CO2 emitters by enough in the aggregate to bring the cost of more emission down to equal the benefits? Here is where opinions begin to diverge. At one extreme there are those who thing that the only way to do this is to reduce the aggregate level of human activity including perhaps by reducing the number of humans. Perhaps another is that the trajectory of technological progress is such that the relative benefit of CO2 emissions will fall below the needed level with no further incentive. And there are a wide range of opinions in between
Personally, I think the best way to reach the optimum level of net emissions (where marginal costs equal marginal benefits) is with a tax on net emissions which will change over time as CO2 levels change and our understanding of the relationship of CO2 levels with costs and benefits changes.
The fundamental question is are the fears of "climate change" rational or are they ideological? With Covid we watched unalienable rights eliminated by government officials based on fears motivated by crappy, half-assed computer models, that immediately proved to be junk. The facts didn't matter, but rather the illusion of experts and their authoritarian dogma.
And so it is with climate change. We KNOW from the geologic record that the earth has been both much colder and much warmer. And that extreme climate change occured all before humans did anything more than burn sticks, if humans were present at all.
The fears of man made climate change remain a dogma. The fears are not supported by data. Yes, the earth is warmer than it was a century ago. But that is probably a good thing.
Predictions of cataclysmic disruption due to excessive CO2 continue to be "sometime in the future". Many climate doomsday predictions have already demonstrably failed.
So why does the dogma of "the crisis of man made climate change" persist? How many times can the doomsayers be wrong before we stop listening to them? Furthermore, why do we give the "climate fixers" any respect when their solutions have demonstrably failed? Germany proves Green Energy is a fraud. Green Energy cannot supply the needs of an industrial economy. It is an utter failure. Yet the climate dogma says failure at Green Energy just means you keep pursuing it, and you keep failing.
I agree that knowing what the "second best" shadow price for CO2 emissions should be used in an investment decision (when it is know that is will not be applied in others) is not necessarily the same as if it is. Is the increased efficiency of financing road use with a miles travelled vs gasoline used tax (and the non-taxation of use of roads by eclectic vehicles) greater than the reduction in the incentive to shift from non-electric to electric vehicles (and how long with this inefficiency last before we DO have a tax on net CO2 emissions)? My guess is that it is, particularly as I believe the current gasoline tax does not in fact raise enough revenue, but I'll admit I might be wrong.
"until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies"
I think the US and UK at least (the only countries I have much knowledge about) have pretty good balanced, productive and assimilationist policies, particularly for skilled immigrants. We are leaving multiple billions of value on the table by not going all out to attract these immigrants. And even low skilled immigrants find work or start businesses and start moving up into the middle class.